ALUM IN BREAD.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume II, Issue 307, 28 December 1867, Page 2

ALUM IN BREAD.

To the Editor of the Nelson Evening Mail. Sir — Perhaps the following extract from Household Words, vol. v, p. 424, may not be uninteresting to your readers at the present moment, when a slight rise in flour has caused anything but a slight rise iu the price of bread. This is not said out of any dislike to bakers in general or particular; for it is, as everybody who is at all acquainted with the trade, or who has visited a bakehouse especially in the summer, must know, a very laborious and physically depressing calling; and nobody can begrudge a baker making a moderate fortune by years spent in his somewhat unnatural state of existence. 'Alum whitens and economises by enabling the baker to sell in a loaf, together with his flour, more than the proper quantity of water. A sack of flour containing 2801b. should make, according to the old parliamentarj standard, 80 loaves of 4lb. each. That is to say. in. the making of the bread 401b, of water is the fair weight to be added to the sick of flour. Bakers however like to make more than 80 of these loaves out of a sack of flour, and they get in practice 94 and sometimes even 100. That is to say, instead of adding 40lb. __ water to the sack of flour, they will add 96 or even " 1201b. of that exceedingly cheap article of trade. Upon each sack of flour they obtain therefore the price of bread for 50, 60, or 701b. of water that has been unfairly added to the reckoning. Simple flour would not take up so much, but alum has the power of retaining water at the same time that it whitens the whole compound, and sometimes enables flour of an inferior quality to produce loaves of "the best bread." When the Lancet published its analysis of bread, purchased at rau dotn from many shops, there was found scarcely a specimen from which alum was absent. It is said in the Encyclopaedia Britanaica that it is common to put as much alum into the bread as salt, 2£lb. to the sack; this would yield 157grs. to a loaf— a serious quantity. Experience has shown that less alum' than 31grs. to a loaf would not affect the bread at all, while this quantity (the lowest that can be assumed) yields a weekly allowance of astringent matter to the consumer that cannot fail to have a slow and hurtful influence upon- his organs of digestion.' Trusting shortly to see the day when breadmaking will become a household duty, ■ I am, etc., Homemade. Nelson,December27, 18G7.