Baker (2)

The interior of Arthur 'Snowy' Mason's bakery in 1986. Photo courtesy of the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester & Rutland.

David Wood: The baking method has changed a great deal. Could you go into the old way of doing it, or the old method of doing it compared with the modern one?

Mr Mason: Yes. When I came down here firstly there was a big drum here, about where I'm sitting now. I should imagine it was four foot in diameter and on the side there was a big wheel, like the wheel on the old mangles. This drum, it would take a sack of flour, which is two hundred and eighty pound of flour. Making ordinary dough like we do, to within half a gallon of water we used to put fourteen gallons of water per two hundred and eighty pounds of flour. Which compared today with sliced bread, put eighteen gallons in, which we couldn't possibly do, we couldn't handle the dough. I could turn that wheel, when I first came here, just four times over, that's as much as I could turn it. Then it used to come out into the old wooden tro' (sort of trough) and it used to stay over night in there to rise. In the winter probably it would only be half way up in the tro'. Of course, there was no frontage on this at all, it was just a zinc lean-to here with no coverage, of course the problem’s keeping it warm. When the dough was tinned up in the morning – after you’d […] and tinned it all up, moulded it, tinned it up - you would probably have to wait two hours for those loaves to rise in the tin before you could put them in the oven. You would probably get your bread in the oven by nine o'clock, half past nine, sometimes ten, according to what the weather was like. If it was bitterly cold your dough wouldn't rise. I've seen the time when my old boss has taken it out of the tro' because it hasn't risen anything like enough. They've put flour bags on to steel trays and put great chunks of dough on, prior to lighting the fire just to warm it up, then fetch it out and start on it. But, the difference was in the summer, the dough used to come up to the top and go down again, it would be sour before you'd got to it. That was a big problem if you'd got exceptionally hot nights. You used probably six ounce to eight ounce of yeast for a batch of dough at night, in the winter you would probably put four ounces extra or something like that. But your bread used to come out then, when you'd got an over worked dough, no colour, no bloom on it at all. It was chalkified in colour. After the war it was a bit of a bind really if you'd got your Sunday off, you had to come Sunday nights to make your dough for Monday morning. That meant if you went to church, or chapel, whatever you did, you’d got to go home, you’d got to get changed, and you’d got dough to make.

©David Wood & EMOHA