An excerpt from the PREFACE: I HAVE been asked by the authors of this book to write a Preface to it, and I have no hesitation in responding to such a reasonable request. I do so with all the more pleasure because, in my opinion, the matters treated of in this book are of the very greatest practical importance to the baking trade. The baker, so far as the ordinary varieties of bread are concerned, differs from most other manufacturers in not being able to expect any increased demand for the goods which he supplies. The growing prosperity of the country - and we have increased enormously in wealth during the last twenty or thirty years - has led to a largely increased demand for most commodities, and the manufacturers of those commodities have had with them all along the great advantage of art expanding market. With the baker, so far as household bread is concerned, the case is entirely different. Exact figures are unfortunately wanting, but there is no doubt that the per capita consumption of bread has sensibly diminished. When the first Bread Act was under discussion it was stated that three-fourths of the population lived almost entirely on bread. That remark was probably quite true at the time it was made, but we have travelled a long way since then, and the facts are now entirely different. Well-to-do people eat very little bread, and even the working classes, so far as the adult members are concerned, are not the heavy consumers they once were. The children are still there, and big families still mean a large consumption of bread. But there is no elasticity in the demand for the baker's chief commodity, and a great deal of the excessive competition about which bakers are continually complaining is due to this unpleasant but significant fact. When we come, however, from household bread to those fancy varieties which may be roughly classed as Vienna Bread, the case is quite altered. Here the baker may find an expanding market and abundant possibilities for the future. People who won't eat bread simply because it is the cheapest food will eat it if it appeals to their palate. Bread as one of the necessities of life is on a largely reduced footing; bread as one of the luxuries of the table has a great future in front of it. It is to be noted that there is already a certain vague sort of demand for these fancy varieties of bread. One is almost tired of hearing people, after a few weeks' experience of foreign hotels, complain that they cannot get in England "the delicious bread we find on the Continent." Of course they can get it, but they cannot get it easily enough or readily enough, and so go on grumbling at the household bread and eating as little of it as they can. The leading restaurants and hotels are quite alive to this, and do not, as a rule, offer their customers slices or chunks of household bread. Their fancy bread is not always of the best, but, at any rate, the fact is recognized that people do for the most part prefer these fancy varieties. What people like abroad they like at home, and there seems no reason why Vienna Bread should not be regularly found on the tables of most well-to-do or fairly well-to-do households. And let the trade just consider what a possibility this opens out of increased business and increased profit. Only this bread must be the real thing, and not a mere pretence. The warning with which our authors have opened their work is emphatically necessary. There seems to be an impression in some quarters that fancy shapes are all that is necessary to develop a trade in fancy bread. The public is not going to be beguiled in that way. If a trade is to be built up in Vienna Bread, it must be built up by bread which is nice to eat and not merely pretty to look at.