In the old days, if you wanted bread, you had to bake it yourself. Today, we have grown accustomed to store bought bread, but there are many people who are learning, once again, how to bake homemade bread. The fact is, there is nothing that compares to a freshly baked loaf of bread.
The article below, found in a 1912 newspaper, details community bread baking in Chicago and how one woman made a living off of it.
All the Neighbors Make Their Own Bread Then One Woman Bakes It
Baking bread for Italian women at a penny a lot, — or two pennies, perhaps three, according to the size — is the way Signora Anita Arnoldi of Chicago makes money.
There is nothing modern about community bake ovens. In Boston in colonial times our grandames had their beans stirred in a community pot and delivered at their doors every morning.
In South Italy people have always had communistic things. Signora Arnoldi knew this as she looked for a business chance in Chicago’s Little Italy. Here the people are as crowded in their one and two rooms in big brick buildings as they never were in Sicily.
The woman from Toronto studied her Sicilians and the result was that she rented a basement, had a large oven built, employed six bakers and hung out a sign that she would bake bread.
Every morning about 10 o’clock the baking begins and it keeps up all day long. Triangular, circular, oblong, fan shape pillow-like masses of dough sprinkled with caraway seeds, are tucked into the brick oven, roaring hot at the far end of the dark basement room, while at long tables are mothers who prefer to knead their dough here rather than at home.
Groups of eight and ten women with shawls over shoulders and babies on hips are daily seen hurrying to the bake house. They carry their paste in tin buckets, spread on barrel heads and boards or tied in blue check gingham cloths, and their caraways seeds in paper sacks.
As they stand at the long tables, kneading their dough, they are as happy as our grandmothers in the sewing circle.
Signora Arnoldi’s bakery serves from 125 to 190 families a day.
She clears $10 a day, for no housewife comes to her with less than three loaves, and often there are six, seven and ten. An average of six loaves to each of 190 families count over a thousand loaves, which , even at a cent a loaf, bring a steady profit.
Every loaf of pani (the Italian word for bread) is numbered before it goes into the oven. A bookkeeper writes numbers on small squares of paper thus: 24 (6) meaning that the woman whose number is 24 has six loaves of bread in the oven.
She sticks the numbers to the dough and goes home to wait until her bread is baked. Then she comes for it, or sends the children.
Source: (1912, January 11). All the Neighbors Make Their Own Bread Then One Woman Bakes It. The Day Book.
