A Plain White Loaf

By the 1880s, few households in the south of England habitually baked all their daily bread. Even the queen ordered much of the bread used at the palaces from outside suppliers. But bread-making was still deemed a vital skill for working-class women, for, although there had been a great deal of improvement in the previous decades, much of the bread sold in England was still adulterated with inferior ingredients. For those at the bottom of society, bread really was ‘the staff of life’, by fa