For the Slavs, bread was the main product, and modern people consider the table empty without bread. For the first time, bread was baked in the Stone Age. No other dish has such a long and interesting history. You can learn about recipes, types and methods of making various pastries in the Bread Museum.
There are 13 officially registered bread museums in the world. They are in Holland, Austria, Germany, France, America, Tatarstan, Israel, Azerbaijan, Ukraine and Russia.
Museum of bread in St. Petersburg
The state bread museum is located in the northern capital. It was founded in 1988. More than 10 thousand exhibits are displayed at the exhibition stands and in the halls.
The Museum of Bread in St. Petersburg is located at the address: Ligovsky Prospect, 73
Visitors will be able to see here not only dishes, equipment, samples of advertising from different eras, but also other household utensils, documents, photographs and even the production line of the bakery of the 50s of the last century. A short excursion into archeology and ethnography is presented in the “History of the origin and formation of bakery” hall. The exposition "The History of Bread in Pre-Petrine Russia", which presents models of pastries of that era: pies, gingerbreads, rolls, will also seem interesting.
A separate room is dedicated to the history of bakery and grain trade in St. Petersburg. When a regular army was assembled in the city in the 18th century, several times more bread was required. Then industrial baking appeared. The opening of bakeries was regulated by the shop floor legislation. The first to bake bread on an industrial scale in St. Petersburg were the Germans. At the beginning of the 19th century, a number of specialized industries were opened. Some shopkeepers specialized in bagels, others in cakes, and still others in waffles. In the 19th century, there were about 3 thousand small shops in the city, where only rye bread was sold. Residents of the nearest three or four houses were regular customers of each of these shops.
The Museum of Bread also has a hall dedicated to the traditions of tea drinking. The guide will show you dozens of samovars of different times, sizes and shapes. It will be interesting to look at the packaging boxes for baking, which in the 19th century served not only as decoration, but also as an advertisement. Many of these boxes are true works of art. If you dreamed of seeing how the life of the townspeople was organized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, you can see the dining room and cuisine of that era. Of particular interest will be the original items of that time: baking pans, spatulas, metal and porcelain dishes. In one of the parts of the museum, an old Russian oven is recreated, there is a linen towel, there is a shovel for taking bread out of the oven, in another, the furnishings of a city bakery are reconstructed with equipment in real size, in the third is a department of a store from the times of the USSR with scales, cash register and other equipment.
Bread Museum in Kiev
In the capital of Ukraine, there is the People's Museum of Bread, founded in 1981.
The People's Museum of Bread in Kiev is located at 19 Vyshgorodskaya Street
The museum has collected more than 2 thousand exhibits, demonstrating not only the history of baking in Russia, but also the importance of bread for humans, the origin and methods of processing various grain crops. The exposition contains more than sixty loaves and types of ritual pastries made in different regions of Ukraine. Even matzah is presented at the stand, which has long become familiar on the tables of not only Jews, but also many Ukrainians. In the part of the exposition, which is called "Bread is the head of everything", you can see loaves from Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Lithuania, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Latvia and other countries. Visitors will even be shown white and black bread made especially for astronauts.
