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Home , History of bread

Episode 1

Bread timeline:

Humankind’s relationship with is very long and, at least for the earlier portion, a bit unclear. Being essentially just a cooked mixture of water and ground up plant material it is perhaps not surprising that our species quickly spread the development of bread all across the globe allowing a wide variety of different styles and flavors to develop.

12,000 BCE

As of 2018 the oldest known human created bread type product comes from a 14,000 year old ‘Natufian’ archaeological site in the Black Desert in . This bread is comprised of a wild / mixed with pulverized dried plant roots from nearby ponds (bullrushes, cattails, etc) and water that would then be baked on hot stones or ash. According to a BBC article from around its discovery, “The bake would have looked like a and tasted a bit like today’s multi-grain varieties”. All of this knowledge comes to us from 24 breadcrumbs archaeologists discovered within some large circular stone fireplaces at the site.

I would like to take a moment to note that there are some scholars who claim that

Australia, Italy, Russia, and the Czech Republic all hold evidence of 30,000 year old older bread-making cultures. According to at least one article from 1993 the Cuddie

Springs site in Australia contains some grindstones with starchy residue that could have possibly been used to mill flour for purposes. This is a similar story in the sites in the other three countries. There is, however, no evidence of actual bread that has been made such as in Jordan and so that will remain inconclusive until a later date.

------10,000 BCE Era------

7,000 BCE

Prior to the discovery of the Black Desert site the oldest known evidence of bread baking came from Turkey and the Çatalhöyük people. This bread was similar to the bread from Jordan but instead of using those ground tubers they used ground beans like chickpeas or lentils. Also unlike the Natufian site, the bread from Turkey was cooked in an rather than directly on hot stones or ashes. One of the big reasons the new discovery in Jordan is so big is because it causes scholars to reassess the way they view agricultural development in human history. It used to be believed that the agricultural revolution lead to the creation of baking and brewing, but the new evidence suggests that the opposite may be the case, or at least that these technologies predate the cultivation of grain for consumption.

3,000 BCE

There isn’t a whole lot of other evidence of bread making until the Egyptian Old

Kingdom. By looking at Egyptian art and archaeological records we can see that the Old

Kingdom method of baking involved creating a batter and filling a preheated mold which would then cook the bread or baking flat loaves in an oven. The Egyptians in general are known for having been proficient and brewers, two trades which are often connected in study for their close functional relationship. While it is doubtless that other cultures accidentally experimented with as it is naturally all around us, the

Egyptians give us some of the first evidence of intentional leavening in the breadmaking process. According to one study there were 14 varieties of bread in the Old Kingdom and around forty in New Kingdom Egypt. I do not really have a lot of information on those varieties and how they were made, but if you want to know way more than you’ll ever know about ancient Egyptian bread and beer making then head on over to ancientgrains.com and check out some of the work by anthropologist Delwen Samuel.

1,000 BCE

In Rome is where we first begin to see the kinds of modern and bread recipes that are more recognizable to a modern eye as bread than a flatbread or kind of dish. Additionally the Romans created some of the first large-scale milling operations which allowed for finer ground flour and more of it. This industrialization of the baking process in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE also means that the Romans are one of the earliest known cultures with designated ‘bakers’ who could subsist off of the profits from making bread and they even created a Bakers Guild some time around 168 BCE. And

with specialization in profession comes specialization in production. Roman people all across the social spectrum were eating bread with most meals, though the contents of that bread differed based on context. Nutty coarse bread made with chestnuts, acorns, and barley were eaten by the poor while finer softer (whiter) bread made with eggs, , honey, and spices were eaten by the wealthy. According to Pliny the Elder, the

Gauls created bread using foam taken from beer brewing and baked, “a lighter bread than other peoples”.

That’s kind of all I got for the ancient history of bread, obviously I’m really only scratching the surface and if you’re at all interested I encourage you to look more into it.

I genuinely wasn’t interested in writing down notes on the various methods in which different ancient people processed which grain to create which product and so I apologize for that.

Medieval Bread

During the middle ages, like during the time of the Romans, bread had become a in Europe. So much so that people used to eat their meals on a piece of stale bread known as a ‘trencher’ which could be consumed after eating or fed to the dogs on the street if one did not want it. Eventually these bread trenchers would be replaced by wooden trenchers and ultimately become what we know of as plates. Different regions began specializing in breadmaking of different types during the middle ages with artisan

guilds forming in different locations dedicated to keeping the secrets of producing fine bread.

Modern Bread

With the widespread change in milling that came about after the creation of the grain roller fine became easier and easier to make and the invention of the automated bread slicer made bread easier to consume. By the modern era most bread production has moved away from skilled artisans and into large-scale factories. While bakers are still fairly common today their product is seen as more of a specialty item while the vast majority of bread consumed at least in the U.S. comes from companies like Wonderbread. Wonderbread was created in 1921 and holds the distinction of being the oldest producers of pre-. In 1928 an ad for sliced bread claimed it was,

“the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped”.

Wonderbread was also one of the first companies to add vitamins and minerals to their bread in the 1940s, creating “enriched white bread” which is the form we commonly think of today.

Types of bread:

Sourdough: The most basic leavened bread, its basically just flour, water, and ​ starter. There is evidence of sourdough bread from 3,700 BCE in

Switzerland, though it is likely that a similar sourdough type bread existed thousands of years earlier in the . There are also mentions in Pliny’s Natural Histories of groups holding on to the from a previous bake and allowing it to ferment in order to create sourdough.

White: A very refined, though nutritionally void variety of bread, much more modern than ​ other sorts. Though the Romans were able to make bread out of refined wheat flour that was white in comparison to what was being made at the time, real white bread didn’t really come about until the creation of the roller mill in the mid-19th century, which crushed grains and allowed for further refining including the removal of the bran and wheat germ. White bread allows a longer shelf life as it removes many of the oils that naturally occur in wheat products.

Wheat: Very ambiguous, as it pretty much includes all normal bread that isn’t white ​ bread, but wikipedia did tell me about ‘’ which is basically what I’m talking about. During the Potato Famine around 1848 brown bread was handed out to the Irish as it was seen as less desirable than regular bread, though in 1865 once the health

benefits of bran were discovered the price of brown meal increased often to a point higher than fine white flour.

Rye: Rye itself is just a type of grain like wheat or barley, though it is unique in that it ​ can grow farther north than other types of grain. The bread is often chewier than other breads and has a distinct taste. Originally from central Asia, the grain became popular in places like Russia, Poland, and Germany. Though it wasn’t favored by nearly anyone who ate it, it was easy to get and lasted much longer than wheat bread and was thus popular with poorer populations.

Pumpernickel: (Just go here) ​ https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/the-devilish-origins-of-pumpernickel/

French v. Italian: https://www.reluctantgourmet.com/difference-french-italian-bread/

Banana:? ​ Tortilla: According to Wikipedia the first tortillas discovered date back to 10,000 BCE ​ which does not make much sense as the Maya, Aztec, Inca, and even Olmec have no presence in the region until around 6,000 BCE at the earliest.

Sources:

Jordan/Turkey: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44846874 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6077754/

Australia: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/22/indigenous-australians-know- were-the-oldest-living-culture-its-in-our-dreamtime https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.1834-4453.1993.tb00320.x

Egypt: http://ancientgrains.org/samuel1989bread.pdf http://ancientgrains.org/samuel2000aemt.pdf

Rome: http://www.cerealialudi.org/en/alimentazione/pane-e-panettieri-nellantica-roma/ https://www.loebclassics.com/view/pliny_elder-natural_history/1938/pb_LCL371.255.xm l?readMode=recto

Breads: https://www.ehow.com/about_5339455_origin-white-bread.html https://books.google.com/books?id=BuhSZOIY4G4C&pg=PA36#v=onepage&q&f=false https://quatr.us/central-asia/history-rye-bread-central-asia.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Bread