While the dough is rising, preparations should be made for baking it. Some bake their bread in a brick oven, some in a stove, some in a reflector, and some in a baking kettle. In all these ways very good bread may be baked; but the baking kettle is decidedly the most objectionable. Probably there is no better and more certain way of baking bread well than in the use of the brick oven. Good bread-makers, accustomed to brick ovens, can always manage them with a very great degree of certainty; and as a general fact, bread is sweeter, baked in this way, than in any other. Yet, when it is well baked in tin reflectors, it is certainly very fine; and so it is also when well baked in iron stoves. But the baking of bread requires almost as much care and judgment as any part of the process of bread-making. If the oven is too hot, the bread will burn on the outside before it is done in the centre; if it is too cold, the bread will be heavy, raw and sour. If the heat is much greater from below than from above, the bottom of the loaf will burn before the top is done: or if the heat is much greater from above than from below, the top of the loaf will burn before the bottom is done. All these points therefore must be carefully attended to; and no small excuse ought to be considered a satisfactory apology for sour, heavy, raw or burnt bread; for it is hardly possible to conceive of an absolute necessity for such results; and the cases are extremely rare in which they are not the offspring of downright and culpable carelessness. The best bread-makers I have ever known, watch over their bread troughs while their dough is rising, and over their ovens while it is baking, with about as much care and attention as a mother watches over the cradle of her sick child. Dough made of wheat meal requires a hotter oven than that made of fine flour; and it needs to remain in the oven longer. Indeed, it is a general fault of bread of every description, made in this country, that it is not sufficiently baked. Multitudes eat their bread hot and smoking from the oven in a half-cooked state; and very few seem to think there is any impropriety in doing so. But they who would have their bread good, not only a few hours after it comes from the oven, but as long as it can be kept, must see that it is thoroughly baked. I have said that the process of vinous fermentation converts a portion of the saccharine matter of the meal into carbonic acid gas or air, by which means the dough is raised and made light; and that the same process converts a portion of the saccharine matter into alcohol. The alcohol thus generated is mostly if not entirely driven off by the heat of the oven when the dough is baking;—and in modern times, ovens have been so constructed in England, as to serve the double purpose of ovens and stills; so that while the bread is baking, the alcohol is distilled off and condensed, and saved for the various uses of arts and manufacture.