THE BAKERS GUIDE

containing many millions of cell-structures, are all built up by the wonderful agency of nitrogen, or rather of its compounds. But, while nitrogen is so important an agent, so marvellous a builder up, it is for very similar reasons equally powerful in breaking down. Whenever you have albuminoids present, if there be moisture sufficient, and if there be warmth sufficient, there you have the agent ready for degradation.

Flour may be relatively or potentially, rather than actively, bad. It is hardly speaking correctly when we talk of bad flour ; some good is positively present in all flours, and it would be preferable to speak of certain kinds as being suitable or unsuitable for the purpose required. The flour that would be classed A, i in a prison, poothouse, or by the Army or Navy commissariat, would be called rubbish by the city baker ; and what the city baker would class as good, the chef ox baker of the upper classes would look upon as inferior ; and what he says is excellent, the whole- meal advocate would put down as positively injurious to health. Flour is only relatively good or bad according to the uses to which it is put.

Flours are usually divided into four chief grades.—

American Equivalent in English. ist Patents ... ... ... Whites

2nd Patents ... ... ... Supers

i st Bakers ... ... ... Households

2nd Bakers ... ... ... No. 2's

but the up and down varieties of these grades — both English and American — are very numerous. Some millers make a speciality of one grade, and make the best they can of the bye products of that grade ; in some cases as many as five different classes from the one grist of wheat. Others do not make such acute or so many divisions, but endeavour to make standard ist, 2nd and 3rd grades, I each within a Shilling or so value of the other. It will not be safe, therefore, to buy flour by the name of its grade. For the quality of that particular grade will depend upon the number of grades made out of the same grist of wheat. As a matter of opinion, I believe the English mode of classification preferable to that of America, and if the responsible English miller will be content with the profits obtained by the American, and imitate him in his progressive milling, and put as much brains into it as he of America does, then the English baker, handling whites, supers, households, and No. 2's, will be safer than when handling the ist and 2nd patents and 1st and 2nd bakers' grades of the — to him — irresponsible firms beyond the seas ; but, in either case, the baker must depend upon his own knowledge to test his flour, for in no case does the name of the firm or the name of the grade give him the security sufficient to dispense with such knowledge, or to save him from a money loss.

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