Bread Ovens
Description
Located 5 to 10 meters from the house, these are stone structures with sturdy frames and roofs. In 1920, there were 89 active bread ovens in Cordon. Today (2023), about 20 of them are still in regular use.
These days, it’s not uncommon to see smoke billowing from the mouth of one of them. Cordon Bread Day is an authentic reenactment of a ritual that continues to this day, much to our delight. It takes place on the first Sunday in September.
The bread: The bread is generally shaped like a ball, 20 to 30 cm in diameter and weighing 1.5 to 2 kg. Various ingredients can be used in its preparation: flour, water, sourdough, wheat, rye, and oats. During the war, when flour was in short supply, it was mixed with boiled, peeled potatoes.
Just four decades ago, most residents of Cordon baked their own bread every 15 days or 3 weeks. In the local dialect, the process of baking bread (kneading, heating the oven, baking, etc.) is called “faire au four.”
They would knead between 20 and 25 kg of flour.
The dough was left to rise in the bedroom or kitchen, where it was warm, and the bread was stored in the granary (a small outbuilding separate from the main house, where certain foods were kept) on a rack. It would then keep for 15 days to 3 weeks. Baking bread was hard work; the treats baked afterward were, in a way, a well-deserved reward, just like a piece of warm bread dipped in sweet wine—known in the local dialect as “Na Rusta.”
Today, 25 households in the village still bake their bread this way for personal consumption.
Originally, the vault was made of granite or lauzes (schist). There was a mason in the town who specialized in building ovens. The oven floor had a slope of 5 cm per meter. To build the vault, the mason would stand in the center of the floor and stack the stones around him.
It took 5 hours to heat the oven and another 5 hours to bake the bread. So as soon as firebricks became available on the market and the railroad could transport them to Sallanches, the ovens were converted. Today, it takes 1 hour to 1 hour and 30 minutes to heat the oven and 1 hour to 1 hour and 30 minutes to bake the bread, depending on the outside temperature, without affecting its taste. You can tell the oven’s temperature by the color of the stones in the “mouth” of the oven. If you baked bread in an oven that didn’t belong to you, you would stamp your mark on it using an engraved boxwood stamp (a cross, a square, parallel lines, etc.).
