on of Bread._

This is one of the sophistications of the articles of food most commonly
practised in this metropolis, where the goodness of bread is estimated
entirely by its whiteness. It is therefore usual to add a certain
quantity of alum to the dough; this improves the look of the bread very
much, and renders it whiter and firmer. Good, white, and porous bread,
may certainly be manufactured from good wheaten flour alone; but to
produce the degree of whiteness rendered indispensable by the caprice of
the consumers in London, it is necessary (unless the very best flour is
employed,) that the dough should be _bleached_; and no substance has
hitherto been found to answer this purpose better than alum.

Without this salt it is impossible to make bread, from the kind of flour
usually employed by the London bakers, so white, as that which is
commonly sold in the metropolis.

If the alum be omitted, the bread has a slight yellowish grey hue--as
may be seen in the instance of what is called _home-made bread_, of
private families. Such bread remains longer moist than bread made with
alum; yet it is not so light, and full of eyes, or porous, and it has
also a different taste.

The quantity of alum requisite to produce the required whiteness and
porosity depends entirely upon the genuineness of the flour, and the
quality of the grain from which the flour is obtained. The mealman makes
different sorts of flour from the same kind of grain. The best flour is
mostly used by the biscuit bakers and pastry cooks, and the inferior
sorts in the making of bread. The bakers' flour is very often made of
the worst kinds of damaged foreign wheat, and other cereal grains mixed
with them in grinding the wheat into flour. In this capital, no fewer
than six distinct kinds of wheaten flour are brought into market. They
are called fine flour, seconds, middlings, fine middlings, coarse
middlings, and twenty-penny flour. Common garden beans, and pease, are
also frequently ground up among the London bread flour.

I have been assured by several bakers, on whose testimony I can rely,
that the small profit attached to the bakers' trade, and the bad
quality of the flour, induces the generality of the London bakers to use
alum in the making of their bread.

The smallest quantity of alum that can be employed with effect to
produce a white, light, and porous bread, from an inferior kind of
flour, I have my own baker's authority to state, is from thr