practised in this metropolis, where the goodness of bread is estimated entirely by its whiteness. It is therefore usual to add a certain quantity of alum to the dough; this improves the look of the bread very much, and renders it whiter and firmer. Good, white, and porous bread, may certainly be manufactured from good wheaten flour alone; but to produce the degree of whiteness rendered indispensable by the caprice of the consumers in London, it is necessary (unless the very best flour is employed,) that the dough should be _bleached_; and no substance has hitherto been found to answer this purpose better than alum. Without this salt it is impossible to make bread, from the kind of flour usually employed by the London bakers, so white, as that which is commonly sold in the metropolis. If the alum be omitted, the bread has a slight yellowish grey hue--as may be seen in the instance of what is called _home-made bread_, of private families. Such bread remains longer moist than bread made with alum; yet it is not so light, and full of eyes, or porous, and it has also a different taste. The quantity of alum requisite to produce the required whiteness and porosity depends entirely upon the genuineness of the flour, and the quality of the grain from which the flour is obtained. The mealman makes different sorts of flour from the same kind of grain. The best flour is mostly used by the biscuit bakers and pastry cooks, and the inferior sorts in the making of bread. The bakers' flour is very often made of the worst kinds of damaged foreign wheat, and other cereal grains mixed with them in grinding the wheat into flour. In this capital, no fewer than six distinct kinds of wheaten flour are brought into market. They are called fine flour, seconds, middlings, fine middlings, coarse middlings, and twenty-penny flour. Common garden beans, and pease, are also frequently ground up among the London bread flour. I have been assured by several bakers, on whose testimony I can rely, that the small profit attached to the bakers' trade, and the bad quality of the flour, induces the generality of the London bakers to use alum in the making of their bread. The smallest quantity of alum that can be employed with effect to produce a white, light, and porous bread, from an inferior kind of flour, I have my own baker's authority to state, is from three to four ounces to a sack of flour, weighing 240 pounds. The alum is either mixed well in the form of powder, with a quantity of flour previously made into a liquid paste with water, and then incorporated with the dough; or the alum is dissolved in the water employed for mixing up the whole quantity of the flour for making the dough. Let us suppose that the baker intends to convert five bushels, or a sack of flour, into loaves with the least adulteration practised. He pours the flour into the kneading trough, and sifts it through a fine wire sieve, which makes it lie very light, and serves to separate any