What is a Peck? Baking Bread

I used up all the bread in our house. With two kids in elementary school we go through a lot of bread. I make sandwiches for lunch at least twice a week. I try to be creative but school lunches are my least favourite thing to prepare. Most days my kids get distracted, and don't eat what I packed them anyway. If it food that doesn't need to be kept cold they eat it after school but meats go into the trash. Such a waste! In the winter warm toast is a breakfast favourite. Needless to say we go through a lot of bread.

Since bread is consumed so frequently in our house I tend to bake it often. Homemade bread is so much tastier than store bread and it really is only 4 ingredients (flour, water, salt, yeast). So for my first recipe from Mrs. Beeton bread was a natural starting place.

I figured how complicated can baking bread be? I do it all the time, this should be a great place to start. So I opened up the table of contents and went to the standard 4 ingredient bread recipe, simple right? WRONG!

What is a PECK? My first thought when thinking of a Peck is Madmartigan calling Willow a Peck in the movie Willow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r36bKjBAdb0

Clearly that is not the peck required in the recipe. Time to Google. I found out that a peck is a dry volume measure, equivalent to 16 dry pints. Still not helpful for measuring bread with my standard kitchen implements. More searching was going to be required. After additional research it seems that a peck of flour is 14 pounds or 6350g. (I am most familiar with baking bread in metric weights so that's what I will use in this recipe.)

6350g of flour would make approximately 12 loaves of bread. If I was the cook in a manor house with a large staff perhaps 12 loaves would be required. A household of 4 people and no staff clearly does not need 12 loaves of bread. I needed to do some math to downsize this recipe.

To figure this out I determined the hydration ratio for the bread and downsized to a standard 1000g of flour. The hydration ration for this recipe was 45%. This is low for bread but in the interest of cooking as true to Mrs. Beeton I kept it.

I mixed the recipe based up and it was SOOOOO DRY! How could this possibly ever have worked? Then I remembered that the nature of flour has changed since 1912. In the 1960s high yield flour was developed. This flour is higher in the amount of gluten it contains. The higher the amount of gluten in the flour the more water it is able to absorb. I didn't want to waste all the flour I had used so I added more water bringing the hydration up to 60%. This was still the "stiff dough" called for in the original recipe.

What a difference a little water can make.

I then proceeded to follow the instructions for the rest of the process. Kneed, rise, kneed again were fairly simple. When it got to the baking instructions it was clear that there was a presumed level of knowledge in the past that people had was much higher than it is presumed to be today. "Turn out on to the board, divide into suitable sized pieces, make into loaves, prove and bake."

I decided to divide my bread into 3 pieces. I did this because I have 2 smaller bread pans and 1 larger one so I divided 2 slightly smaller and 1 larger piece. The two smaller ones I shaped and placed into greased pans. The larger one I decided some breakfast bread would be nice, so I rolled out to a rectangle and sprinkled it with cinnamon and sugar. Who doesn't like cinnamon bread for breakfast?

I baked the bread at 400F for 25 minutes. It turned out nice and light. My kids gobbled it up, they love it when we have white bread at home. The loaves were a bit small, so I would make only 2 loaves next time.

Ingredients

1000g All purpose flour

600g water (98 degrees F)

9g yeast

7g salt

Method

1. Place 1000g flour in a large mixing bowl

2. Place 600g water into a small bowl with the yeast and the salt. Mix until the yeast is dissolved.

3. Make a well in the flour and add the water mix

4. Mix it into a stiff dough.

5. On a clean surface kneed for 5 minutes until smooth

5. Return the dough to a bowl. Cover and let rise for 2 hours

6. Kneed the dough for another 5 minutes

7. Return to bowl and rise for another hour

8. Divide the dough into two parts and shape into a loaves

9. Place loaves into greased pans

10. Prove for 45 minutes

11. Bake at 400F for 25min or until bread is golden and sounds hollow when tapped

Almost 4000 Recipes - Some Involve Brain

I love old fashioned murder mysteries. When I have a bit of time and want to read something that isn't too taxing they are my go to. It was reading Phryne Fisher Mysteries by Kerry Greenwood that I first encountered reference to Mrs. Beeton. So when I found the voluminous tome sitting among the books on my grandmother's shelf I knew I had found something special. Like the character Ruth who was using Mrs. Beeton as a guide to prepare meals for her family, I too love cooking. I pulled the book off the shelf and carefully opened it up (it is over 100 years old after all). As soon as I did I was enthralled by the wealth of information contained within the covers. There are 1997 pages in the edition I have and there is such a wide variety of information on all subjects. Need an idea of how much to pay your servant's, Mrs. Beeton has you covered. Need a menu for a shooting party, advice on teething, how to clean and store your bicycle, it is in there too.

I have read little bits and pieces of Mrs. Beeton here and there but never attempted to try any of the recipes, but where to start? With almost 4000 different recipes, using unfamiliar measures I have been stuck on my starting place. At least I know what I'm not going to cook first - BRAINS.

You read that right, there are in fact 2 separate recipes for cooking Sheep's Brain. Sheep's Brain with Parsley Sauce and Sheep's Brain with Matelote Sauce. Our modern sensibilities keep me from wanting to try brain due to concerns of prion diseases.

There are many other recipes using various offal. As I progress through this project I am hoping to become more adventurous and attempt some of these. Currently though cooking tripe, kidneys and liver are just not my cup of tea.

With brain and other offal off my list of starting places I still had an abundance of choice in where to start.

Not all the meat dishes are strange to today's palette. There are many dishes with curry as well as other flavourful herbs and spices that I am excited to try. There are pages and pages of puddings, including a treacle pudding that sounds fabulous. I will have to space out the testing of the pudding recipes for the benefit of my waistline.

I have decided to approach this project of Cooking Mrs. Beeton simply. I am going to cook what we need to eat, and cook what I can find the ingredients for. Join me as I work through this adventure. I can't wait to dive into the past and bring a bit of it back to enjoy.