Better yet, Oh Lord, give help  to chose and name it. I asked someone to get me a loaf - a bloomer - I said. and the reply came,' A what?  I'll never remember that.'

Now this was someone who would not use a note, neither indeed  I could explain to that it looked like an old fashioned knicker leg...…. in any case the request in the shop might convert to thong.... Bloom as in flower was my best shot. 
 The assistant clouded over at whatever was asked for but then a sign was spotted over a shelf. 'Those,' the assistant said, 'have two other names that we use.'   
Those being forgotten I am none the wiser. What was worse the bread was nowhere near as good as I recall from the good ol' days. I miss the artisan bread no longer on sale here. Now I have to try out many to find one that suits The one I have just ordered is best eaten on the day..... all 800g of it?  Please, Lord, tell me where the crusty. rough textured stuff is at.....and send named visions, if you would be so kind..... also what to avoid.

Yes Priscilla, those were the times...

Of course I didn't knew either what a bloomer was, but we have the mighty search robots on internet...
And yes it was the one of my childhood...end the Fourties...the rationing of WWII gone...again flour...and with butter from the cow...we called it "beste boter" (dialect: bestebutter) (best butter) as opposed to margarine ("Solo" in that time)...
Perhaps still available in bakeries at a reasonable price, but "beste butter" is quite expensive nowadays...
But I stick since years for the price and the ease to fresh bread from the local supermarket baked in their own oven and then put in the deep freezer to let defrost it the day before before use with "confiture" or "veggy" fat from for the moment "Becel Gold"

But that wouldn't say that if I occasionally I have the opportunity to eat fresh bloomer with best butter I am not "in the seventh heaven" and the (supposed ) happiness of the childhood comes back...



Our nowaday's one:




Kind regards from Paul.

Priscilla, I suppose a thong could be something like a "breadstick" - rear view.  I'd never thought of the name for a loaf "bloomer" coming from the leg shape of an old-fashioned style of ladies' undies*.  I'd thought that the name inferred that the loaf was fresh and "blooming".  But I have to be careful of "false friends" in translation in my forays into learning Spanish and jogging along in French.  Though in Spanish I am at the stage of trying to get to grips with various tenses rather than attempting to write erudite essays on the works of, for example, de Lorca or Benito Perez Galdos.

*  Though I think the original "bloomers" were more of the bottom part of an old-fashioned type of trouser suit rather than an item of underwear.  I've just had a look on Wikipedia and it seems that Amelia Bloomer didn't invent bloomers but just promoted the style of wear.  She seems to have been an active participant in the women's rights movement though and a person of interest for other matters besides promoting a style of pants.  Though none of this paragraph will be of assistance in enabling Priscilla to find an alternative name for that particular type of loaf...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Bloomer 

It has been suggest by kind private note that I get a bread maker. A good thought - but then what would he do for the rest of the day?

Bread-winners are more useful - although bacon-bringers are good, too.

I suppose the burden of providing the bacon butties should always be shared though (obligatory feminist comment).

Barm cakes and baps are a mystey to southerners, I believe - or they used to be.

"You mean a bacon roll?"

"No, I mean a bacon bap."

As for crumpets, pyklets and muffins (as in have you seen the man?) - that's been done to death, I suppose.

A bacon Vienna???? How lah-di-dah is that?

I have lived and worked most of my life in Sussex, Surrey and London ... and I've never heard of a 'morning roll' until now.

Re the map:

Buttery/Rowie, I've only ever heard used in Aberdeen/ NE Scotland as word for a specific type of roll:
this one.


wiki:

Legend has it that the buttery was made for the fishermen sailing from Aberdeen harbour. The theory is that they needed a bread that would not become stale during the two weeks or more that they were at sea. The high fat content meant the bread also provided an immediate energy source.

Rowie have never heard used in Southern Scotland. The word used there is just Roll.
I agree with Meles, in that Morning Roll is an expression I've never heard either.
And a Bridie is like a pasty, it's filled with meat and bears no resemblance to a Roll/Bap.

This Foods of England website, citing a 2013 University of Manchester study, gives the proportion of the names in common use for a soft bread roll thoughout the whole of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as:

roll (36%), bap (18%), bun (16%), barm (14%), muffin (5%), cob (5%), teacake (5%) and batch (1%).

... with no mention at all of a 'morning roll' nor a 'vienna'.

On that site there's also a Google map overlay, which geographically marks exactly (to within a postcode) where each of the many hundreds of individual respondants to their survey, was located.

A 14,000 year old flatbread:

Neolithic bread

Supplementary Information

Despite being one of the most important foodstuffs consumed in the modern world, the origins of bread are still largely unknown. Here we report the earliest empirical evidence for the preparation of bread-like products by Natufian hunter-gatherers, 4,000 years before the emergence of the Neolithic agricultural way of life. The discovery of charred food remains has allowed for the reconstruction of the chaîne opératoire for the early production of bread-like products. Our results suggest the use of the wild ancestors of domesticated cereals (e.g. wild einkorn) and club-rush tubers to produce flat bread-like products. Cereal-based meals such as bread probably become staples when Neolithic farmers started to rely on the cultivation of domesticated cereal species for their subsistence.

Meles meles wrote:

with no mention at all of a 'morning roll' nor a 'vienna'.

Just to add that neither have I heard of either those 2 terms having grown up in Kent and also having worked for a while in Peterborough with my first job. In east Kent (with my lot at least) if the crust is hard then it's a roll and if it's soft then it's a bun. In Peterborough (from what I remember) it tended to be 'bap' for both. That's not particularly scientific though (nor necessarily representative of Fenland usage) as by then the ancient Soke (with its 800 year old cathedral) had been designated a 'new town' and so a sudden and disproportionately large number of newcomers from London, Karachi, Belfast, Dacca, Newcastle, Lahore, Glasgow, Malta, Hartlepool, Goa, Derry, Cyprus, Sheffield and Calabria etc (including yours truly) no doubt served to radically confuse the local dialect.

Talking of confused usage, although I use the word bun, if there is sausage in it then, for some reason, it suddenly becomes a sausage bap. What’s also interesting is that, although ‘roll’ comes out on top of that survey, when one puts a sausage in it then no-one seems to call that a ‘sausage roll’. That, of course, involves pastry.

P.S. All this talk of breads and regional variations and dialects etc reminds me of a chart Temp posted just over a year ago on the Daily Rave thread regarding sausages and pork patties which sort of compliments this one.

P.P.S Also really missing ferval’s input.

In NZ no-one ever uses the word 'bap' (though now I wonder if my grandmother (Scottish) might have sometimes talked about them). Nor do we use 'oggie' (I wouldn't even know what that was) or 'cob' or 'lardy cake'. Nor would I know what a 'bridie' or 'stotty' was. 
We use the word 'Vienna' for a specific loaf of bread. It is white but shaped differently from other breads.  

Do any of you know 'potato scones' - if I remember rightly they are just mashed potatoes with some flour, cooked on a griddle or in a frying pan with butter, and the tossed over and cooked on the other side.

I have tried to put a picture of Vienna Bread here but it doesn't seem to be there. Just google it if you like. 

Potato scones or potato cakes (the name 'scone' is used in the old sense of meaning any low or flattish cake) were sometimes made by my mother - she called them potato cakes and they were only ever eaten as breakfast or as a simple supper, never as part of a 'proper' meal. She made them from cooked, coarsely mashed/chopped potato, mixed with approximately an equal weight of flour, an egg as a binder, then formed into thin patties and fried. They were similar to what are now often called 'hash browns', which I was recently horrified to see can be bought ready-made and frozen, the same as you can even buy pre-made, pre-cooked and frozen, individual bubble-and-squeak portions ... which rather defeats the essential point about all these things as being simple, cheap ways of using up left-over cooked potato and cabbage.

Anyway, mutterings about modern-day decadence aside, here's an old recipe from 'The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy' by Hannah Glasse (1747). This dates from the time when potatoes were only just beginning their ascent in popularity having finally thrown off nearly two centuries of suspicion (based on the plant's resemblence to deadly nightshade) and simple prejudice as being suitable only for feeding pigs ... or the Irish (the nurseryman Stephen Switzer wrote in 'The Practical Husband and Planter' (1733) that potatoes were, "... an exceedingly useful and delightful food, not only for the vulgar, but also for the tables of the curious ... which was heretofore reckon'd a food fit only for Irishmen, and clowns, is now become the diet of the luxuriously polite").

I don't think her use of nutmeg, mace, sugar and sack, should be taken to imply that these were intended as fancy tea-time cakes, but merely that, reflecting the tastes and fashions of the time, sugar and spices were added to nearly everything, simple potato fitters included (and a little nutmeg does indeed go well in most potato dishes). It may perhaps also reflect the fact that potatoes had until recently been a rather uncommon vegetable crop in Britain and so far from being humble spuds, they still had a certain novelty. There again it may have been a conscious attempt to mimic the flavour of the sweet potato, which had previously been the more desirable and fashionable vegetable. I see Hannah Glasse doesn't add any flour, but does add a little cream, and so her dish perhaps more resembles duchesse potatoes (though fried rather than baked) which nowadays would typically be served as an accompaniment in a main meal, rather than being a simple dish to use up left-over potatoes.

To make potatoe cakes.
TAKE potatoes, boil them, peel them, beat them in a mortar, mix them with the yolks of eggs, a little sack, sugar, a little beaten mace, a little nutmeg, a little cream or melted butter, work it up into a paste; then make it into cakes, or just what shapes you please with moulds, fry them brown in fresh butter, lay them in plates or dishes, melt butter with sack and sugar, and pour over them.

Of course potatoes (or potato flour) can also be used to eke out grain flour to make a baked loaf of potato bread. Indeed the resistance to eating potatoes in France was in large part ended because of a series of poor grain harvests towards the end of the 18th century and the resulting necessity of eating potato bread. The grain shortages directly prompted Marie-Antoinette's apochryphal "let them eat cake"; Louis XVI's earnest encouragement of Antoine-Auguste Parmentier's efforts to promote potatoes as food to improve the diet of the poor; and the subsequent Revolutionary government ordering many Parisian parks and gardens to be dug up and replanted with potatoes, to supplement the limited supply of wheat and so maintain the vital supply of daily bread. When the grain supply improved again Parisians went back to all-wheat baguettes, but their resistance to potatoes had been thoroughly broken and pommes de terre were now very definitely accepted on the menu.

Before I became intolerant to gluten I used to like soda farl (sometimes called Irish soda farl) sometimes.  I'm afraid I did used to buy it rather than make it from scratch though, MM.

I wonder if Marie-Antoinette really meant,"Let them eat brioche?" Brioche is an "enriched" bread and is more like a cake.

The English manage to introduce class even into what bread is eaten by whom. Manchet bread - white bread made from the finest flour - was always eaten by the upper crust, whereas peasants ate the rough brown stuff - often made from rye. The peasants presumably had the better bowels.

Bread class rules are confusing even in this egalitarian age (there's no such thing, of course): the middle class have "artisan" breads made from whole "ancient" grains (trendy flour made from spelt and the like) breads which have all sorts of interesting seeds and other "bits" added, while the lower orders now eat the white stuff - sliced "Mother's Pride" ("Mother's Shame" if you are educated to university level and voted "Remain"). BUT - and it is a big but - the really posh still have sandwiches (at afternoon tea) made with white bread  too - but it has to be white bread cut from a proper loaf, NEVER from a sliced abomination purchased at Morrisons. No crusts allowed on posh sandwiches, of course. I always liked crusts and, mystifyingly was told as a little girl to "eat the crust" because it would make my hair curly. 

What I find amusing is the snobbily marketed "The Best" range of breads from the Morrison's bakery counter. It is nicer bread and comes in all sorts and shapes. I like the one with cranberry and sunflower seeds, but then, being a Remainer, I would, wouldn't I?



Here is some info about manchet bread from dear old Wiki. Good grief those aristos got through a lot at breakfast - not just bread either - and all washed down by a quart of wine. That's a pint each before 9.00 am, plus beer!







One of the first recipes printed in English for manchet breads comes from 1588 and the recipe book The Good Huswifes Handmaide by an unknown author. In it the author explains that the flour must be fine and have been "boulted" twice.


There are several recipes for manchets mentioned in Florence White's classic English cuisine book Good Things in England first published in 1932. She gives five regional varieties of the bread and quotes from sources for the recipes. The first is from Gervase Markham in Nottinghamshirepublished in 1615 where White quotes an anonymous source that describes a manchet as 'Your best and principal bread'.^[1]


There is also a reference to "Manchetts for the Queen's Maides", a royal ordinance originating from Eltham Palace in 1526 during Henry VIII's reign which describes a menu for medieval aristocracy.^[2] It is inserted because a correspondent had requested when manchets were to be served at court. This suggests that in origin it was a luxurious bread containing ingredients that were available only to the wealthy. The most superior wheat for a manchet was said to come from Heston, near Hounslow during the reign of Elizabeth I.^[3] Manchets would sometimes be sweetened by the addition of scented ingredients such as rose water, nutmeg and cinnamon.^[4]


Breakfast in the household of Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, according to the household accounts from 1564 to 1632, for the earl and his lady on a flesh day was a loofe of bred in trenchors, 2 manchets, 1 quart bere, 1 quart wyne, a Chyne of Muton or Chyne of Beef Boilid; the two older sons had "'2 loaf of household Breid, a Manchet, 1 Potell [two quarts] of Bere, a Chekynge [chicken] or ells 3 mutton Bonys boyled.^[5]


Florence White makes reference to three contemporary versions. The Cornish manchant which she confirms is shaped by hand,^[6] a version from the Isle of Wight and a recipe from 1676 from Sussex for Lady Arundel's Manchet which is notable for the use of cream and milk in the constituents similar to brioche. The latter version she updates.


Manchets are little made today with the traditional Bath bun and Sally Lunn bun amongst the best known contemporary styles still made commercially. According to Elizabeth David,^[7] only the wealthy could have manchets for their breakfast or dinner and these became the 'ancestors' of eighteenth century french rolls or french bread.

PS Had to look up "boulted": it means sieved.

Temperance wrote:

I wonder if Marie-Antoinette really meant,"Let them eat brioche?" Brioche is an "enriched" bread and is more like a cake.

Neither brioche nor cake, at least out of the French queen's mouth - the expression is a quote from Rousseau's "Confessions", published posthumously in 1782 (some years before the Revolution) and attributed by him only to "a great princess" who is not named. If Marie Antoinette was inclined to say anything similar there was no recorded instance of it at all until the mid-19th century, and that was in a pseudo-historical article in the the satirical monthly "Les Guêpes" published by Alphonse Karr when he was editor of Le Figaro, and in which Marie Antoinette is a minor character who is attributed as saying a lot of rather nasty remarks against the peasants, including Rousseau's. For what it's worth, modern transcriptions of Rousseau's book do indeed use the word "brioche".

Also for what it's worth, Karr had quite a knack for coining pithy epigrams. He gets credit too for "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" (from the same satirical journal), which in the case of popular mis-attributions of quotes could well apply here too.

Temperance wrote:

Here is some info about manchet bread from dear old Wiki ...

One of the first recipes printed in English for manchet breads comes from 1588 and the recipe book The Good Huswifes Handmaide by an unknown author. In it the author explains that the flour must be fine and have been "boulted" twice.
There are several recipes for manchets mentioned in Florence White's classic English cuisine book Good Things in England first published in 1932. She gives five regional varieties of the bread and quotes from sources for the recipes. .................

Here's Florence White's 1932 book, Good Things in England, in full. The manchet recipes start on page 71 and there are plenty of other regional English bread recipes in the same section, as well as plenty of other 'good things' too.

EDIT

Sorry that direct link to 'Good things in England' doesn't work, but you can access it, plus many other old cook books, via the brilliant Foods of England cookbooks page, which lists all the references in date order and so Florence White's 1932 book is towards the bottom of the page

MM wrote:

 The grain shortages directly prompted Marie-Antoinette's apochryphal "let them eat cake...."

MM gets a gold star for putting "apochryphal."

I always thought she said it, so I shall write something out a hundred times - not sure what. Something appropriate. 


PS Just noted that "household" bread chez les Percies was different from manchet. The kids got the "household" stuff: mum and dad Percy got the better manchet (plus the quart of wine). Presumably they didn't actually eat their  other loaf that was used as a "trencher" (?).


When did people start toasting bread, I wonder? Did the French start that with eggy toast?

You also need to write out 'I will read Dish of the Day' too as I discussed the Marie-Antoinette saying in some detail not so very long ago on the day she was executed, the 16th October (1793).

Temperance wrote:

MM gets a gold star for putting "apochryphal."

You can't dish out gold stars just for sticking superfluous aitches into words --- is this what the British education system has come to????

apocryphal apocryphal apocryphal

I didn't get it wrong, of course; I just copied off MM, so he should copy it out more than me. He still gets his gold star though for knowing about Marie Antoinette not saying it first. Perhaps she had read Rousseau and was showing off to impress people.

I always read Dish of the Day: it's one of my favourite threads!

Spread jam on your bread, after removing the mould*

Treeza doesn't waste food

* if Brexit causes problems with medicinal supplies, we'll need the mould in place of penicillin.

Temperance wrote:

When did people start toasting bread, I wonder? Did the French start that with eggy toast?

"Eggy toast" as you call it, or pain perdu, certainly has a long history, being recorded in 14th century cookbooks such as 'Forme of Cury' and even as far back as the late Roman recipe collection atributed to Apicius where it is described as simply aliter dulcia ("another sweet dish"). The recipe says to "slice fine white bread, remove the crust, and break it into large pieces. Soak these pieces in milk and beaten egg, fry in oil, and cover with honey before serving."

EDIT:

And yes, d'oh! ... apocryphal (sans aitch) isn't akin to epoch (avec aitch) as the latter ultimately derives from the Greek noun ἐποχή (epokhé) meaning a specific pause, start or point in time ... while the former derives from the Greek ἀπόκρυφος (apokryphos), an adjective meaning obscure or hidden, which is of course the same origin for crypt (an underground vault) and cryptic (as in difficult crosswords or deliberately ambiguous government announcements).

Ok - he getsh to keep hish gold shtar sho!  :)

It's amazing how much local identity and fierce pride can be invested in a humble loaf, sometimes even the humbler the better. Soda bread in Ireland, for example, was a 19th century invention, basically using cheap chemicals only lately being manufactured in enough quantity to make them cheap, as a substitute for more nutritious and traditional ingredients (which, though grown locally, were all bound for the UK and out of the economic reach of the locals). It was a symbol of poverty, in other words, and for many people also a symbol of foreign oppression, enforced destitution, and even famine, so one might be forgiven for assuming that it would wane in popularity as an unwelcome (and to be honest rather bland) reminder of such straitened times.

Quite the opposite in fact. And in recent years, as it has begun to be supplanted by supermarket breads, we now in fact have The Society For The Preservation of Irish Soda Bread. Interestingly, the baking soda (actually a patented mixture of chemicals, royalties for the manufacture of which are still paid to Rumford Chemical Works in the USA, and originally imported into Ireland from Thom's Laboratories in Dundee), is proudly proclaimed on the website as "traditionally Irish".



EDIT: And I must acknowledge my own debt to soda bread - thanks to a granny who baked it every second day and therefore who always had a tin of this stuff on the go ....



... I received my first introduction to contemplation of spatial infinity in two dimensions (which when opened up to a third or even a fourth dimension then carries really complicated - and really astounding - implied logical consequences in which even all the tired old god suppositions, like the tins in the picture, recede into mind-boggling absurdity).

nordmann,

"EDIT: And I must acknowledge my own debt to soda bread - thanks to a granny who baked it every second day and therefore who always had a tin of this stuff on the go ...."

I looked up "soda powder" and it seems to be our: "maagzout" (stomach salt) (Sodium bicarbonate). We use it for instance with the sprouts to make them more digestible...
My question: Is that powder in the tin then sodium bicarbonate?
And another question: What is the difference between "baking powder" (the soda one and the sophisticated one)  and "yeast"? Short time and long time rising? Sorry to show my ignorance among all these knowledgeables ...I know that one uses baking powder to add to the dough for a cake in the oven...I think I need the advice from MM...

Kind regards from Paul.

A link to a recipe for soda bread, Paul.  https://www.bbc.com/food/recipes/irishsodabread_67445  Baking powder per se is not pure sodium bicarbonate but I think "bicarb" is one of its ingredients.  Baking powder is a mixture of sodium bicarbonate (alkaline) and cream of tartar (acid) and unless it is homemade usually has some sort of a filler such as cornflour.  https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/glossary/baking-powder

Paul, as LiR says, pure baking soda is just sodium bicarbonate (or strictly using modern nomenclature, sodium hydrogen carbonate, NaHCO₃). However commercial baking powder - or levure chimique in French - is a dry powdered mixture of sodium bicarbonate and tartaric acid crystals. This mixture is stable when kept dry, but when it is mixed into a moist cooking mixture, eg cake or bread ingredients, and then heated (during baking) the two agents react together and generate carbon dioxide gas, thereby 'raising' the mixture. One can achieve the same result using just pure baking soda with an acidic ingredient, such as butttermilk, yoghurt, lemon juice, or a dash of vinegar, but then the reaction starts immediately and so you have to be very quick in getting the whole lot mixed and into a hot oven if it's not to fall flat again. That was the problem with the earliest artificial baking powders - which were essentially just sodium bicarbonate - when they first appeared commercially in the mid 19th century. Using a baking powder the effect is very similar to using natural baker's or brewer's yeasts (ie levure boulangère), except that yeasts are living organisms that eat the natural sugars in the flour and then essentially fart out carbon dioxide gas. The end result is largely the same except that the yeasts, being living organisms, tend to be rather more unpredictable in how quickly and efficiently they perform, as well as them giving a distictive yeasty and a rather less 'chemical' taste to the final product.

PaulRyckie wrote:

I looked up "soda powder" and it seems to be our: "maagzout" (stomach salt) (Sodium bicarbonate). We use it for instance with the sprouts to make them more digestible...

Sorry, Paul, no it doesn't. It just disguises the fact you have boiled the poor little things beyond the point of edibility.

I sometimes buy sodium bicarbonate (not food grade - made by Dri Pak) for cleaning purposes.  I wouldn't advise using Dri Pak's "bicarb" in cooking or bread making under any circumstances.

Excuses to all. I wanted to finish first my Hitler-Stalin thread overhere after the reading (at the end) the four books that I mentioned. And as there is again "movement" on the parallel thread on Historum I posted my prelimianry conclusions overthere too.

No time to reply in full overhere and to the other threads...

Kind regards from Paul.

No, no, GG, not boiled these little Brussels ones beyond the point of edibilty...only "blancheren" (I doubted to find an English term for the word, but see: to blanch ) and I looked it up only a ten minutes as we do and for digestive reasons, as they seem, due to the "raffinose" content, to cause "winderigheid" (they translate it on the net with "flatulence" while I didn't find the word in the Dutch-English dictionary. We call it a "wind", a "scheet"...) you have to add some bicarbonate...And if you boil too long it has the typical smell of sulpher gasses also related to "flatulence", because the little things contain sulpher compounds...

But "blanch" is only the first stage, I may not think about it...to eat them in that stage...I need fat...vegetal fat agreed, but fat...let's bake them in a lot of fat...with the neccesary spices...and distinctly present!...


Kind regards from Paul.

MM,

thank you for your to the point explanation. It explains it all.
My mother and my grandmother baked the old way with yeast and I remember from my childhood: the  dough had to stay near the stove with a cloth over it, to let rise the dough. And one had to be cautious, especially I, to not open suddenly the door, because that could cause wind and by that the whole substance could go flat...instead of rising...

Kind regards from Paul.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

Priscilla, I suppose a thong could be something like a "breadstick" - rear view.  I'd never thought of the name for a loaf "bloomer" coming from the leg shape of an old-fashioned style of ladies' undies*.  I'd thought that the name inferred that the loaf was fresh and "blooming".  But I have to be careful of "false friends" in translation in my forays into learning Spanish and jogging along in French.  Though in Spanish I am at the stage of trying to get to grips with various tenses rather than attempting to write erudite essays on the works of, for example, de Lorca or Benito Perez Galdos.

*  Though I think the original "bloomers" were more of the bottom part of an old-fashioned type of trouser suit rather than an item of underwear.  I've just had a look on Wikipedia and it seems that Amelia Bloomer didn't invent bloomers but just promoted the style of wear.  She seems to have been an active participant in the women's rights movement though and a person of interest for other matters besides promoting a style of pants.  Though none of this paragraph will be of assistance in enabling Priscilla to find an alternative name for that particular type of loaf...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Bloomer 

Lady,

yes a "thong" was for me a piece in the form of a "tong" (tongue)

I too thought on the first sight on "blooming" (bloesem) as fresh and new...

"Though I think the original "bloomers" were more of the bottom part of an old-fashioned type of trouser suit rather than an item of underwear."

Didn't find "an old-fashioned type of trouser suit" but found this:




May I ask, is it the visual appearance of the slit in the bloomer referring to the slits in the "bloomer" bread? They say in my paperback Collins: slit: a long narrow cut or opening...
It brings me all on "onkuise gedachten" as my sister and I learned as kids in the Catholic nun's school in Belgium. They translate it on the net
with "impure thoughts" (that's real English: half Romance, half Germanic).
Yes and I came by my research also on "open drawers" There was a picture in the images...
And to be honest, I think I saw it once in the fish auction, where my parents had a storehouse as fishmerchants. The lady stand "sans gêne" above the grid of the waterevacuation and did it. Asking my parents (I didn't dare ask her) they explained that she had a special "bloomer" that she could open with a kind of "device" and close again. I have never heard about further details...

Kind regards from Paul.

I think old-fashioned ladies' drawers did have an opening because of the tightness of the "stays" or corsets ladies wore then.  I didn't realise this until some years ago I saw some dancers on the TV dancing the can-can and I asked my mother why it was considered so shocking - was the sight of underwear thought very bad in those days.*  My mother said that the original drawers had had a slit. Of course the ladies dancing on the TV had a closed gusset.  I don't know if the "bloomers" promoted by Amelia Bloomer (I always want to call her Arabella) were constructed thus or not.  So I can't answer your question as to whether the slashes in the side of the bloomer bread helped name the bread because of the appearance of the bloomer pants.  I can remember a couple of English lines of some English words put to the can-can tune - "See those naughty dollies, dancing at the Follies".  I think the can-can dance was actually called something else in French.

*Of course there was the song (not French) which went "In olden days a glimpse of stocking, was thought of as something shocking, Now heaven knows, anything goes".

Ans, Dear Lord, lead me not into the temptations of posting about jam tarts, bagels and batons.

Priscilla, I suppose the thread has veered away from the bloomer as in a loaf - and as yet nobody has come up with an answer as to other names for that type of loaf.  For myself it has to be 'and lead me not to any bread containing gluten'.

The original bloomers, as promoted by Amelia Bloomer, were intended to be outer clothing, as a comfortable alternative to the heavy, constricting dresses then worn by women. They became popular from the 1850s onwards, principally in America at least to start with. The style was also know as Turkish dress, Reform dress or American dress. Originally they were worn 'skirted' with an knee-length, or just above the knee, over-skirt (as depicted here) but later the skirt was dispensed with.



Bloomers as knickers: baggy underpants fastened to just below or above the knee only became popular from the 1910s to the 1930s, although the term "bloomers" is often used interchangeably with pantalettes (the sort of thing depicted above in Paul's post), which were worn in the mid 19th century, and also with unfastened at the knee, open leg, knee-length drawers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Having consulted several bread-making books and the OED ... the term bloomer, for the loaf of bread, seems to date only from around 1937 when it was in use by bakeries in London: it may have originated a few years earlier but almost certainly not before the First World War. The name bloomer just defines the shape and has nothing to do with the diagonal slashes in the crust. Although bloomer loaves traditionally are made with less water and a higher protein flour than other "white" breads (and accordingly need a longer time to rise), and they are usually baked (with steam) to get a harder crust - all this is to retain the shape as they are not baked in a tin - there are no rules about any of this. A shop bought bloomer loaf might be just the same as any standard white loaf but just made into the oval bloomer shape. The bloomer name is exclusively British but similar dense, oval, slashed-top, crusty loaves are made in most European countries (in France it would probably be called a pain de campagne).

Talking about French bread ... what's the difference between a baguette, a flûte, a bâtard and a gros pain? That too seems to vary on a regional basis and is not just down to relative size.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

I think the can-can dance was actually called something else in French.

In France the can-can, or cancan, or coin-coin is still sometimes known as the chahut or the chahut-cancan, after the Spanish dance, la cachucha. The cachucha is in a rapid 3/8 time and in style it, as well as its offspring the can-can, seems to be classed as a quadrille type dance. However probably the best known music for the can-can is Jacques Offenbach's famous 'Galop Infernal' from his operetta 'Orpheus in the Underworld' ... but a galop, which is in 4/8 time, is a different dance altogether, and anyway Offenbach's, 4/8 time, can-can/galop, effectively goes very like: one, two, three, hop; one, two, three, hop; etc ... which is essentially like a polka, no? And, quelle surprise, the polka was very much the popular dance in fashion when Offenbach wrote his operetta in 1858.

Help! Where's Temp, our dance expert?

Offenbach's music is the one everyone nowadays associates with the can-can, but quite a lot of other composers wrote music for the can-can dance. Anyway here's Offenbach's 'Galop Infernal', the classic 'can-can' (in 4/8 time) ... but is it really a can-can?



A propos of the discussion about bloomers, gusset-less pantalettes, and the shocking reputation of the can-can, wiki says:

"The dance was considered scandalous, and for a while, here were attempts to suppress it. This may have been partly because in the 19th century, women wore pantalettes, which had an open crotch, meaning that a high kick could be unintentionally revealing. There is no evidence that cancan dancers wore special closed underwear, although it has been said that the Moulin Rouge management did not permit dancers to perform in "revealing undergarments". Occasionally, people dancing the cancan were arrested, but there is no record of its being banned, as some accounts claim.

Throughout the 1830s, it was often groups of men, particularly students, who danced the cancan at public dance-halls. As the dance became more popular, professional performers emerged, although it was still danced by individuals, not by a chorus line. A few men became cancan stars in the 1840s to 1861 and an all-male group known as the 'Quadrille des Clodoches' performed in London in 1870. However, women performers were much more widely known. The early cancan dancers were probably prostitutes, but by the 1890s, it was possible to earn a living as a full-time dancer and stars such as La Goulue and Jane Avril emerged, who were highly paid for their appearances at the Moulin Rouge and elsewhere.  The most prominent male can-can dancer of the time was Valentin le Désossé (Valentin the Boneless) a frequent partner of La Goulue.

The professional dancers of the Second Empire and the fin de siècle developed the cancan moves that were later incorporated by the choreographer Pierre Sandrini in the spectacular "French Cancan", which he devised at the Moulin Rouge in the 1920s and presented at his own Bal Tabarin from 1928. This was a combination of the individual style of the Parisian dance-halls and the chorus-line style of British and American music halls."

..... And now I wonder what scandalous details might be associated with English muffins, huffkins, pikelets, splits and shuttles, or indeed clap breads, pap breads and Dorset knobs ?

What on earth is a "huffkin"? Sounds like a term of endearment from the glory days of the old BBC board.

MM wrote:

 Help! Where's Temp, our dance expert?

Hardly expert - just interested! I have never intentionally danced the can-can, and know nothing about it, but I do remember a withering comment  from a ballet instructor when I was (many, many years ago) trying to learn the ballet move called "ronde de jambe en l'air". It is a movement  of the leg rather similar to that of the can-can, but has to be executed in a very controlled way, holding the thigh absolutely rigid (see the young man in the link below). My dance teacher took one look at my rather manic and very uncontrolled attempt and said, "What on earth do you think you are doing - the can-can?"

We seem to have strayed from our daily bread topic, but never mind.

Seriously, what is a huffkin?

Here is a ronde de jambe en l'air done properly:

A Kentish huffkin is a flattish soft bread bun with a distinctive dimple on the top. They are made of slightly sweetened wheat dough, with lard or butter, about 3 inches in diameter, 1½in thick and with a deep thumb depression in the centre.

Here are some huffkins made by Speciality Breads a specialist bakers who have all sorts of unusual breads listed in their online catalogue:

As a follow-up on your link, MM, a little history to their 'viennoiserie', back in 1850 there was a a strike among the journeymen-bakers and a number of Austrian bakers were brought in, bringing their traditions from the Austrian Empire, eventually teaching these to their Danish counterparts, and going forth from there. As Danish emigrant bakers brought it to the US before others, it was given the name 'Danish'. 
In Danish and in Scandinavia it's generally referred to as 'wienerbrød' roughly 'from the vienese tradition'.

The cachucha is referenced in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers but I haven't been able to find an example of the dance itself.  I found a balletic version of it danced by Romany Pajdak after the style of Austrian 19th century ballerina Fanny Essler

I don't really know my ballerinas.  Of course I've heard of Margot Fontaine, Alicia Pavlova, Alicia Markova and Beryl Grey and even of Darcy Bussell but I doubt I could name many of the present-day ones without looking them up first.

Nielsen, before I had to swear off (or at least consume less) sugar because of high blood pressure I quite liked a 'cinnamon swirl' type of Danish pastry.  Now of course I have to doubly swear off them because they contain wheat flour.  I hadn't realised the link between Danish pastries and Viennese breads.

Yesterday we went to a restaurant for lunch, and my husband had a croque madame. I knew a croque monsieur which is described as bread pieces toasted with ham and cheese, and a croque madame is the same with an egg on top. But these ones (and others I have seen) are more toasted rolls or buns, not quite hamburger buns but similar, perhaps softer. My husband enjoyoed his a lot and I wondered if I could order one, sans the ham and the egg (and preferably the roll!). I am very fond of runny cooked cheese. Or any cheese, except what my grandsons call plastic cheese. Love Normandie brie or camembert, as does my husband though when we brought some back to Britain from France and put it in our son's fridge, there were many complaints about the smell. 

As regards underwear, I have probably mentioned before my grandmother's performance of getting all the hooks and eyes of her stays done up and undone, even though we lived on a farm in the country and had few visitors. She had to do up dozens of them from her chest to the top of her bottom. And then she attached with pins a piece of material to go underneath, much like a pad that girls used to use for their periods.

When I first visited Crete I was taken aback at the cheek of restaurants serving up stale bread with every meal - though over the years I grew to look forward to Paximadia in all its forms when I went there. The trick for a psomi-deprived Irishman such as I was to put my mouth into biscuit mode, then suddenly everything made sense on the palate.

For Cretans Paximidia can be a midday meal in itself - the Kouloura variant always served up with an olive oil, oregano and tomato "dip" and surprisingly refreshing on warm days when taken with a little tea.



The origin of "Kouloura" as a name for this variety of bread is interesting, given that there are several villages with that name throughout the Aegean, each inclined to make tentative claim to having invented the bread. The word pops up these days in archaeology when referring to ancient granary pits such as those famously excavated at Knossos (the first time they were properly unearthed and identified regarding function), but this was by no means down to Arthur Evans drawing on historical knowledge at the time. Instead it was the labourers on the site who in fact immediately thought they recognised what they were looking at and gave them this name. The "koulouris" was a term they half-remembered in oral tradition from pre-Ottoman times when villagers shared a very ancient design of communal bread oven which was basically a large hole in the ground lined with stones, above which a conventional hearth and oven was then constructed. The pit, fed by fluted air ducts, served as a heat recycler when the oven above was in use. The conventional oven made conventional bread, whereas the pit beneath, once the day's baking was done, had by then conserved so much heat that it could be used as a sort of "slow oven" overnight to bake a very brittle, dry bread from leftover ingredients that had the great advantage for its day of remaining edible afterwards for up to two months. "Koulouris" was the name for this pit, and therefore for the bread it produced.

After the Ottoman takeover ovens became totally conventional according to Turkish standards, though larger ones still preserved enough heat overnight to continue baking "kouloura" bread, and the word persisted in this use long after the eponymous pit in which it had first been baked had long vanished from the culinary landscape.

I could have posted this on 'Dish of the Day', but I missed the crucial date. However we're only a few days late, so after mentioning Kentish huffkins, what about Rutland shuttles?

Rutland Plum Shuttles, sometimes called simply Valentine Buns, are sweet, yeast-raised, bread buns, made with dried fruit and candied peel, formed into the point-ended shape of weaver's shuttles, and then glazed. They are traditionally eaten on St. Valentine's Day in Rutland and parts of Leicestershire.



And this is from that well-known and redoubtable 19th century organ, 'The Leicestershire and Rutland, Notes and Queries, and Antiquarian Gleaner' (1889-92):

Curious Old Custom at Market Overton, Rutland.

On the 14th of February every year (Valentine Day) it has been the custom from time immemorial to give away buns to all the children in the village. Some years ago, buns were given from four different houses, also from two houses in the adjoining village of Barrow, and from one house in the village of Teigh; as the old families have died off, or have left, and new ones came in their places, the number of donors has diminished, until at the present time I am the only one left who keeps up the custom, and when I am gone it will probably die out altogether. The buns are now known as "Valentine Buns," but within my recollection they were called "Plum Shuttles," being of an oval shape, like a weaver's shuttle*; and I have heard it said that the custom of giving the buns away has prevailed even since the time when weaving by means of the hand-looms was common in many houses. Perhaps some of your readers can throw some light upon the origin of the custom.
* Plum Shuttles (pronounced " Shittles") are still eaten on St. Valentine's Day, at Uppingham, Rutland.- Ed.

I wonder if the reference to weavers' shuttles is not perhaps a rather un-subtle or even cruel 'joke' referring - particularly on St Valentine's Day - to unmarried spinsters keeping themselves occupied in spinning and weaving. Or there again maybe it refers to those dextrous, as-yet-unmarried maids, carefully spinning and weaving their future romantic fortunes.

Caro wrote:

Yesterday we went to a restaurant for lunch, and my husband had a croque madame. I knew a croque monsieur which is described as bread pieces toasted with ham and cheese, and a croque madame is the same with an egg on top. But these ones (and others I have seen) are more toasted rolls or buns, not quite hamburger buns but similar, perhaps softer.

Caro,

in the middle of all these sophisticated outlandish fabrications, mentioned by the other members, I only know the croque monsieur that you mentioned. We eat it regularly on café with a coffee or a glass of fruit juice when reading the dayly papers. But when I put croque-monsieur in google images I had to seek nearly to the end to find one as we have in the Belgian cafés. While I see now from my quick research that it originated in France (how could it otherwise) in the cafés, I see that the original? one is with the cheese on top of it and the ham between the two slices of bread, while in ours both the cheese and the ham are between the slices bread...MM? If you can enlighten?



Of course this is a croque-madame, but I found no other picture between the more than hundred ones.
And as you said the only difference is the egg above the croque...
But why it is called "madame" with the egg on the upperside I don't know...

Kind regards from Paul.

Re-reading The Mons Myth after obtaining a good second hand copy on Amazon, and in its' discussion of the pre-war German Army it mentions that breakfast in the Kaiser's Army consisted of Coffee and Kommisbrot.
This is a type a rye bread and was specifically made for the German military.

Kommissbrot