"Scientific baking" emerged as a discourse in the second half of the 19th century. In a chapter I wrote (available here), I argued that the 1870s were the crucial moment, as a result of two phenomena: the increasing surveillance and regulation of the food system by the British state using medical apparatus (basically medically trained inspectors of the food system), and the globalization of Britain's wheat supply chain. Together, these two phenomena meant that bakers had to deal with doctors looking over their shoulders and a bewildering variety of wheats from around the world. To cope with both of these, and to reassert the ancient privileges of their trade in a more modern language, a group of scientists began specializing in the science of baking.

When we consider "what we knew," it's tempting to compare their knowledge to ours. We tend to assume that since we are scientific, "modern" people, that we know more than our less-scientific, less-Enlightened ancestors. That subjects them to our standards, though, and is therefore ahistorical. It doesn't teach us much to be like, "They didn't know stuff that we now know." Rather, they knew different things, and their forms of knowledge were really quite alien to ours. So, what did bakers know of fermentation before the second half of the 19th century? They knew their experience, and they knew that flour, water, and yeast (plus a few other things) reacted to one another in certain ways under certain conditions. It was common for bakers to describe their craft in artistic terms, and often with very tactile qualities. So, they would argue that you couldn't learn baking from a book; only by many hours over many years with one's hands literally turned to kneading, forming loaves, putting them in the oven and taking them out, could you really know about things like fermentation, dough, and baking. And this makes sense. As tradesmen and women, they needed to be able to produce relatively consistent loaves of bread despite changing conditions like weather, yeast quality, flour quality, and so on. There's remarkably little investigation by natural philosophers, and essentially none by bakers or other tradesmen, into the more theoretical issues of chemistry and fermentation. That form of knowledge just isn't in the sources, and I suspect because it simply didn't seem relevant to them. Indeed, one baker commented in 1828 that no "true" baker would trust a device like a thermometer to know the heat of an oven; he would simply know by the feel of the oven if it were the right temperature or not.

Two developments helped change this situation, as I noted above. The first was that the British state began to regulate the food industry much more than in the past. Particularly after a series of scandals in adulteration in the 1850s, and then another in the working conditions of London bakers in the 1860s, the medical profession and local governments began to pay much more attention to what was in food, how food was produced, and under what conditions. This is part of a broader change in British (and Western) society in which scientific expertise and the state cooperated to govern human beings, their activities, and their bodies more carefully than ever before. (See Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society for a social history of this phenomenon; see Otter, The Victorian Eye for a more cultural examination of the same, through the lens of light, vision, and sight.) Bakers wanted respect, and to keep inspectors off their backs by controlling the scientific expertise of their trade, so they began to engage much more explicitly in scientific research. At the same time, the wheat supply of Britain was globalizing: between 1846 (the repeal of the Corn Laws) and 1914, Britain's wheat imports increased by more 1000%, and they went from providing about three-quarters of everything they ate to less than one-fifth. This was a problem for bakers because they found themselves having to work with American, Russian, Canadian, Indian, Australian, Argentinian, or other kinds of wheat and flour, all of which varied a lot. Scientific baking offered a kind of universal knowledge that could be taught in lectures and books, and that could help practical bakers better navigate a new global economy.

There are early-19th-century precedents for developing relevant scientific knowledge: the French scientists Payen and Persoz described the chemical changes in malting in the 1830s, while William Odling and Cornelius O'Sullivan worked more on the chemistry of starches and sugars in fermentation in the 1850s and 1860s; Charles Cagniard de la Tour identified yeast as single-celled organisms in 1867, and the German physiologist Theodor Schwann connected the growth of the "sugar fungus," as he called yeast, to the chemical changes observed in fermentation; Louis Pasteur, of course, is now the most famous of scientists studying what Robert Bud called "zymotechnology" (Robert Bud, The Uses of Life: A History of Biotechnology); his contribution in this instance was to shift the explanations of fermentation from simple physical (as bakers understood them) or chemical (as early investigators did) to the actual physiological processes of micro-organisms. In other words, it was Pasteur who was able to first demonstrate that the observed physical and chemical changes in fermentation, whether in wine, beer, or bread, were the result of the life processes of yeast organisms. From that point, scientists working for breweries began to actually apply these insights. Horace T. Brown, the "Doyen of Brewing," began using microscopes to control the brewing process at English breweries in Burton-on-Trent in 1871; the German physiologist Emil Fischer applied Pasteur's findings in Dortmund breweries in the 1876, and between 1879 and 1883, Emil Christian Hansen developed methods of growing pure yeast strains from single cells at the Carlseberg Laboratory in Copenhagen. (See the whole series of articles by James A. Barnett and Frieder W. Lichetenthaler, "A History of Research of Yeasts," in the journal Yeast from 2000 to 2002 [yes, that's a real journal that exists].)

Once this knowledge was out there, it was a pretty simple step to begin applying it to baking. The key person, perhaps more than anyone else, was a man named William Jago. He made a career out of the science and chemistry of baking from the 1870s on, publishing extensively. He wrote textbooks on organic and inorganic chemistry, and took the ideas he presented there and turned them into a program for research and practical application in baking, so that he was literally writing the books on scientific baking. See, for example, his magnum opus: A Text-Book of the Science and Art of Bread-Making: Including the Chemistry and Analytic and Practical Testing of Wheat, Flour, and Other Materials Employed in Baking (London, 1895). There were others who followed--John Kirkland (if you've ever seen signs on old shops in Liverpool for "Kirkland's Bakery," it's the same family), Owen Simmons, Robert Wells--but Jago is the real center of this story. By 1900, there was a whole literature of scientific baking that's pretty much as we understand it today. There was also a growing technical component to education for millers and bakers, including specialized schools and certificates.

The sources I've provided here are thin; I'm happy to look up more specific ones if people are interested. You'll have to wait until I get home this evening though, because it's warm today and therefore beach season has officially opened.