THE BAKERY
The term PISTRINUM
A small vestibule left between the two bedrooms of the
servants gives access to the "brothers' bakery" (pistrinū
fr̄m̄). It occupies the eastern half of the house and its center
space forms an area 22½ feet wide and 32½ feet long.
It should be mentioned in this context that the term
pistrinum is used exclusively as a designation for "bakery"
on the Plan of St. Gall, and never in the sense of "mill,"
its original classical meaning.[555]
The equipment with which
the spaces that carry this designation on the Plan are
furnished offers the proof (figs. 462-464). Hildemar, who
touches on the matter of bake houses in his commentary
of chapter 66 of the Rule, makes some interesting etymological
comments about this term: "Pistrinum," he says,
"is the equivalent of pilistrinum, because in the early days
people used to crush grain with the aid of a pestle (pilo)
for which reason the ancients did not call them grinders
(molitores) but crushers (pistores), i.e., people engaged in
the crushing of grain (pinsores) for there were no mill stones
(molae) in use at that time, but grain was crushed with
pestles."[556]
[ILLUSTRATION]
PLAN OF ST. GALL. MONKS' BAKE AND BREW HOUSE
462.X
THE SYMBIOTIC SCHEME IN PLANNING
The efficiency internal to the Plan of St. Gall is nowhere better demonstrated
than in the relationships among the Brewers' Granary, Mortars,
Mills, Drying Kiln, and Monks' Bake and Brewhouse. The traffic patterns
demonstrate with what economy of movement raw material, grain—bulky
and heavy even after threshing—could be moved from the Brewers' Granary
to facilities where it was further refined, and finally into the Brewhouse
where the end product, beer, was produced. Similar efficiency of movement
existed between the Mill, the Bakehouse, and the Monks' Kitchen.
However, planning for isolation of the monks' sanctum takes precedence over
convenience where monastery met the world. See fig. 463.X, p. 256.
SITE PLAN
The makers of the Plan devoted extraordinary attention to the visual detail and verbal instruction for this house, for it lay, in a most
immediate sense, at the physical heart of the monastic complex, as the Church lay at its spiritual heart. The technology of this house is among
the most highly elaborated and least abstract of all facilities of the Plan that existed to support daily life in the monastery.
The close proximity of facilities for processing raw material (grain), refining it (Drying Kiln, 29; Mortar; 28; Mill, 27), and using it in the
Monks' Bake and Brewhouse assumes intense daily use—transporting sheaved grain, sacking threshed grain, carrying it after processing to
bakery or brewery, carrying end products, new bread and new beer, to their destinations.
All the starting points and termini for these processes are found in a very small area relative to the size of the whole site of the Plan. Each day
some major part of the cycles and processes for brewing and baking would be set in motion by monks assigned to such chores. The traffic in
numbers of men, to say nothing of their burdens—grain, buckets, barrows, sacks, baked bread—achieved a density of use and compaction
nowhere else found in the Plan. The planning of the associated facilities would therefore be highly specific, with little assumed and nothing left
to improvisation that would affect efficiency adversely. In this small area of the overall site, the makers of the Plan demonstrated their
thoroughness and ingenuity as administrators and architects.
The term is fascinating, since its shifting values reflect
the entire history of grain preparation from the mortar-and-pestle
stage to the milling stage, and thence by an associative
leap (because bread was often baked near the mill)
from the building in which grain was ground into flour to
the facility where bread was baked.
Layout and equipment
The principal piece of equipment in the Bake House is
the large oven (caminus) which is installed in the southern
aisle of the house directly opposite the entrance. The oven
has a diameter of 10 feet, and is serviced from the main
room of the bakery. This room is furnished with a continuous
course of tables or shelves running in a U-formation
around three of its four walls. The total linear length of
this shelf is 62½ feet. Its depth is 2½ feet. Thus it provides
an ample general work space that could have been used
variously for any number of purposes in the course of
breadmaking.
Next to the oven and in the same aisle with it there is
a trough (alueolus) 12½ feet long and 2½ feet wide. The
space under the lean-to at the east end of the house serves
as a "storage bin for flour" (repositio farinae); this area is
7½ feet wide and 30 feet long. The Plan shows no doors
giving access either to the flour bin or to the room with the
kneading trough—one of the few genuine oversights on
the Plan.[557]
In the axis of the center space, and almost equidistant
from their edges to the shelves that line the room on three
sides, are two rectangles that together form an area 6¼ feet
wide and 10 feet long. A similar but smaller object is found
in the corresponding space in the bakery of the House for
Distinguished Guests. In the bakery of the Hospice for
Pilgrims and Paupers, however, this space is occupied by
the kitchen stove[558]
that seemingly displaces to the brew
house an oblong surface that probably corresponds to the
same pieces found in the center of the bakeries of the other
two houses. Unfortunately the Plan does not provide any
explanatory titles that would enable us to identify the
nature, construction, or function of the objects designated
by these rectangles. This is somewhat surprising because
similar objects situated in the outer aisles are clearly identified
with titles that not only explain their shape or form
(alueolus, trough) but also their function (locus conspergendi,
the place where the dough is mixed; and ineruendae
pastae locus, the place where flour is mingled [with water].)
There is no doubt that the large rectangles in the side
aisles of the bake house were the troughs in which the
dough was first mixed. Good baking practice would require
that the yeast sponge be added to the dough at this beginning
stage, and it is quite possible that after being vigorously
mixed, it was likewise here that the dough was allowed to
enter its first stage of rising. The warmth of the enclosure
near the oven, already fired by a considerable heat, would
significantly aid the rising process in the large mass of
dough.
To convert the bulk of dough into a multitude of loaves
required a different setting: large surfaces sprinkled with
flour where the mass could be broken up, kneaded, divided
and weighed into uniform batches, and shaped into loaves.
All these purposes could have been served by the large
rectangular surfaces in the center of the bakery, or, if these
rectangles were actually troughs, the work could have been
done on the shelves that lined the central space on three
sides. After the loaves were shaped and before they were
placed in the oven for baking, they probably went through
a second stage of rising.[559]
The reconstruction of the equipment used in baking
poses no problem. We have already discussed the oven
together with other heating units shown on the Plan.[560]
Their form was established early and until very recent times
did not undergo any significant changes. The same can
also probably be said about bakers' troughs, a good medieval
example of which is shown in figure 388.
I am inclined to believe that in medieval ovens, the
firing and baking chamber were one and the same unit—as
they were still in the earlier decades of this century in the
bakeries of the German village where I spent my childhood.
There the ovens were heated by wood, as was done
in the Middle Ages. When the right temperature was
reached, the coals were raked out to make room for the
loaves, and the bread was baked as the oven temperature
entered its descending cycle.
The daily allowance of bread
The daily ration of bread allowed to each monk was
fixed by St. Benedict:
Let a weighed pound of bread suffice for the day, whether there be
one meal only, or both dinner and supper. . . . But if their work
chance to be heavier, the abbot shall have the choice and power,
should it be expedient, to increase this allowance.[561]
Charlemagne, in trying to establish the exact weight of
this pound, learned from Abbot Theodomar of Monte
Cassino that in St. Benedict's own monastery bread was
baked in loaves weighing four pounds and divisible into
four quarter sections, weighing a pound each: "This
weight," the Abbot assures the emperor, "just as it was
instituted by the Father himself, is found at this place."[562]
The Roman pound was the equivalent of 326 grams.
Charlemagne increased it by one fourth of its former size,
sometime before 779, which brought it up an equivalent of
406 grams.[563]
The Synod of 817 defined the weight of one
pound as corresponding to 30 solidi of a value equivalent to
12 denarii.[564]
Adalhard distinguishes between "bread of mixed grain"
(panos de mixtura factos) and that "made of wheat or
spelt" (de frumento uel spelta). The former was issued to
the paupers; the latter, to visiting vassals and clergymen
on pilgrimage.[565]
He gives a complete account of the daily
and yearly bread consumption in the monastery of Corbie,
specifies the quantity of flour needed to produce that volume,
and the sources from which it was obtained.
[566]
He
cautions the "keeper of the bread" (
custos panis) to make
allowance for the yearly fluctuations in the number of
mouths to be fed by providing for a reasonable surplus of
flour in order not to be caught with a shortage, and he
admonishes him at the same time not to bake more for the
brothers than is needed, "lest what is left over should get
too hard." If this were nevertheless allowed to happen,
the old bread would have to be thrown away, and the
supply of bread replenished.
[567]
A single cycle of firing and baking
If we presume that St. Benedict's allowance of a daily
pound of bread for each monk applied to the monastery's
serfs as well, the monks' bakery on the Plan of St. Gall
would have to have been capable of producing 250 to 270
pounds of bread per day.[568]
An analysis of the dimensions
of its oven and the amount of space required for this output
discloses that this volume of bread could be produced in a
single cycle of firing and baking.[569]
A passage in Ekkehart's Casus sancti Galli, which has
consistently been misconstrued, reads that the monastery
of St. Gall had an oven (clibanum) capable of baking a
thousand loaves of bread at once and a bronze kettle
(lebete eneo) and drying kiln (tarra avenis) capable of
holding one hundred bushels of oats.[570]
This is not a
statement of fact, but a passage in a speech by Abbot
Solomon III, which Ekkehart himself refers to as "boastful"
and "fraudulent."[571]
