Baker and Confectioner, vol. 10, no. 239, 29 January 1897

To see the whole volume all on one zoomable page, go to the Metabotnik upload here.

The leader of this issue concerns what was actually a fierce dispute in the National Association of Master Bakers, Confectioners (founded in 1887) conducted in the Association’s organ, the National Association Review (the NAR had started as the Quarterly Trade Review in 1887 and changed its frequency and name in 1894) the question was an important one: what constituted a loaf of bread? Should the ingredients and their quantities be standardised? At the time Bread Laws were in force, but they were subject to interpretation. This is not the place to go into the detail – see instead chapter XIV of Twenty-One Years’ History of the National Association of Master Bakers and Confectioners (privately printed for the Association, 1908; available on the Hathi Trust site if you can access it) – but it is important to note that, typical for a successful and long-lasting trade periodical, the Baker and Confectioner was careful not to take sides and to point out that it did not: rather it gave space to all sides in order to encourage debate (which meant of course continued sales in the search for news of a resolution).

There is a dearth of recipes in this issue outside one in “Answers to Correspondents” for Bristol Cake, but there is a long account of the Annual Dinner of the London Master Bakers’ Protection Society (pp. 67-9). The 7-course menu, listed at the bottom of p. 67, was typical of the nineteenth-century display dinner. Typically, the Exeter and District Master Bakers’ Annual Dinner is reported in just one column n p. 74 and while there is no mention of what had been eaten, the guests and the toasts are detailed.

This issue too shows the arbitrary separation of the Supplement from the main body of the periodical: sections of the former are women through the adverts of the latter, creating a confusion between them so that the spatial and hence status difference between editorial and advert becomes slightly blurred, even if the formats of both remain distinct. This is only a continuation of the running adverts at the foot of the main body pages that had been a feature of many nineteenth-century periodicals, whether oriented towards the instrumentality of trade or leisure-reading. This is why, as we explained on the Baker and Confectioner main page, we have chosen to bring back together the supplement and the issue which the hard-copy bound volume of the periodical we scanned in, assuming rather too automatically that supplements were not connected to their issue, had separated out.

Baker and Confectioner (1897)↗