The English Bread Book

This was the last of Eliza Acton’s books, published two years before her death in 1859. It is not only a collection of bread recipes of all sorts, from household bread to Sally Lunns, but also a polemic on healthy eating which is still relevant 150 years later. Although she was a firm believer in home baking, she also advocated machine dough - mixing in commercial bakeries - and compared the new French machine methods with the filthy conditions and hard lives of the English bakers of the time. There are chapters on flours, yeasts, ovens and breadbaking for beginners. Although this book created a sensation when it first came out in 1857, it has never been reprinted and is now an extremely rare book.