21 minutes ago, AlaMoi said:my grandmother had two large coal stoves/ovens in a very large kitchen.
I'll bet there was some really good food came out of that kitchen. My mother was a magician when it came to baking and how she did it in that unreliable oven I will never know and when she got a gas stove she had a terrible time adapting.
I would have loved to have seen your German Village. Bread has been so important through the centuries. Everybody had to have it because sometimes that was all they had to eat but nobody had an oven. At the end of his day the baker would let the people bring their bread and he would bake it.
Some of the modern conveniences that we take entirely for granted are our leavening agents. If you wanted to bake bread you had to beg, borrow or steal brewers yeast from the person that was making the beer. Contrary to popular belief, not everybody had a pot of sourdough brewing in the pantry. Baking powder and baking soda are like a gift from the gods. Before the 19th century they didn't have it at all or anything even similar. Cookies or biscuits were as hard as rocks and if you wanted to bake a nice fluffy cake you stood there and beat that sucker for a full hour. Or your scullery maid did it if you were lucky enough to have one.
