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Quick-Rising Bread: Food Uncertainties in 1980s Mozambique

By Kathleen Sheldon

 In 1982 I moved to Mozambique in southern Africa to pursue dissertation research on urban working women. I was a doctoral candidate in African history at the University of California in Los Angeles. I went there with my husband, a pediatrician, who had a two-year contract with the Ministry of Health, and our toddler-aged daughter. We were somewhat prepared for living in a newly independent socialist country that ranked as one of the poorest in the world. Mozambique had gained its independence from Portugal in 1975, after a decade-long liberation struggle. But neighboring South Africa, then under the white-supremacist apartheid regime, funded and supplied weapons to organizations that were anti-socialist or otherwise opposed to Mozambique’s government. By the early 1980s conditions deteriorated as that internal war expanded.[i] Beira, the port city where we lived, suffered from repeated electrical power losses due to sabotage and increasing problems in obtaining food. Devastation in the country as a whole was extreme.[ii]

A colourful book cover of the author's memoir
Fig. 1. Cover of The Mackerel Years, the memoir by the author.

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Access to food was problematic. Most of the shops posted signs in their windows warning, “There is no salt, meat, bread,” sometimes listing a dozen items that were not available. We marveled at the rows of empty shelves, as even so-called supermarkets had only half a shelf of rough gray toilet paper and nothing else. The open-air markets displayed little or no fresh items. If tomatoes or oranges arrived at a shop, boisterous lines would materialize, and the food would quickly run out. The local dollar shop, where we could use foreign currency to buy imported items, had very limited supplies, though we appreciated delicacies like Hero jam from Switzerland. Even Spam, which we had avoided at home in the U.S., proved to be a tasty treat.

When we first arrived, we noticed that a tea shop on the ground floor of our five-story apartment building was closed and dark, though tables and chairs were visible inside. As we stopped to peer through the large dirty windows, a friend told us, “This shop used to serve nice little rolls and tea, up until a few months ago.” “Oh good,” I responded optimistically, “Maybe we’ll be able to buy some bread here.” The tea shop never opened while we were there, though it did occasionally act as a bakery and sell bread rolls, with people lining up around the block to buy a bagful.

I eventually discovered a recipe for a quick-rising yeast bread in a small pamphlet that I had brought from home, 250 Breads Biscuits and Rolls from the Culinary Arts Institute.[iii]

A loaf cake sites on a yellow platter topped with glazed fruit.
Fig. 2. Cover of 250 Breads Biscuits and Rolls. Image credit, Kathleen Sheldon from pamphlet in author’s possession.

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Casserole Bread Batter Method

1 cup milk

3 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1½ tablespoons shortening

1 cup warm (not hot) water

2 packages or cakes yeast, active dry or compressed

4½ cups sifted flour

Scald milk; stir in sugar, salt and shortening. Cool to lukewarm. Measure the warm water into a bowl. (Use lukewarm water for compressed yeast). Sprinkle or crumble in the yeast. Stir until softened. Blend in the lukewarm milk mixture. Add flour and stir until well blended, about 2 minutes. Cover; let rise in warm place free from drafts about 40 minutes or until doubled in bulk. Stir batter down. Beat vigorously about ½ minute. Turn into greased 1½-quart casserole. An 8x8x2-inch square pan may be used. Bake uncovered at 375o F. about 1 hour. Makes 1 loaf.

A page of text includes recipes for various breads with yeast, with an accompanying image of bread
Fig. 3. Recipe page from 250 Breads Biscuits and Rolls. Image credit, Kathleen Sheldon from pamphlet in author’s possession. Original publisher no longer exists and cannot be contacted for permission.

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Since it could be baked in an eight-inch square pan, I could use our 220-volt toaster oven that we had purchased in Los Angeles before leaving, which was more reliable than the propane gas oven installed in the kitchen. I developed a routine to fit the bread-baking into the on-and-off pattern of our electric power. When the power came on, I would immediately mix up a batch of dough, which then needed less than an hour to rise before baking. I would then beat it down, put it into the pan, and get it into the oven while we still had electricity. Even if we only had three or four hours of power every other day, I could make enough bread to last us for two or three days.

The other constraint was the erratic supply of flour. Once or twice my husband’s co-workers arranged to buy fifty-kilogram sacks and divide the flour among our group. Getting milk was also a group endeavor. We bought it in bulk through a special arrangement from a local dairy. It was delivered to our building in ten-gallon metal milk cans, shared out among our friends, and then we each boiled our share before using it.

That bread became a staple part of our diet. We usually ate it for breakfast, sliced in small squares and spread with White Rhino peanut butter that friends brought back from shopping trips to Zimbabwe or South Africa.

A white rhinoceros features in the center of black text with a red border.
Fig. 4. Label from White Rhino peanut butter, ca. 1983, in author’s possession. Image credit: Kathleen Sheldon.

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In more recent years when I met with a group of friends to discuss a draft of my memoir, one of them baked this bread for our gathering. Baking that bread during the difficult years of living with conflict had felt like a clever, necessary accomplishment, and I had not made it myself since our return to the U.S. My friend’s offering was the first time I had eaten it in forty years, and it was still a good sturdy bread that tasted wonderful with butter and peanut butter.

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[i] Two sources that focus on that conflict are: William Minter, Apartheid’s Contras: An Inquiry into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique (London: Zed Books, 1994) and Hilary Andersson, Mozambique: A War Against the People (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).

[ii] I have written about that experience in The Mackerel Years: A Memoir of War, Hunger, and Women’s History in 1980s Mozambique. This essay shares one story about how we coped.

[iii] Culinary Arts Institute, 250 Breads Biscuits and Rolls (Chicago: Consolidated Book Publishers, 1965). It is out of print, but available at Amazon and EBay. For more information on Culinary Arts Institute cookbooks, see Terri Griffith’s blog, 250 Potato Possibilities.


Kathleen Sheldon is an independent scholar of African women’s history. Her previous books include African Women: Early History to the 21st Century (2017), Pounders of Grain: A History of Women, Work, and Politics in Mozambique (2002), and the Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2d ed. (2016). She has also published dozens of articles in journals and edited collections and contributed as an author and editor to many reference works. She has just completed ten years on the editorial board of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. She is a founding editor of H-Luso-Africa, an online network about Portuguese-speaking Africa.

Bread and Resistance in Colonial Bengal

By Mohd. Ahmar Alvi

Among the many foods accompanying British colonizers to India, leavened bread was received differently by different communities and religious groups. Many upper-caste Hindus had revulsion not only for the bread but also for the other items coming out of bakeries introduced to the Indian culinary scene by the British. Meanwhile, Dalits –who had been marginalized by the Brahmins first by not being given jobs and second by being denied food eaten by the higher castes— accrued these bakeries as an opportunity to liberate themselves from unpaid, indentured, menial jobs, but also to ensure economic security and dignity. Muslims, a religious minority, also perceived these bakeries as a prospective source of earnings owing to their longstanding and auspicious connections to baking skills, inherited from the Mughals during their rule in past centuries.  

The aversion exhibited by upper-caste Hindus was predicated on a set of strong Brahmanical religious beliefs. In Hinduism, food can carry a plethora of diktats. It dictates your job, your social status, whether you are ‘pure’ or ‘polluted’, and whether you are entitled to enter a temple or not. The food one eats becomes the defining factor of one’s caste. One such way that upper-caste Hindus distinguish themselves from the lower ones is by denying the food touched or cooked by the lower castes. A high-caste Hindu can only accept food or drink from a person of a similar rank. If the food is prepared or touched by a lower caste person, it must be rejected.[i] Therefore, to accept bread coming from Dalits’ hands would be polluting and profaning to savarnas (caste Hindus). 

However, bhadralok (the educated ‘enlightened’ Bengali middle-class), under the strong influence of Brahmo Samaj [ii], used the consumption of bread as a means to record their resistance against casteism and to defy the taboo about crossing the seas to the West. A sizeable amount of literature—both fictional and autobiographical—written in Bengal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries documents this resistance.

Rajnarayan Basu, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

For example, in his 1909 autobiography, Atmacharit (Autobiography), Rajnarayan Basu (1826-1899), a famous Brahmo[iii] leader, narrates how during his college days he often consumed bread and biscuits coming from the hands of Dalits as an emblem of progress and to mobilize resistance against casteism. When he accepted Brahmosim, he consumed bread to record his protest against casteism, because, at that time, Bengal bakeries were operated by Dalits or Muslims. He remembers his Brahmo oath-taking ceremony as:

On the day when I signed the oath (at the beginning of 1846) and received Brahmoism, I was accompanied by a couple of other adults from my village. That day, we celebrated our new religion with bread and sherry. This was to show that we did not believe in distinctions of caste or creed.[iv]

 

Bipin Chandra Pal, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Likewise, Bipin Chandra Pal (1858-1932), in his autobiography, Sattar Bastar (Seventy Years), tells us how by consuming bread, albeit secretly, he along with his peers broke away from the shackles of casteism:

Though we would come out of the shop after buying flour of one paisa and holding it in our hands to show to the people. We would bring hot bread and biscuits inside our shirt pockets or inside our dhotis, and at the night, after our guardians slept, we would bring these out and have those. In this way, even while staying at Sylhet, my binding considerations of religion and caste were internally totally broken.[v]

 

Madhusudan Dutt, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In his satirical play, Ekei Ki Bale Sabhyata (That’s What Civilization is all About), Madhusudhan Dutt (1824-1873) dramatizes the response of the middle-class Bengali youth toward the consumption of bread baked by Dalits. In the play, a Vaishnava[vi] man observes some youths to learn their activities. Kali, one of the youths, suggests feeding Vaishnava fowl cutlet with bread so that his life becomes meaningful.[vii] In the nineteenth century, Vaishnavas did not consume any meat or an item prepared by a lower-caste Hindu, so this represented a particularly powerful moment of resistance.

Swami Vivekananda, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Among critics, the diminishing potential of scriptural reasoning and advancing modernity in colonial Bengal meant that some detractors couched their criticism against the consumption of bread in the language of science. In 1899, Swami Vivekananda, in his essay, The East and the West, strongly opposed the consumption of bread. According to him, flour mixed with yeast became injurious to health, and he approved of the consumption of only toasted bread under special circumstances:

And as for fermented bread, it is also poison, don’t touch it at all. Flour mixed with yeast becomes injurious. Never take any fermented thing; in this respect, the prohibition in our shastras of partaking of any such article of food is a fact of great importance.[viii]

In this way, the consumption of bread was not only about sustenance, but reflected broader debates and relationships between communities and religious groups. People’s varied responses to bread thus suggest the power of food in resisting casteism in Colonial Bengal.

 

[i] For a detailed study on food and Hinduism see Pamela G. Kittler and Kathryn P. Sucher, Food and Culture. 5th ([Sydney]: Thomson Wadsworth, 2004).

[ii] This community played an important role in the genesis and development of every major religious, social, and political movement in India between 1820 and 1930. It brought about a social reformation by extending full equality to Dalits, women, and laborers, among other marginalized groups. Its members are regarded as the pioneers of liberal political consciousness and Indian nationalism. 

[iii] A believer and practitioner of the principles of Brahmo Samaj.

[iv] Rajnarayan Basu,  Atmacharit (Calcutta: Chiraya Prakasan, 1909): 44.

[v] Bipin Chandra Pal, Sattar Bastar (Calcutta: Patralakha, 1954): 92-93.

[vi] Follower of the Hindu god Vishnu and his incarnations.

[vii] Madhusudhan Dutt, Ekei Ki Bale Sabhyata (Calcutta: Tuli Kalam, 1860): 247.

[viii] Swami Vivekananda, “The East and the West”, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (Almora: Advaita Ashram, 1954): 390-91.

Rice Bread in Sixteenth-Century Italy

By Lena Breda

While scholars are broadening our understanding of food in early modern Italy, one curiously absent ingredient from such pictures is rice. Rice (or oryza sativa) is hypothesized to have been brought to Europe as early as 400 BCE [1], used more as medicine than as a culinary ingredient. The European consumption and cultivation of rice, however, increased rapidly in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as eastern trade networks faltered following the Ottoman Empire’s capture of Constantinople in 1453 [2]. Aided by contemporary improvements in irrigation, sixteenth-century Italian farmers from across the peninsula took to their soils to grow this increasingly popular grain.

Although there is much to be uncovered regarding the ‘Rice Renaissance’ of the sixteenth-century, one area for further research is its cause. While there may have been the necessary land and technology for rice cultivation, such features do not explain why Italians decided to start cultivating rice as opposed to any other crop.

One possible motivation yet unexplored by historians is the contemporary lack of wheat. Wheat—specifically wheat bread—was the cornerstone of pre-modern Italian diets; its absence was detrimental for urban society. Sixteenth-century Italy suffered a series of wheat shortages as a result of inclimate weather, forcing many to find suitable alternatives. Contemporary accounts praising the abundant harvest and agricultural fortitude of rice suggest these were considered important benefits, possibly indicating why rice’s cultivation grew in this period. Rice, resistant to soil erosion and cold weather, may have proved an appealing and reliable alternative to wheat during harvest crises.

Relatedly, grain fraud petrified sixteenth-century Italians during famines. As bread prices surged, fears that bakers substituted wheat with alternatives (but charged the same price) verged on paranoia. Many sixteenth-century Italians recount how contemporaries would make hybrid loaves during famines, combining numerous grains together including beans, millet, oats—and rice. Given the simultaneous shortage of wheat and increasing cultivation of rice, is it possible bakers made rice breads that would have passed as wheat?

Reading numerous such mentions of rice bread, I asked myself: is this even feasible? Would rice bread be a presentable or edible product? Could these accounts be merely impracticable exaggerations? Therefore, I conducted an experiment to see if rice bread could be crafted, and whether it would be aesthetically pleasing, delicious, and mistakable for a pure-wheat bread.

As other contributors have noted, it is impossible to recreate a historical recipe exactly given the difference in ingredients, tools, and training. Despite these deviations, my experiment would still allow me to observe whether rice bread could be executed in practice or whether such accounts were myth.

For this experiment, I based my recipe off of Giovanni Battista Segni’s Discorso sopra la carestia e fame (1591). In this text, Segni recounts famine in his life and in history, and describes various ingredients in terms of their role during food shortages. While he does not include a classic ‘recipe’ for rice bread, Segni describes the proportions people would use to increase the size of their bread loaves without more wheat flour. Segni writes that for every 30 pounds of “grain” (presumably wheat) flour, they would add three pounds of rice flour with hot water (41).

Based on this proportion, I modified a bread recipe to substitute 10% of the wheat flour with rice flour and see if that modified the final size, taste, and appearance of the bread loaf. For comparison, I also created a 100% wheat and 100% rice flour loaf.

Control Recipe

Segni-Hybrid Loaf

Pure Rice Loaf

      ●         200 g wheat

      ●         4 g salt (2%)

      ●         7 g yeast (2.5%)

      ●         120 g water (60%)

      ●         5 g sugar (.005)

      ●         Drizzle of oil

      ●         181 g wheat flour

      ●         18 g rice flour

      ●         4 g salt

      ●         7 g yeast

      ●         120 g water

      ●         5 g sugar

      ●         Drizzle of oil

      ●         200 g rice flour

      ●         4 g salt

      ●         7 g yeast

      ●         120 g water

      ●         5 g sugar

      ●         Drizzle of oil

 

While creating the loaves, I was forced to modify the base recipes due to the nature of the ingredients. While the control and hybrid loaves followed the planned recipes, the pure rice dough needed much more water. Likely due to the lack of gluten, the pure rice mixture was oilier and crumblier, creating a mass that felt more like wet sand than supple bread dough.

After letting the loaves rest, the two wheaten ones had risen nicely (the pure wheat somewhat more than the hybrid) while the rice loaf appeared the same after forty minutes. Once baked, the rice loaf was very white but very wrinkled, and had barely grown in size. The other two loaves, however, had risen, browned, and were nearly identical.

Upon tasting, it was clear that a 100% pure rice loaf would be unable to pass as wheat bread. The flavor was very bland, but the clearest problem was the texture. Incredibly hard and crumbly, the rice loaf was nearly impossible to slice. This result corroborates some sixteenth-century authors who remark on the heaviness of rice bread. Indeed, the rice bread was substantially heavier than the others: 318 grams while the wheat loaf was 306g and the hybrid was 304g. Its greater weight was likely caused by the additional water I added to form a workable dough. On the other hand, the hybrid was a near doppelganger of the wheat loaf. In fact, both were so identical I had to be attentive to not confuse them. Their interchangeability was underscored by the fact that there was no rice flavor in the hybrid loaf.

While my experiment was unable to corroborate Segni’s assertion that a 10% rice flour loaf would be larger or heavier, it did confirm that it would be possible to substitute without detection some rice flour for wheat in grain scarcity. This experiment also demonstrates that rice substitutions could not occur in a complete absence of wheat given the inability to create a successful 100% rice loaf. While these results do not prove conclusively that famines contributed to the rise in rice cultivation during the sixteenth-century, they do suggest that rice would have been an appealing alternative to wheat during such shortages. My experiment also confirms that rice flour substitutions could occur unbeknownst to the buyer, given that the hybrid and wheat loaves were near identical. Moreover, both findings present the value of remaking as a mode of historical analysis.


[1]: For more on rice’s history before its arrival to Europe, read: Chang, Te-Tzu, “Rice,” The Cambridge World History of Food (2000), 132-149.

[2]: For more on Italy’s historical relationship and cultivation of rice, consult: Bevilacqua, Piero, Tra natura e storia: ambiente, economie, risorse in Italia (Rome: Donzelli, 1996), 39-48.

Canadian Women, War, and Wheat Bread

By Sarah Cavanagh

Image courtesy of Archival & Special Collections, University of Guelph Library.

While rustic sourdoughs and fancy homemade bagels have filled Canadian kitchens during the pandemic, another way to pass the time (and give even the dodgiest sourdough boule a respectable look and taste by comparison) is to recreate the thrifty bread of wartime. Many of these feature in a 1917 Canadian collection of First World War recipes, Ethel Chapman’s War Breads: How the Housekeeper May Help to Save the Country’s Wheat Supply. This 16-page recipe pamphlet, jointly produced by the Ontario Department of Agriculture and the Women’s Institutes, instructed housewives to save wheat for soldiers and cook with alternate grains–corn, barley, oats, and rye–some of which carried the unfortunate stigma of being livestock feed.[i]  

 

“Vision Your Sons, Mothers of Canada!”, The Grimsby Independent (19 September 1917): 7.

The War Breads publication flowed from the Canadian government’s decision to support Allied efforts overseas via a domestic food conservation policy in June 1917 that included domestic rationing and ensuring the continuous export of food to Britain. Subsequent propaganda campaigns targeting women were tinged with emotion, premised on patriotism and moral duty.  Housewives were asked to symbolize their commitment to King and country by signing and displaying “Food Service Pledges” in their front windows. A September 1917 food pledge advertisement headlined “Vision Your Sons, Mothers of Canada!” urged women to think what would happen if one morning, there was no breakfast for the “valiant boys” and “word went down the line that Canada had failed them.” The solution, the ad reads, was for women to forgo white flour and vary their baking by using one-third oatmeal, corn, barley or rye flour.[ii]  Meanwhile, an Ontario farmer took the unusual step of mailing his wife’s war bread by parcel post to the editor of The Toronto Daily Star to prove that less expensive oatmeal grain was not just delicious, but economical for the household and a service to the nation.[iii]

The pamphlet’s physical appearance matches the bread’s frugality, with few images, save three rather pathetic photographs of unappealing dark and deflated brown loaves on the title page. I opted to recreate a recipe for a steamed Boston Brown Bread, mainly because the cooking technique was unfamiliar to me. The recipe looked easy – a handful of ingredients like flour grains, cornmeal, baking soda, milk, molasses – and brief instructions; however, like many historical recipes, it contained tacit knowledge from the era, with puzzling terminology requiring substitutions and improvisations – some more successful than others.

One challenge was finding a mould for the bread. The recipe suggests using a one-pound baking powder can, a testament to the ubiquity of the beautifully decorated baking powder cans produced by American manufacturers like DeLand & Co. and the frugality of the housekeepers who saved the containers for alternate purposes.[iv] I opted for a modern-day metal coffee can.  Graham flour proved difficult to find, and soured milk? I keep my milk in the fridge, so the addition of lemon juice turned my fresh milk into a lumpy substitute. Adding molasses to the flour/soda/milk mixture produced a gorgeous soft-brown coloured dough. 

Image courtesy of Sarah Cavanagh

The recipe instructs placing the mould in a “kettle” of boiling water, allowing the water to rise halfway up, trapping the steam with a tight-fitting lid. How big is a kettle? The only kettle I have boils my morning tea, so I substituted a large steel pot; the coffee can sat just below the rim inside. As the water began to boil, the coffee can bobbed up and down like a sailboat in the Atlantic, knocking the lid off the pot. Precious steam exited like a genie out of a bottle. Eyeing the nearby closet, I grabbed a metal coat hanger to quickly secure the lid in place, bending the wire through both pot handles and across the top of the lid, which was (mostly) successful. After the suggested three-and-one-half-hours of steaming, I removed the can from the water, wrestling to free the bread from its mould, resorting to an inauthentic can opener to remove the can bottom. The bread itself was a rich rusty brown colour, exceedingly dense and moist. My husband, whose parents lived through the Depression and the Second World War, adored it. It reminded him of his mother’s cooking, proving the sensory power of food and its connection to memory. For me, the texture was coarse, and it lacked flavour. The experience of making the bread was more satisfying than the actual eating of it.[v] 

Image courtesy of Sarah Cavanagh

This historical recipe highlights elements of wartime cooking: uncomplicated, practical, frugal. The bread preserved well on the counter for five days, a tribute to the power of the working-class staple, molasses. The four-hour time commitment illustrates domestic structures which bound women to their home. And while there was friction between urban and rural women about who was making the greater sacrifice, government-mandated food substitution was generally embraced by Canadian housewives. Interestingly, Chapman later wrote that a promise made by the government Food Controller to remove “the thing that troubled most women” was the key to securing their cooperation. The quid-pro-quo? A government Order-in-Council banning the use of grain of any kind for the distillation of potable liquors.[vi] Temperance and patriotism, it seems, went hand-in-hand. Alas, little chance of washing that coarse brown bread down with a shot of whiskey.

 

[i] Ethel M. Chapman, War Breads: How the Housekeeper May Help to Save the Country’s Wheat Supply (Ontario Department of Agriculture: Women’s Institute Branch, 1917). 

[ii] “Vision Your Sons, Mothers of Canada!”, The Grimsby Independent (19 September 1917): 7. 

[iii] “Maist Economical Is Oatmeal Bread: Another Experiment in Wheat Substitutes Which May Be Tried on Hubby,” Toronto Daily Star (30 July 1917): 8. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

[iv] Advertisement for DeLand & Co’s Chemical Baking Powder, Wikimedia Commons.

[v] Diane Tye, “‘A Poor Man’s Meal,’” Food, Culture & Society 11, no. 3 (1 September 2008): 344.

[vi] Ethel M. Chapman, “Voluntary Rationing at Home,” Maclean’s Magazine (1 January 1918): 42-43, 62-63. 

 

About 

Sarah Cavanagh is a senior History/Canadian Studies student at Brock University.