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Cooks And Bakers

"Why, good heavens! we have lost our way. But what a delightful smell there is here of hot bread, Andree." "That is by no means surprising," replied the other, "for we are close to the door of a baker's shop."-Dumas.

Anciently,-we read in Roman antiquities-the cook and baker were one. In the hotel work of the present the same rule holds. This little book recognizes a distinction between the hotel baker or pastry-cook and the shop baker. The batter seldom does well when he tries hotel work. The hotel pastry-cook going into a bakery generally makes the goods richer than shop rules and profits will allow. This book applying to hotel ways pursues a new path and is necessarily a little at variance with baker's methods. If it were a baker's routine we should have to describe three bucket sponges or ten bucket sponges; and when the baker makes up his dough he adds to his three bucket sponge about as much more warm water.

This plan of adding more liquid to the sponge is commendable for checking too rapid fermentation-best way when loaf bread only is to be made, but not for rolls or fancy breads. The bakers' ways are referred to for illustrations for comparison chiefly.

The essential points in bread making are the same whether in shops, hotel kitchens, or private houses. When to the baker's proper ways of working, we in hotels add the small amount of enriching ingredients which they do not need and cannot afford in their larger operations, we produce the extra fine rolls and extra bread, having which people think they can almost dispense with everything else.

The lump of dough already prepared, smooth and like an air cushion, lies in layers or flakes, and it is another part of the art of good bread making not to disturb them much in making up. It might be hard to explain why this stringy texture preserved in the loaves should make a difference in the taste, but it is plain it does, and in this lies the desirableness of what are known as French loaves.