Antique bread maker leads to black inventor

The metal pot with the army green patina looked like a thicker version of an Asian wok there on the auction table. I slid off the lid and saw a jumble of heavy metal parts inside.

On the lid were some deeply embossed words that led off with this inscription: “The ‘General’ Seamless Bread Maker.” It was the strangest-looking bread maker I had seen.

 

I had toyed once with the idea of buying a nice electric bread maker so I could start making my own wheat bread. I scuttled the idea because I knew that it would go the way of the automatic rice cooker and the cute little ice cream maker I had bought – both now sitting on a shelf somewhere in my pantry.

This bread maker before me, though, was a lot more interesting than the modern ones I’d seen. On the top were instructions on how to make bread: “Put in all liquid first. One quart of liquid to three of flour. No seams to fill with dough.” It sounded simple enough, but there certainly had to be more to it than that.

It was surprisingly clean for its age, as if it has been used little or not at all. On what looked like a crank were two patent dates, the latest was Jan. 29, 1907. This was a No. 10 model.

Looking at the crank I was reminded of the other antique home and kitchen items I’d come across at auction that required a crank to operate, including a White Mountain ice cream maker.

As usual, I was curious about this machine, which surely eased the chore of making fresh bread a century ago. I could find nothing about the General No. 10 on the web, but was bombarded with plenty of machines bearing the name Universal. It apparently was a pretty popular bread-making machine manufactured by a Connecticut company near the turn of the 20th century.

What I found even more interesting was the inventor who revolutionized bread making – an African American man named Joseph Lee. Born around 1849 in Boston, he worked in a bakery as a boy, and went on to become a successful restaurateur and caterer in the city. In the 1890s, he invented and patented a machine that ground bread into crumbs. In the past, day-old bread was discarded, but his machine opened up a whole new way to recycle it. He used the machine to make bread crumbs for such dishes as croquettes, fried chops and fish, and for cake batter in his enterprises.

Lee sold the invention to the Royal Worcester Crumb Co. of Boston. A 1902 American Kitchen magazine extolled the convenience of the company’s prepared bread crumbs – something grandma didn’t have – which offered “escalloped oysters at the moment’s notice … or croquettes that melt in one’s mouth, besides all the other toothsome fried things that everybody delights in.”

His invention apparently made frying a delectable undertaking.

Lee then sought to find a better way to make fresh bread simply and with less labor. That led to the invention and patenting of a bread-making machine. I could find nothing about whatever happened to it. Lee died in 1905, and school teacher Jerome T. Peoples last year chronicled his life, inventions and more in the book “Lee’s Bread Machines: The father of automated bread making.”

Bread-making machines appeared to be a hit around the 1890s and into the 20th century. That was around the time Landers-Frary & Clark of New Britain, CT, came out with its Universal machine – the “mainstay” of its business – along with its food chopper and percolator. The Universal had embossed instructions on the cover, and an inscription on the side noting that it had won a gold medal at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.

In a 1905 newspaper ad, the company promised that its bread maker could mix and knead dough in 3 minutes. and it came in two sizes. One sold for $2 and the other $2.50. This new bread-making machine, a company official said in 1955, allowed dough to be “prepared in the evening, left in the machine overnight, ready for baking in the morning.”

Universal No. 4 machines I found on eBay were selling well, most for less than $100.

Another turn-of-the-century bread making machine was the Manning-Bowman Eclipse, manufactured in Meriden, CT, by Manning Bowman and Co. It seemed to have worked the same way as the Universal.