{"id":256559,"date":"2013-09-17T18:23:37","date_gmt":"2013-09-17T18:23:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2013\/09\/17\/dancingspirals-ironychan\/"},"modified":"2018-10-07T12:02:25","modified_gmt":"2018-10-07T12:02:25","slug":"dancingspirals-ironychan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2013\/09\/17\/dancingspirals-ironychan\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-256559 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-thumbnail'><figure class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<div class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2013\/09\/17\/dancingspirals-ironychan\/attachment\/256560\/'><img width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/tumblr_mqgdw7zD7U1qa3mn6o1_500-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/tumblr_mqgdw7zD7U1qa3mn6o1_500-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/tumblr_mqgdw7zD7U1qa3mn6o1_500-100x100.jpg 100w\" sizes=\"100vw\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<p><a class=\"tumblr_blog\" href=\"http:\/\/dancingspirals.tumblr.com\/post\/56618164288\/ironychan-hungrylikethewolfie-dduane-a\" target=\"_blank\">dancingspirals<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><a class=\"tumblr_blog\" href=\"http:\/\/ironychan.tumblr.com\/post\/56607568611\/hungrylikethewolfie-dduane-a-loaf-of-bread\" target=\"_blank\">ironychan<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><a class=\"tumblr_blog\" href=\"http:\/\/hungrylikethewolfie.tumblr.com\/post\/56540134733\/dduane-a-loaf-of-bread-made-in-the-first\" target=\"_blank\">hungrylikethewolfie<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><a class=\"tumblr_blog\" href=\"http:\/\/dduane.tumblr.com\/post\/56524858858\/a-loaf-of-bread-made-in-the-first-century-ad\" target=\"_blank\">dduane<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><a class=\"tumblr_blog\" href=\"http:\/\/wine-loving-vagabond.tumblr.com\/post\/56349531596\" target=\"_blank\">wine-loving-vagabond<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>A loaf of bread made in the first century AD, which was discovered at Pompeii, preserved for centuries in the volcanic ashes of Mount Vesuvius. The markings visible on the top are made from a Roman bread stamp, which bakeries were required to use in order to mark the source of the loaves, and to prevent fraud. (via <a href=\"http:\/\/ridiculouslyinteresting.com\/2013\/07\/22\/preserved-loaf-of-bread-discovered-at-pompeii\/#more-1875\" target=\"_blank\">Ridiculously Interesting<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>(sigh) I\u2019ve seen these before, but this one\u2019s particularly beautiful.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I feel like I\u2019m supposed to be marveling over the fact that this is <em>a loaf of bread<\/em> that\u2019s been preserved for thousands of years, and don\u2019t get me wrong, that\u2019s hella cool.\u00a0 But honestly, I\u2019m mostly struck by the unexpected news that \u201cbread fraud\u201d was apparently once a serious concern.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Bread Fraud was a huge thing,\u00a0 Bread was provided to the Roman people by the government &#8211; bakers were given grain to make the free bread, but some of them stole the government grain to use in other baked goods and would add various substitutes, like sawdust or even worse things, to the bread instead.\u00a0 So if people complained that their free bread was not proper bread, the stamp told them exactly whose bakery they ought to burn down.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Bread stamps continued to be used at\u00a0<em>least<\/em> until the Medieval period in Europe. Any commercially sold bread had to be stamped with an official seal to identify the baker to show that it complied with all rules and regulations about size, price, and quality. This way, rotten or undersized loaves could be traced back to the baker. Bakers could be pilloried, sent down the streets in a hurdle cart with the offending loaf tied around their neck, fined, or forbidden to engage in baking commercially ever again in that city. There are records of a baker in London being sent on a hurdle cart because he used an iron rod to increase the weight of his loaves, and another who wrapped rotten dough with fresh who was pilloried. Any baker hurdled three times had to move to a new city if they wanted to continue baking.<em><br \/><\/em><\/p>\n<p>If you have made bread, you are probably familiar with a molding board. It\u2019s a flat board used to shape the bread. Clever fraudsters came up with a molding board that had a little hole drilled into it that wasn\u2019t easily noticed. A customer would buy his dough by weight, and then the baker would force some of that dough through the hole, so they could sell and underweight loaf and use the stolen dough to bake new loafs to sell. Molding boards ended up being banned in London after nine different bakers were caught doing this.\u00a0There were also instances of grain sellers withholding grain to create an artificial scarcity drive up the price of that, and things like bread.<\/p>\n<p>Bread, being one of the\u00a0<em>main things<\/em> that literally everyone ate in many parts of the world, ended up with a plethora of rules and regulations. Bakers were probably no more likely to commit fraud than anyone else, but there were\u00a0<em>so many<\/em> of them, that we ended up with lots and lots of rules and records of people being shifty.<\/p>\n<p>Check out <span>Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony<\/span> by Madeleine Pelner Cosman for a whole chapter on food laws as they existed in about 1400. Plus the color plates are\u00a0<em>fantastic<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>dancingspirals: ironychan: hungrylikethewolfie: dduane: wine-loving-vagabond: A loaf of bread made in the first century AD, which was discovered at Pompeii, preserved for centuries in the volcanic ashes of Mount Vesuvius. The markings visible on the top are made from a Roman bread stamp, which bakeries were required to use in order to mark the source &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2013\/09\/17\/dancingspirals-ironychan\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[1455,235,261],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256559"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256559"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":256561,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256559\/revisions\/256561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}