A couple of months after I published my Save Sourdough book, emeritus history professor Peter Scholliers released Brood: een geschiedenis van bakkers en nun brood (Bread: a history of bakers and their bread), a thorough socio-economical analysis of bread eaters and creators in Flanders, from the 1800s until now. Eager to see how Peter approached the subject, I picked up the book back then, but it took me a few years to get to it.

It's a much more thorough and structurally sound book than my chapter on the history of bread ever will be. Considering Peter's career, that might not come as a big surprise. That said, the biggest sore point of the book is also due to his career: in a typical academic fashion, it's full of interesting facts but served in a rather dry fashion. If you manage to look past that, Bread contains reference upon reference of fascinating local bread culture history. Peter even managed to dig up old archives from Ghent and Antwerp and systematically went through everything he could get his hands on.

I doubt this book is for the average non-fiction reader. For me, the highly specific subject makes it all the more interesting. If you're interested in the process of bread baking, in yeast, or in oven building, this is not the book for you, as even to my surprise, Peter doesn't even bother digressing in the complex relationship of the brewer and the baker. On the other hand, if you're interested in a detailed price history analysis, in governmental rulings considering the pricing and distribution of bread and the impact of potential uprising, then this is the perfect book for you---considering you live in Flanders or The Netherlands.

The book is divided in three parts: the eater, the baker, and the government. In each part, Peter describes prices, the relationship between the other involved parties, evolving technologies, and the enormous social importance of bread, that only very recently has been (partially) diminished.

That all sounds very dull, doesn't it? And it's not particularly sugarcoated, but these facts are for a bread enthusiast still very compelling. Allow me to try and convince you with a few examples.

Here's the percentage of expenses for bread compared to the total family expenses, 1750--2020:

• 1750: 45%
• 1850: 30%
• 1900: 20%
• 1930: 10%
• 1950: 5%
• 1980: 2%
• 2020: 1%

Can you imagine spending half of your total income to buy bread each month? If I earn €2000, that would be almost €1000 or €62 per day! Bread prices are rising lately, and an uninspired grey yeast bread of 850 gr is nowadays almost €3.20. We love complaining about bread prices, but this does put things into perspective. At the same time, bread consumption has lowered from 750 gr per day (in 1811) to less than 105 gr per day (in 2015). In percentages, that means from 58% of the total calorie intake down to less than 12%.

Peter doesn't simply provide the facts but relates this to the rise in purchasing power, the industrial revolution, the import and mass adaptation of other calorie-rich food, the evolving price of an average rye and wheat bread, and so forth. I know, I know, booorringg! How about a few graphs to spice things up?

What can I say, I'm a sucker for books like this. Unfortunately, the writing style doesn't make the admittedly sometimes dull facts a joy to read. I still very much prefer Steven Laurence Kaplan's The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, covering France's preindustrial dependence on grain from 1700--1775. It's a very thick tome and pricey, but to a bread nut, totally worth it. Being the more popular one, it's also available in English.

A historian's viewpoint of bread certainly puts things in perspective, and I especially appreciate Peter's thorough run-down of the available material. The reference list in itself is a valuable resource in case you're compelled to dig even deeper. A few things are missing and by the governmental part, the never-ending numbers were wearing me out, but if you approach this book as study material, it's a more than excellent resource on the local socio-economical and cultural history of one of the most important foods ever invented: bread.