Reddit mentions of Bread and the British Economy, 1770–1870

> Back then if you had gathered some meager pennies you made them count, and you could buy a whole lot more flour to bake your own bread instead of spending said money on a loaf. It didn't make the bread better, but it made more bread. And as soon as you had made bread, you devised ways to make it last as long as possible, yes, but there were limits to even that. You made as much as you needed, and ate that as soon as possible, and if you made too much you turned the rest of it into toast. You didn't need a specialized bakery to make bread, you simply needed a hot enough oven, which was usually a small brick construction. Some poor families pitched in and made a bigger one, sure, but any fire will make some kind of bread.

This is not what the source data for the early modern British diet reflects, and the main issues are fuel and reliability. Yes, it's true that people with access to fuel did bake their own bread for longer; as I mentioned above, Newcastle in particular was known for home-baking longer than anywhere else. With all the coal-mining there, fuel was cheap and people could actually afford to have an oven hot enough to bake bread.

For much of the rest of the country, however, from about the 18th century forward, home baking was not economical. It took time away from the women (and it was a gendered activity), time better spent either working for wages or working in some sort of domestic industry like spinning. But most importantly, it took fuel, which was scarce and expensive. Again, as I said above, MANY 18th and 19th century Britons went without fires for substantial portions of the day, if not of the year. We cannot assume that people had instant and constant access to cooking heat as we do today.

In terms of baking, however, people in cities were not baking their own bread by the 18th century if not earlier. In the country, home baking probably persisted a bit longer, but it's not necessarily a better economic choice to bake your own. Bakers worked in larger batches (the traditional sack of flour in Britain was 280 lbs, and many bakeries by the mid-19th century went through about 5 to 10 sacks a week; bakeries that went through 20 were rare), and had a higher skill level. The skill level is important because it made their products more reliable. Bread is easy to screw up, and when a huge portion of your wages--half or more--is going to basic provisions, screwing up the bread means shitty eating for a week or longer. Further, bakers used larger ovens that stayed hot, making their use of fuel more efficient. So, despite literally generations of middle and upper class social reformers accusing working women of ignorance, sloth, and stupidity, paying the baker to bake your bread for you was not a bad choice at all. Christian Petersen goes through all of this quite thoroughly in his Bread and the British Economy.

It wasn't an issue to make bread last; it was eaten before it got old. The Assize of Bread in England, first implemented in Tudor times (I think) and still in force in some part of the Kingdom until 1836, mandated the standard loaf of bread as the "Quartern Loaf," a four-pound loaf of bread. With bread as the vast majority of calories for people, it would be common to eat several pounds (yes, POUNDS) of bread per day; they would grind through those loaves well before they got old and unpalatable.