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Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed

"Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series)"

[4] The ravelled cheat therefore
is generally so made that out of one bushel of meal, after two and
twenty pounds of bran be sifted and taken from it (whereunto they add
the gurgeons that rise from the manchet), they make thirty cast, every
loaf weighing eighteen ounces into the oven, and sixteen ounces out;
and, beside this, they so handle the matter that to every bushel of
meal they add only two and twenty, or three and twenty, pound of
water, washing also (in some houses) their corn before it go to the
mill, whereby their manchet bread is more excellent in colour, and
pleasing to the eye, than otherwise it would be. The next sort is
named brown bread, of the colour of which we have two sorts one baked
up as it cometh from the mill, so that neither the bran nor the flour
are any whit diminished; this, Celsus called _autopirus panis_, lib.
2, and putteth it in the second place of nourishment. The other hath
little or no flour left therein at all, howbeit he calleth it _Panem
Cibarium_, and it is not only the worst and weakest of all the other
sorts, but also appointed in old time for servants, slaves, and the
inferior kind of people to feed upon.


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