Breaking Bread with the Past: Making an 18th Century Dough Bowl

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The Art of Chipping Away at a Block of Maple Until Something Useful Appears


The finished bowl, ready for use.

 A dough bowl, also called a kneading trough, is a wooden vessel traditionally used for mixing, raising, and kneading yeast dough for making bread. It was hand carved from a single piece of wood. It could be oval, round or rectangular in shape, and vary in size and width—typically from 24" to 36" long, 10" to 18" wide, and 3" to 8" deep. It often had small handles or grips on either end. Ancient Egyptian tomb paintings often depict bakers using a similar vessel to knead dough for bread making; in literature, they are mentioned as early as 1386 in Chaucer’s The Miller's Tale. This type of dough bowl was typically used by home bakers for small batches of bread; large scale commercial bakeries or bread makers for large households used a much larger, lidded, framed container called a dough box or dough trough.

A good dough bowl was often handed down through a family, typically to the oldest daughter, as both an heirloom and a reminder of the loving hands that prepared their daily bread. It was not uncommon for a future husband to carve a wooden dough bowl for his bride as a wedding present.

How A Dough Bowl Was Used

The ingredients for the bread-- typically flour, yeast, salt, water or milk, and a pinch of sugar or perhaps and egg--were mixed together and kneaded into dough in the bowl, then covered with a damp cloth and left to ferment and rise. A crafty bread maker might use barm, the yeasty
A small batch of yeast dough begins to rise.
foam skimmed from the top of beer during the home brewing process, as the yeast. Or, in the sour dough tradition, they might use a pinch of fermented dough left over from the last round of bread making. Wooden bowls were preferred as the wood held the heat generated by the fermentation of the yeast. I would also posit that the wood itself might hold on to some of the particles of yeast from previous use, aiding in the acceleration of the rising of the dough.  In addition to being used for bread making, these bowls had other uses such as chopping or mixing bowls, salad or serving bowls, and could even be used for working butter (the process of washing and kneading the butter to work out the residual buttermilk).

The Materials and Process for My Recreation

The scorp helps you quickly scoop
out the center of a bowl.
A dough bowl may be carved from almost any fine textured, straight grained wood that is free from knots, splits, or other defects, and from a wood which has no toxic characteristics. I used hard maple for my recreation.  After studying numerous extant and modern examples, I chose to make mine a soft rectangle, 20” x 12” x 3”, with tab handles. I decided to keep it about half an inch thick to make it more durable and to stand up to the possible abuse of reenactments.  Starting from a solid block of wood, I used a mallet and chisel and wood rasp to create the rough exterior shape, and mallet and chisel primarily to remove most of the interior bowl. I tend to prefer hand tools whenever possible.  For a faster, modern shortcut, a large forstner drill bit could be used to remove much of the interior waste. As the inside took shape, I used a “scorp,” a kind of wood scoop, to continue shaping, smoothing, and refining the inside. Once satisfied with the overall shape and thickness, I sanded…and sanded…and sanded it until it was butter smooth. It was then lightly stained with food-safe “colonial oak” color, and then sealed it with shellac and several coats of hand-rubbed beeswax. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to take pictures of the bowl in progress. Note to self: always take pictures of the work in progress!
So, when you are ready to create your own bowl, don’t wheat another minute. You’ll knead to rise to the occasion, and don’t let anyone punch you down. Don’t loaf around, and you’ll be a legend in the baking. Crumb to think of it, it’s a fun project, crust me. Last but not yeast, it’ll show you are well bread. I hope my bread puns don’t make you roll on the flour laughing. Or groaning!
Bottom of finished bowl; I added finger grooves to the end grips.

 Dr. Jerry Hedrick Bayside Board Medicine License Charges Virginia Beach

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