Never mind the pandemayn, let them eat horse bread!

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 05:00:00 GMT

An Englishman’s status in society was once expressed by the kind of bread he consumed. While his serfs ate coarse loaves made with whole grains, the bread of choice for a medieval nobleman was a fine white roll called pandemayn. This premium luxury loaf was made with flour from which the bran and wheat germ had been sifted. So the average medieval baron was actually eating far less nutritious bread than the peasant who ploughed his fields. In fact the lord’s white pandemayn, (known also as manchet and gentleman’s rolls), was not even as wholesome as the bread that was consumed by his horse. Yes, a special type of bread really was baked especially for horses! It was made chiefly from chisel, the name given to the bran sifted from the whole meal to make flour for pandemayn.

One sixteenth century writer says of wholemeal bread (also known as cheat or cockle bread), ‘it is fit and meet for hindes and other worke folkes, as delvers, porters and such other persons as are in continuall travel, because they they have need of such like food, as consisteth of a grosse, thicke, and clammie juice’. Of the upper class white loaf he says, ‘it is good for idle and unlaboured persons, such as are students, monks, canons and other fine and daintie persons, which stand in neede to be fed with food of light and easie digestion’.

Upwardly mobile folk have always tended to imitate their social superiors, so many who had made new money, abandoned their honest yeoman’s cockle loaf and went for the high status manchet. Thus was born the English workman’s love affair with the white loaf. By the eighteenth century, everybody wanted white bread, despite the warnings of some medical men, who realised that wholemeal bread was better for our health. A doctor called William Buchan, writing in the 1780s, said ‘The artificially whitened, drying, stuffing bread, though made of the heart of the wheat, is in reality the worst of any; yet this is the bread which most people prefer, and the poorer sort will eat no other’. So the white loaf, once a luxury for the rich, became the preferred choice for all. Buchan thought the poor should eat maslin, a type of bread baked from a blend of whole rye and wheat flours, which he correctly assumed was better for us.

Compared to an eighteenth century white loaf, which at least was made from stone-ground organic flour, a modern factory-made white sliced loaf is very poor stuff indeed, crammed full of flour improvers and other unnecessary additives. Modern strains of wheat also do not have the character of some of the old varieties, such as rivet wheat, once commonly grown throughout the land, but now sadly almost extinct.

What Britain needs are far more artisan bakers with the kind of vision expressed by Andrew Whitley in Bread Matters, an important new book that should be on every kitchen bookshelf in the country. And if you cannot find a decent baker near you, take Andrew’s advice and bake your own.

Historic Food - Ivan Day

Never mind the pandemayn, let them eat horse bread!