What kind of bread did Russians produce in the Middle Ages? Kneading and baking technology

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The Russian peasant, especially in his historical area - the Non-Black Earth Region - until the twentieth century, was always in need. His table is the best proof of this. The basis of food for the peasants was rye bread.

Due to the lack of time for women, it was baked once a week. The bread was often of poor quality - raw or, conversely, baked, which led to stomach ailments. There was often not enough flour to feed the family, and then they baked ersatz bread - with pine bark or quinoa. Apart from bread, the assortment of the table was low: collard greens, turnips, fish and mushrooms.

One of the main constraints on the well-being of Russian peasants was the short warm season. For 130-140 days a year, the peasant had to have time to prepare the soil for sowing grain, carry out haymaking, and harvest. If there were 1-2 workers in the family, it was possible to process arable land with high quality on an area of only 2.5 hectares, and poor-quality - on 3.5 hectares. However, both from that and from the other area were harvested only 3-4, usually it was about 60-70 poods of rye, barley and oats. At the rate of 12 poods of grain per person, the harvest was just barely enough for an average family of 6 people at that time. The horse had to be fed with oats during the difficult field work.

The lack of time allowed only one horse, one cow and a few sheep to be hay ready. The small number of domestic animals led to a shortage of manure - the main fertilizer of the time. Little manure - low yield. The majority of Russian peasants did not manage to break this "vicious circle" until the beginning of the twentieth century.

All this was reflected in the diet of Russian peasants: in general, they ate monotonous and often poor quality. Bread, gray (collard), turnips, mushrooms and fish. They accounted for 80-90% of the diet. In turn, for rye bread - up to 60% of calories. But even this bread was far in quality and taste from what we know rye bread today. The historian Leonid Milov writes about what Russian bread was like in the Middle Ages in his book "The Great Russian Plowman" (perhaps the best economic and historical study of the medieval peasantry in Russia).

Bread kneading and baking technology

The culture of rye bread baking has evolved over the centuries, and by the 18th century it was ideally as follows. Bread in a Russian oven was not baked every day, but only once a week, for the peasant woman had no other opportunity. In addition, it was believed that freshly baked bread was "heavy" and bad for the stomach. A lump of dough was usually left from each pastry - the so-called "leaven". This leaven was kept thickly rolled in flour in a dark place. Shelf life is up to two weeks. Sourdough is kneaded from rye flour in water. For quick souring, sometimes kvass was added. Instead of leaven for dough bread, they took brewer's yeast, kneaded it with flour and fermented in a warm place.

So, the leaven is put into a sourdough, where flour is already poured and a hole is prepared in the middle: for a lump of leaven. Then hot water is poured onto the leaven of such a high temperature that the hand can tolerate it. The dough is thoroughly ground, using only a third of the flour in the dough. Having received a "somewhat steep dough", it is raked into the middle and covered with a thick canvas, covered with flour on top and covered with a lid. In winter, they are additionally covered with a fur coat and a sauerkraut is placed near the oven. The peasant does all these operations in the evening, leaving the covered dough until morning.

In the morning, the dough itself is kneaded: they scoop away the flour, remove the linen and pour hot water again ("so that the hand can endure") into the middle of the leaven. Stir thoroughly without leaving lumps or lumps. Then they "knead" the rest of the flour, setting aside only a part of the flour to roll the breads themselves. At the same time, they make sure not to wait out the solution and not thicken it with excessive flour. Then the dough is covered with a tablecloth (in winter it is first heated) and something warm on top and left for an hour and a half.

The finished dough is checked whether it has risen well (put a fist in the dough to the bottom and quickly take out: the dough should "level up" by itself). Further, when the oven is heated, bread is rolled from the dough and covered with cloth. In order not to spoil the shape of the loaves, put woodpipes between the loaves. Part of the dough is left for future "leaven".

Then they scoop out the coals from the hotly heated stove, leaving a small pile at the mouth of the stove, sweep it clean under the stove and close it for a short time with a damper "so that the heat disappears" middle). Breads are baked: about three hours - sieve, about four hours - sieve (sieve bread - from flour, winnowed through a sieve, and sieve - through a sieve). When the bread is baked, they check each piece by tapping the bottom crust with a finger: the bread should "ring". Having taken out the loaves, it is necessary to put them on the edge, "the shtob moved away and softened while cooling down." It was not recommended to put ready-made hot breads in a "stale place". The cooled bread was stored, as a rule, in a cool place (for example, in a special tub of the cellar, so as not to grow moldy).

Deviations from the norm

Of course, there have often been various kinds of deviations from this ideal baking process in life. For example, if a peasant woman makes the "leaven" too cold, then the bread will end up in lumps. On the contrary, if the "leaven" is too hot, then the bread comes out too hard and hard. When the dough of a sluggish hostess permeates the dough, the bread turns out to be flaky, its shape diffuses (there are sharp pains in the stomach from it). If a peasant woman makes the oven too hot, the bread will burn out on top, but inside it will remain unbaked, "rough". On the contrary, in a weakly heated oven, the bread is not baked, but only dries up, "loses its strength", and becomes sticky inside. When the hostess hastily, barely kneading the dough, quickly rolls the breads and puts them in the oven ("to get rid of as soon as possible"), the crust of the bread swells up, and its crumb becomes strong and unleavened (it lies in the stomach "like lead").

In real life, there were often cases when the whims of nature in the face of bad weather, rainy days during the harvest period led to the fact that the grain germinated, deteriorated, or, conversely, did not ripen. As a result, the flour turned out to be sticky and "malty", and the dough "spreads out, does not rise well". Therefore, bread is not baked and, in fact, is simply unhealthy.

In order not to be poisoned by such bread and not to acquire serious diseases, the popular experience has developed a whole system of methods for neutralizing flour from such grain. Grain of this sort, in addition to drying it in sheaves, must be thoroughly dried again in ovens in small batches. Flour from this grain is not packed tightly into tubs with mallets, as is done with ordinary flour, but it is stored "powder", that is, in a whipped, loose, fluffy form. Before kneading, the fermented flour is again dried in the oven. When mixing less than usual, hot water is poured. And add more kvass thick or just take more old sourdough (that is, sour dough). Salt is also added more than usual: on a four-piece of flour (about 13 kg) - 4 handfuls of salt each. The kneading should become more acidic, so it is wrapped up warmer than usual. More flour is added to the risen dough, making a very steep dough, and when kneading it "they do not spare their hands."

And again leave the dough so that it rises well. The loaves are small and "thin". The main thing is that a very small amount of bread is baked from such flour, since they mold very quickly. Sometimes clean sieved ash is added to the water for kneading (a bag of ash is immersed in the water).

Dirty and harmful bread

Sprouted or greenish rye bread is not the only bread that is unhealthy. Often it is impossible to separate a grain of rye from ergot by a single trend. Flour with ergot is bluish, dark, smells bad. The dough from it also spreads, and the bread falls apart. But in Russia, apparently, due to an acute lack of time, ergot was left in flour, that is, "they do not throw it out of rye grains, they grind it together." In the southern regions of Russia, when grinding wheat, smut is also left, which is also far from harmless.

Finally, the grain of the southern steppe regions often and a lot just got black earth dust. "In the steppe places," writes Drukovtsev, "where the ground is black, there is no white flour, so that black dust, sticking to a circle of grain, comes together in the hammer. Because of that, the taste in baked dough is bad and bitter." In addition, the currents on which the bread was threshed were mostly earthen, and here the grain was additionally covered with a dense, durable layer of black dust, which could not always even be washed off. Thus, from this, the peasants' wheat flour was often darkish in color, and all this got into the bread.

Voluntary fraud: "hungry bread"

In the years of famine, the peasantry widely used all kinds of falsification of bread in the form of various, and sometimes even terrible, in our opinion, additives to rye flour. Among the most benign, so to speak, harmless to health supplements was the quinoa weed grass. Its use is known from various sources. A. T. Bolotov, in particular, pointed out that in the Tula province. in the years of famine, "whole districts were fed with seeds." He also reported that in the Nizhny Novgorod province. with poor grain harvests, many (peasants) "replace the lack of onago (that is, bread) with quinoa grass seeds." In the literature of the 18th century. quinoa gained the sad fame of the "second bread". They made flour from the seeds of the quinoa and "mixing it with a certain amount of flour, they bake bread."

In the severe years of famine, in a number of regions of Russia, there was not even a quinoa. For example, in the Arkhangelsk province, when there was not enough flour, they pounded pine bark and Vakhka grass. In the neighboring Olonets province. the shortage of bread was almost constant: "Clean bread in all, except for the Kargopol district, is consumed by the villagers, excluding the rich, - until March and April. And from that time until the new bread (that is, six months), pine bark is mixed with rye and barley flour, into crushed flour, which, having been removed from the tree, is dried in the summer in the sun and, having cleaned the upper black layer, they pound and knead the dough, adding a few rye and barley flour."

As in the Arkhangelsk province, here “in many graveyards of the Povenets district, spring cakes are baked from the root of a grass called vekhki, which is mixed with bread flour. This grass is born on the banks of large streams and grows up to three quarters of an arshin (c. 54 cm). The leaf is similar to birch. At the onset of spring, the villagers pull out its root, dry it and pound it into flour. The taste of these cakes, although bitter, but the inhabitants, accustomed to eating them in need, eat without disgust and great harm.

The consequences of eating such food, consumed in Russia more or less regularly, are unambiguous: "the peasants are weak and incapable of work."

In Central Russia, such additions to rye flour as wheatgrass were also popular (its roots had to be washed, dried in the shade, crumbled, dried again in the oven, ground and added to rye flour - for three rye quadruples, one wheatgrass root quadruple). Burdock roots were also added (wash, crumble, dry in the sun, crush and add sauerkraut to the batch). Sometimes hemp or flaxseed cakes, etc. were added.

At the end of the century, active propaganda of a new, very solid "bread substitute" in hungry years - potatoes - began. It was recommended to put it boiled and peeled directly into the dough kneading so that it (dough) becomes very thick. Then, as usual, the dough is kneaded and breads are baked. Such bread, as they knew already in the 18th century, "is whiter than usual rye, does not quickly turn stale, is just as satisfying, and besides, it can save up to half the volume of rye flour." But the acquaintance of the Russian peasantry with potatoes stretched out for many, many decades.

Eating real rye bread is a significant indicator of peasant well-being. When contemporaries wanted to emphasize this prosperity, they wrote: "Their food consists in pure rye bread."