You can’t win a war with hungry soldiers. George Washington was learning this the hard way as the tide of the American Revolution turned against him while his army struggled on skimpy rations. Enter the country’s first Baker Master, Christopher Ludwick, a German immigrant who’d come to prominence in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for both his devotion to the revolution and his baking prowess. Washington tasked him with centralizing the army’s bread supply, and Ludwick performed so ably that after the British surrender at Yorktown, Washington celebrated with 6,000 loaves, telling his Baker Master, “Let it be good, old gentleman, and let there be enough of it, if I should want myself.”
The directive lives on today
