18th Century Bread

Last updated: Jan 5, 2024

Primary sources relating to bread, including eighteenth-century recipes for baking bread.

Bread, Dictionarium Rusticum, Urbanicum & Botanicum (1726)
From The Modern Husbandman; or, The Practice of Farming: The Months of July, August, and September (1744):
- Potatoe Bread
- Of Rye
- Of French or Buck Wheat
From Pehr Kalm’s Account of His Visit to England (1748): “The bread which here in England was everywhere and exclusively used, at least where I travelled, was large loaves, baked of wheat-flour. Other bread is next to never eaten. Most Englishmen had rarely heard tell of rye-bread; few had seen it, and still fewer were those who had eaten it. Many also did not know, that anyone was in the habit of baking bread of rye, but they thought that it was only used as food for cattle. This ought to be understood of those who lived in London and the provinces immediately round; for several told me that in the north of England it is common enough to bake bread of rye-meal. Likewise that there are large tracts in the north where most of the people mostly live on Haver-bread [oatmeal cakes]. In London they sometimes, at breakfast, eat with butter, while they drink tea, a kind of thin, small, round cakes, which are snow-white, taste very nice, and are said to be made of the finest Haver-meal. But still wheat-loaves are the principal sort.”
From The London and Country Cook (1749):
- To make French-bread
- How to make bread more substantial than ordinary
- A receipt for making bread without barm, by the help of a leaven
Of Bread, A Treatise of All Sorts of Foods (1745)
A Letter from an Officer, showing how he made his own Bread in Scotland, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1746
Baker, The General Shop Book; or, The Tradesman’s Universal Director (1753)
An Act to Regulate the Price and Assize of Bread, The Charter Granted by their Majesties King William and Queen Mary, to the Inhabitants of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay in New-England (1759)
Baking, A New and Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1763)
Boulanger, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1763)
Bread, Encyclopædia Britannica (1773); includes a recipe for “good French bread”
Recipes in Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1774):
- To make white bread, after the London way
- To make French bread
- A receipt for making bread without barm by the help of a leaven
Lectures on the materia medica, as delivered in the University of Edinburgh (1775)
Considerations on the Adulteration of Bread and Flour, The London Art of Cookery, and Housekeeper’s Complete Assistant (1787):
- To make White Bread in the London Manner
- To make Leaven Bread
- To make French Bread
Directions for baking Bread, The Universal Cook and City and Country Housekeeper (1792)
Bread, Arithmetical Questions on a New Plan (1795)
Baking, Every Woman Her Own House-Keeper; or, The Ladies’ Library (1796)
On work-house bread, The State of the Poor (1797)
Bread, Encyclopædia Britannica (1797)
Arabian Manner of Baking Bread, The Edinburgh Magazine (1800)

18th Century Bread

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