Bread ovens

Spaced 5 to 10 m from the house, these are stone constructions with solid roofs and frames. In 1920, there were 89 bread ovens in operation in Cordon. Today (2023), around twenty are still in regular operation.
Nowadays, it's not uncommon to see smoke escaping from the mouth of one. Pain de Cordon Day is an authentic replica of a ritual that continues to this day, much to our delight. It takes place on the first Sunday in September.
Bread: the general shape of bread is a ball 20 to 30 cm in diameter, weighing 1.5 to 2 kg. Various products are used to make it: flour, water, sourdough, wheat, rye, oats. During the war, when flour was in short supply, it was mixed with boiled potatoes without the skin.
Only four decades ago, most Cordonnants made their bread every 15 days or 3 weeks. In local French, we say "Faire au four", the process of baking bread (kneading, heating the oven, cooking...).
We'd knead between 20 and 25 kg of flour.
The dough was left to rise in the bedroom or kitchen, in the heat, and then stored on a rack in the attic (a small building away from the main building, where certain foods were kept). It could be kept for 15 days to 3 weeks. Making bread was a laborious operation, but the delicacies that were baked afterwards were in some way a just reward, as was the warm piece of bread dipped in sweet wine, known in the local dialect as "Na Rusta".
Today, 25 households in the village still bake bread in this way, for their own personal consumption.
Originally, the vault was made of granite or lauzes (schist). The village had a mason who specialized in oven construction. The hearth had a slope of 5 cm/m. To build the vault, the mason stood in the center of the hearth and placed the stones around him.
It took 5 hours to heat the oven, and then 5 hours to bake the bread. Then, as soon as refractory bricks appeared on the market and the railways were able to transport them to Sallanches, the ovens were transformed. Today, it takes 1 hour to 1 h. 30 to heat the oven and 1 to 1 H. 30 to bake the bread, depending on the outside temperature, without changing its taste. The temperature of the oven can be recognized by the color of the stones in the "gueule". If you baked bread in an oven you didn't own, you printed your mark with an engraved boxwood stamp (cross, square, parallel lines, etc.).