This Sunday at the Gladstone Hotel, Coach House Books launches The Edible City: Toronto’s Food from Farm to Fork, a collection of new essays on all things edible in Hogtown that “dishes on peaches and poverty, on processing plants and public gardens, on rats and bees and bad restaurant service, on schnitzel and school lunches.” Five of the contributors – Steven Biggs, Sasha Chapman, Sarah B. Hood, Lorraine Johnson and Joshna Maharaj – will discuss the joys and perils of Metro masticating at the This Is Not a Reading Series event, which begins at 2 p.m. and also includes a Toronto-theme cookie-decorating segment. Coach House has posted a fun-facts page on their website with even more information on the city’s culinary core.
As part of Books@Torontoist’s Edible City coverage, we will be publishing a tasty excerpt from the collection every day until Sunday. Today: Jamie Bradburn (known to Torontoist readers as one of our Historicists) wraps up the secret history of the city’s bakeries in “Not Loafing Around: Bread in Toronto.”
Not Loafing Around: Bread in Toronto
by Jamie Bradburn
Bread lovers have it good in Toronto. From the wave of European-inspired artisan loaves that followed the success of ace Bakery in the 1990s to the staple breads of each culture in the city, Torontonians can sample a wide range of high quality loaves. Even the long-maligned standard grocery store selection has improved, with the major chains carrying a wider selection of styles and ingredients in their breads than just white, brown, Wonder and the occasional ethnic specialty offered a couple of decades ago.
In nineteenth-century Toronto, most families made their own bread at home, so commercial bakers faced a challenge in weaning housewives off their homemade loaves. Consumers needed to be convinced that baking was drudgery and that buying premade loaves would save time and improve one’s health. The friendly neighbourhood bread man was a key weapon in the baker’s arsenal – his charm could make or break a company’s livelihood.
What was the daily grind like for a bread delivery man in the 1880s, when future moguls like a teenage George Weston entered the business?
From the moment the boy hitched the horse to his dark paneled covered cart in the morning, the day was a slow, measured ritual. The cart wound along dusty, tree-lined streets; at each stop he carried his wood and metal tray filled with an assortment of unwrapped bread and cakes up to the kitchen door. He chatted politely with matrons, indulged small children with treats or occasionally flirted with pretty young housekeepers who exchanged tickets for bread. On he would go, plying his trade along streets where every hedge, every alleyway, every dog’s hiding place, became reassuringly familiar. After the oppressive heat and sometimes cloyingly sweet aromas of the bakeshop, the horse cart was a pleasure in comparatively foul weather.
By 1900, local bakeries battled for customers in the city’s seven daily newspapers. Competition was fiercest in the Evening Telegram, where half a dozen bakers boldly boasted of the superiority of their products to readers who picked up a copy of the paper on their way home for dinner. Subtlety was a foreign concept in a field where bakers like H. C. Tomlin proclaimed that their bread ‘is very good – immeasurably better than most bread you buy,’ without any evidence to back up their proclamations. Who needed official customer surveys or reliable nutritional data?
The purity of the product was stressed, whether it was high-quality ingredients or the hygiene of the production facilities. Skilled labour was a key point of many ads – Tait- Bredin noted in one Evening Telegram spot that ‘even the best ingredients would be rendered unfit for food if we employed poor workmen.’ Consumers were assured that each baker’s goods were made by qualified employees fully devoted to furthering the craft, as opposed to the housewife for whom baking was only one of seventy-eight tasks to be accomplished during the day.
Among the battling bakeries of 1900,Yonge Street–based Tait-Bredin stands out for the bizarre illustrations used in its ads. Eager to show the nutritional strength of its products, especially for its ‘Health Brown Bread,’ Tait-Bredin’s advertising depicted spindly-legged loaves accomplishing feats like running in a race along a viaduct, lifting heavy barbells to make ‘Poor Bread’ feel bad and punching out ambulatory steaks and potatoes to prove bread’s nutritional strength. It also felt no shame in slamming overweight Torontonians who bought hefty loaves of other types of bread – if the portly figure in one ad had chosen Tait-Bredin’s brown instead of a human-length log of rye, ‘no one would have wondered at his rotundity of make up.’2 The company’s products may have helped the stamina of proprietor Mark Bredin, whose busy schedule included a couple of terms on city council.
By contrast, George Weston’s ads in 1900 used quaint, genteel imagery, employing cherubs, children, eighteenth-century servants and Dickensian figures. The latter were used to back up a claim that the ‘golden opinions of the oldest residents of Toronto’ valued Weston bread for its digestive qualities. Palatability was the only selling point that Queen-and- Portland-based R. F. Dale used for his ads, while H. C. Tomlin stressed his wares provided the most sustenance for ‘the brain worker, the muscular worker, and for children.’
The fervour of 1900 gradually faded, with rumours of the largest local players uniting to forma conglomerate. It took a decade, but in 1911 Bredin, Tomlin and Weston, along with bakers from Montreal and Winnipeg, merged their interests to form Canada Bread. Weston pulled out to re-establish his own eponymous firm in the early 1920s, forming the base from which a manufacturing and retailing empire was built on both sides of the Atlantic, including familiar names like Wonder Bread and Loblaws. Canada Bread carried on and, under the ownership of Maple Leaf Foods, continues to stock many of the brand-name baked goods in Canadian grocery stores.
With consolidation came conformity, as the enriched white loaf rushed to the front of the pack. Bread men vanished from city streets as Torontonians began to purchase their bread from supermarkets or neighbourhood specialty bakeries. By the end of the 1980s, apart from the occasional choice of crusty Italian or Portuguese loaves or a chewy Jewish rye, the local grocery-store bread section had only variations of mushy enriched white or brown bread made by corporations. Smaller family-run bakeries had run into higher operating costs that put many out of business.
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