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Monday 23 January 2012

Baker

A standard way of achieving the necessary mix of barley and yeast to brew beer in ancient Egypt was to allow mashed barley bread to ferment. So brewing became, in those early times, part of the baker's trade.


The Roman emperor Constantine The Great passed laws making the occupations of butcher and baker hereditary.

In 1266 English bakers were ordered to mark each loaf of bread so that if a faulty one turns up, "it will be knowne in whom the faulte lies." These bakers' marks were among the first trademarks.

In medieval times, a heavy penalty was inflicted for short weight and bakers used to give a surplus number of loaves to avoid incurring the fine. The thirteenth loaf was called the vantage loaf (as in the loaf allowed for profit). From this comes the phrase, 'Baker's Dozen.'

The Great Fire of London broke out on September 2, 1666, beginning at the house of Thomas Farynor, the king's baker in Pudding Lane. London.

Marie Antoinette, the wife of Louis XVI of France was nicknamed The Baker's Wife' after her husband distributed bread to the starving Parisians during a bread shortage. On being told that the people had no bread to eat she proclaimed "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" ("let them eat cake.")

During World War II, bakers in the United States were ordered to stop selling sliced bread for the duration of the war. Only whole loaves were made available to the public. It was never explained how this action helped the war effort.

Bill Emerson baking bread at the Sawyer Stoll Mill 

The modern frisbee was invented by students at Yale University in 1947, who played with aluminium pie plates. These came from a Bridgeport baker, Joseph Frisbie, whose Frisbie Pie Company was a regular supplier to the university.

A bakery in Chester, England, created in 2013, what is reportedly the world's most expensive wedding cake, valued at $52.7 million. The eight-tiered confection is decorated with more than 4,000 diamonds.

Until 2015, a French law prohibited bakers in Paris from taking vacations at the same time in order to prevent bread shortages.

In France, by law a bakery has to make all the bread it sells from scratch in order to have the right to be called a bakery.

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