Bread is important to all Western cultures but it was extremely important 200 and 300 years
ago specifically to the poor. Bread is what poor people survived upon whether they were
in the country or in the city. There are several times in the 18th century there are crop failures
and the wheat is so very very expensive that bread doubles and triples in price.
That becomes almost impossible for poor people to have their mainstay of food. So
if bread doubles or triples in price and the poor survive on bread what do they do what do
they use as that substitute for wheat bread? This really isn't a problem for the rich or
the middle class. They will always be able to get wheat maybe it'll be expensive imported
wheat but wheat is available they can afford it. At the very end of the 18th century the British
government saw the problem with this they started doing research on what were the substitutes for
wheat when you're making bread? They did all these tests and it was a great book printed in
the early 19th century, 1804, that talked about the Art of Bread Making and in that they laid out
all the substitutes for wheat and we get an idea here about what they were using for substitutes.
Sometimes they're new substitutes but the vast majority of them were things that have been used
for hundreds of years as substitutes for wheat whenever it got expensive. The research lays out
the different substitutes and what they cost some of these substitutes weren't any better than wheat
they were just as expensive. Rice is a wonderful example of this you can make rice bread but in
the 18th century rice was almost as expensive as wheat so there was no real reason to use it.
Another one of these substitutes that seemed to be almost as expensive as wheat were white peas
and I'm not even sure exactly what they meant by white peas probably a type of kind of bean
I don't know exactly but it was really expensive in the time period. Two of the least expensive
were barley and oatmeal and these were already a common substitute in the south of England and of
course in the north of England and Scotland where oatmeal was very very popular so that is what the
poor had been subsisting upon all this time they rarely ate wheat bread anyway. One of the grains
that's mentioned are beans and that's what I want to focus on today Bean Bread or even in the time
period sometimes something called horse bread. And horse bread is very interesting it's been made for
hundreds of years even in the 18th century and it was made to feed horses whether you are going on a
trip and you don't know whether they'll be fodder along and you need to be able to carry your food,
it's hard to carry a whole lot of hay with you if you're taking a horse, but you can take horse
bread. So they would feed specialized horse bred to race horses to work horses horses that are sick
or they'd use them in circumstances where they didn't have the proper fodder. Horse bread was
not quite like bread that we think of today but it was made by the baker in fact in some places
in Great Britain it was illegal for anybody but the baker to make horse bread and horse bread was
made with ground beans, peas, sometimes something like oats or barley and probably no wheat. And
they would use a very coarse grind they wouldn't bother to put anything like yeast in it and they
would make these hard dense cakes of bread just for horses. When wheat became expensive
then people poor people who couldn't afford anything else would have to eat horse bread.
Using beans as a substitute for wheat seems like it would be pretty easy for bread but it's not
easy. Wheat you just grind up into flour and you mix it with your water and your yeast and
a little bit of salt and tada you've got bread but beans ground up don't work very well in fact
some beans even have a kind of toxicity to them so unless they're soaked or cooked in a certain
way they're not good for you. Beans ground up just as they are generally kind of have a bitter taste
and they don't make anything that's very palatable at least for humans apparently horses didn't mind
that much so that for horse bread they would just grind up the beans and toss it right in but for
people if people want to eat a Bean Bread then you have to kind of work on those beans. They have to
be soaked. But you can't soak the beans and then grind them into a flour that wouldn't work very
well you'd have to like let them completely dry out again so the directions that we get
in the 18th Century are to grind the bean into a fine flour and then soak that flour. Now that's
hard to do if you just add a little bit of water to the bean flour you make a paste and you can't
switch the water on it it does not work because what we want to do is change the water a couple
of different times and that'll take the bitterness away. Now they were very familiar with this kind
of a technique they would use it on things like salt beef and salt pork to wash away the salt so
soaking bean flour can be tricky we have to have a lot of water and we just stir it a little bit and
let that settle very rapidly and then pour that off once or twice. The directions in our book
in 1804 talk about putting our beans to soap for three days changing the water each day and then
you have this sodden bean flour that you can put into your flour mix and make a bread that's 50 50.
Bean flour and wheat flour. There are a lot of different kinds of beans that are listed in the
18th century and we could use something like the fava bean or a field pea which is a kind of bean
we've got white beans and red beans cranberry beans all these kinds of beans none of those
were specifically separated out in our recipe so we can try some of those different ones to see
if some have a more bitter flavor than others. I picked a bean that's giving us the whitest flour
some of these cranberry beans and other beans have a darkness from the shell of the bean but
I've picked a yellow bean and a white bean kind of mixed them together to give us a white bean flour.
Right out of the mill the bean flour looks good it's got a good color to it it's a little yellowy
looking but you know it looks like your standard run-of-the-mill flour but it's definitely got
a strange raw bean smell to it and I'm sure the taste would be very off you could instantly tell
this was nothing like a wheat flour and if I made bread with this just as it was it would probably
just be clammy and have just a very strange almost metallic taste to it. I'm working from the Art of
Bread Making book in 1804 and it has a recipe for mixed Bean Bread so we're going to start off with
whole wheat flour and mix that with a little bit of salt and a little bit of Barm here and
it's going to be a very very dry mixture but I've already got my bean flour that's been soaked this
has been soaking for three days and I've taken the water off each day and what I'm left with is
a very very heavy slurry that we're going to add into our flour and that will probably bring along
all the moisture we're going to need in fact maybe just a little bit more than we need and we'll mix
that in with our wheat flour and it will end up being about 50 50 bean flour and wheat flour along
with that salt and our barm which is the yeast and we've talked about Barm in other recipes that has
to do with the yeast that comes off the top of the Brewing batch of beer that you get from the Brewer
in fact it's better if you get ale because then you don't have that bitterness of beer. If you're
doing this in a modern context standard packets of yeast that you get at the grocery store will
work just fine. Once this is mixed well we can go ahead and set this aside and let the yeast work.
These substitute's been going on for hundreds of years whether it's the Scots with oatmeal
or the south of Great Britain with barley and More classically in North America corn or as in
the book it's called maize. So corn in North America is what everybody's eating for bread
sometimes they'll have a bread that does have a mix so they'll mix it with rye and they'll
mix it with wheat to make a high class bread that still has corn in it. Very few people
especially in that middle and lower class here in North America in the 18th century
are eating wheat bread that is a special bread and not eaten that often. Most people are eating
cornbread. Our bread was in the oven about 30 minutes or so at 400. It was in the Earthen
oven so it kind of started high and worked a little low it did not rise a lot I don't know
whether it was because of the beans or because my barm wasn't as active as I needed it to be
but that's all right this is probably exactly like a loaf was like 200 or 300 years ago as
they're making bean bread and it's interesting as we dig in that they were looking for solutions to
this problem of not having enough wheat in 1804 but they had been having those problems for you
know two three hundred years before that and the solutions were there people were making
bread with other kinds of grains. This is one of those examples so let's find out what this
tastes like that's the important part and now the smell great wonderful whole wheat loaf smell but
the taste is like a whole wheat loaf but you can definitely tell there's some Bean in there maybe
a little bean bitterness. Regardless this is bread this you can survive on those poor
people in the 18th century they might have had to survive on this and it would get them through
the day it would fill their bellies this is the solution to the problem of very expensive wheat.