Louis P. De Gouy - The Bread Book

Louis P. De Gouy
DOVER PUBLICATIONS

Garden City, New York

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2021, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published as The Bread Tray: Nearly 600 Recipes for Homemade Breads, Rolls, Muffins and Biscuits by Greenberg Publisher in 1944.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: De Gouy, Louis P. (Louis Pullig), 18761947, author.

Title: The bread book / Louis P. De Gouy.

Other titles: Bread tray

Description: Garden City, New York: Dover Publications, 2021. |

Originally published Greenberg Publisher, 1944, under the title: The bread tray. | summary: This book will be an invaluable addition to the shelf of any cook or anyone who takes eating seriously. Not only does it provide recipes for simple and complex breads for all occasions but it also gives many ideas that will help in buying and choosing breads and understanding the basic process behind each. Over 500 recipes included, there are sixty-four baking powder biscuits, two hundred plain and sweet breads, eighteen buns; muffins, gingerbread recipes, popovers,scones and more. Excellent advice on bread making in general
Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021000524 | ISBN 9780486847849 (hardcover) | ISBN
0486847845 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Bread. | LCGFT: Cookbooks.

Classification: LCC TX769 .D4 2021 | DDC 641.81/5dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000524

Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications Book LLC

84784501

www.doverpublications.com

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2021

T his book is fondly dedicated
to the memory of
L ouis P. De Gouy
(18761947)
B y his daughter
J acqueline S. D ooner

FOREWORD

BY DOROTHY THOMPSON

All my life I have found cookbooks among the most fascinating of reading matter. No literature comes closer to living experience. Whatever our other activities may be, we all eat, most of us three meals a day. Why we eat what we do, what it does for us or to us, how others eatother peoples, and other cultureshow to extend and refine our tastes and our appetites, and how to prepare the food that we put into our mouths, not only for our nourishment, but for our delightthese are matters of prime importance to all civilized persons.

This book deals with the basic human food: Bread. Its author is a greatgourmet and an incomparable chef. It is the most complete guide to bread making that I know of.

It has always astonished and annoyed me that even the most voluminous cook books, that instruct in everything from the preparation of rare game to the concoction of the most intricate desserts, including hundreds of recipes for cakes, ignore or telescope into a few inadequate pages the culinary science and art of baking bread. Even excellent cooks and bakers show, in this generation, an almost complete lack of knowledge of breadof bread flours and bread mixtures.

So lost an art is that of home bread-baking that families who scorn a bakery cake suffer daily the sliced loaf that passes itself off over the grocery counter as the Staff of Life. In my mothers household, the sickly, bleached-blonde, airy, quick-staling, crustless, sweetish, sticky mass would have been dumped in the garbage can as unfit for human consumption.

For those who, scorning the afternoon cocktail, look forward to a cup of five oclock tea, the paper-thin bread and butter, preferably white and brown, rolled around watercress, in summer, or tissue-thin cucumbers, or accompanied by wild strawberry jam, is an unknown luxury. The bakers loaf is already cut and were it not, no one could shave from its bodyless consistency, the millimeter slice.

Were it not for our immigrants, who come to our shores with the taste of real bread still on their tongues, we should probably have become a breadless nation, and as such, unique among mankind. The dieter takes our pseudo-bread off her listthe dieter is usually femalewith less regret than any other food, because she has seldom eaten good bread. Actually, as this author tells us, a piece of good bread and butter is not high in caloric content in proportion to other foods. But the average bakers bread is just low in sensory pleasure.

Yet one woman has already demonstrated that if you can bake a better loaf than the big firms, the world will beat a path to your door. Baking an old-fashioned loaf in her own kitchen, and selling it first to a few friends, she rapidly built up a big business, with a loaf of average size and costing twice as much, simply because, with it, people rediscovered bread as such.

A return of home baking would be a challenge to the commercial bakers of a mass product and should therefore be encouraged, in the interest of their reform.

But even those who must shop for bread, having no time to make it, should read this book, as a guide to buying. Its revelation concerning the enormous varieties of bread may encourage people to search for something resembling them, in the not too obvious places. As I have said, good bread is always easier to find in communities or districts where there is a foreign colony. Up in the country, I owe it to a colony of Italian-Americans in a nearby industrial town, that I can get the round, crusty, nutty dark loaf that one cuts in hunks to eat with meats and vegetables.

But even the bakers cannot supply the home with that aroma sweeter than all the perfumes of Araby that issues from the oven when the fresh loaves are taken out. They cannot supply you with the irreplaceable deliciousness of the fresh yeast-raised roll, straight out of the oven, into which the hard, sweet butter melts most toothsomely. Nor can they supply you with the disproportionate sense of accomplishment and triumph which accompanies the turning out of a perfect brace of loaves. I do not know why this is so, because it is not hard to make bread. But the housewife who does it enjoys extraordinary praise, and especially from her husband.

One does not slice the bread one makes oneself, in wanton waste, into a basket or onto a plate. It appears at the table on a white-scoured board, with a gleaming knife at its side. It is custom-made and cut to order. It goes back into the bread box, carefully wrapped in a spotless linen tea-towel. It is treated with respect. In it one feels the sun on wheatfields; one smells the freshness of earth; one savors the fragrant sweetness of honey; it brings a message of friendly laborthe labor of men on the soil, under the sun, and of a competent good-tempered woman, serene in her own kitchen. It is not anonymous bread, but strictly personal.

Only one warning must be uttered. The expert bread-maker tends to smugness. So intense is the satisfaction with the product that it promotes self-satisfaction. If you dont believe this, watch the expression on a womans face, when she announces, Its home made.

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