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Baker's French Loaves
The same as the preceding, of larger size. Cut the entire piece of dough in about 10 pieces. Flatten out without kneading. Bring two opposite corners together and press them into the middle and press the loaf sides together in long, pointed shape. Then there are tow ways of proceeding. 1. Place each loaf with the smooth side down in a flowered napkin or piece of clean flour sick and set them to rise an hour that way, in a deep pan or box just touching. The oven being ready, turn the loaf right side up on to the peel, cut it lengthwise down nearly to the bottom, and slip it to its place on the oven bottom. 2. The above plan not being convenient to practice, make the loaves as before and place them right side up in the usual hotel baking pans, brush over with water, rise, cut as before, and bake in the pans. There should be plenty of room between. Brush with water again when done.
The bakers pursue a method so laborious in making their flaky, stringy French loaves as would forever deter weakly people from trying, if it were the only way. But in this case knowledge is literally power. The dough carefully kneaded on the table in the way that has been directed reaches the same condition as if it had been worked in a trough with water with an immense expenditure of strength.
This is a continuation entry — the dough itself is made by the preceding recipe, so read the two together. What is given here is shaping, proofing and baking, and most of the guidance still holds; the vocabulary and the equipment are what need translating.
- The hinge: proof seam-side down, bake seam-side upThe whole first method depends on resting the shaped loaf with its smooth face against the cloth, then flipping it onto the peel so the seam sits underneath and the taut smooth surface takes the cut. Get that backwards and the loaf tears open along the seam instead of opening at the score.
- "A flowered napkin or piece of clean flour sick"Typesetting errors for floured napkin and flour sack. This is the ancestor of the couche: floured linen holding the loaves' shape while they rise just touching, with a deep pan or box to keep the sides upright. Modern bakers use much the same cloth and the same trick.
- "Tow ways"Read two ways. The second is offered simply for when the first plan is not convenient.
- Hotel baking pansRimmed sheet pans of roughly commercial size. If you use the second method, the loaves bake on the pan rather than the oven floor, so expect a paler, softer bottom crust. A preheated stone or steel gets you closer to method one.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all. For lean loaves of this size, 450-475F, hot from the start, is a workable equivalent, with a baking stone preheated at least 45 minutes.
- Brushing with waterThis is the period substitute for a steam-injected oven, and it does help the crust set glossy and thin. A pan of boiling water or a few ice cubes on a preheated tray at the moment of loading does more. The second brushing after baking softens the crust slightly and gives shine; skip it if you want it crackling.
- Scoring"Cut it lengthwise down nearly to the bottom" is deeper than most modern instruction. A shallow-angled slash about half an inch deep, made with a blade rather than a knife, gives a better ear without collapsing the loaf.
- Rise time and yieldAn hour at ordinary room temperature is what the text gives; judge by feel — the loaf should spring back slowly when pressed. The batch is divided into about ten pieces, and the recipe calls these larger than the preceding ones, though the total quantity of dough is set by that earlier entry.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the American hotel and restaurant trade at the end of the nineteenth century, and this entry shows him doing what he did best: taking a professional bakery process and stripping it down for a hotel cook working alone with a table, a peel and whatever oven the house had. The "laborious" method he alludes to is the trough work he names himself — dough worked in a trough with water and, as he says, an immense expenditure of strength. Whitehead's argument that careful table kneading reaches the same condition is a working cook's practical claim rather than a scientific one, but it points at something now well established: what matters is the state of the gluten, not the ritual by which it got there. The couche, the peel and the hearth bake are all still standard practice in artisan bakeries today.