Flohr 1 Our Daily Bread: A Brief History The honey-crusted aroma drifts through the house as four sticky, rounded lumps quickly bake into golden loaves. The timer beeps, an irrelevant reminder as I have been standing in front of the oven, waiting impatiently. With a mitted hand, I carefully tip one of the loaves from the thin, aluminum pan and tap the bottom, listening for that familiar, hollow sound. Rebelliously, I slice one heel off and slather it with salted butter, too eager to wait for the crust to fully cool. Steam trickles out from the cut loaf. The butter instantly liquefies and becomes one with the bread. My teeth dig into the crust with a satisfying crackle. The caramel of the crust and creamy, salty butter fill my mouth with delight. Now that I’ve had the first skimming, I can allow the rest to cool properly. My love affair with bread began in early childhood. Our family of five lived in a tiny town outside of Smithfield in southeastern Virginia. My father commuted from our three acre, under-utilized farm to the shipyards nearly an hour away, leaving behind my mother, my two younger sisters, and me. We had very little money, so my mother made do with what she had. She stuck to a strict budget, planned simple weekly menus, and baked all of our bread from scratch. A transplant from California, I was probably the only kid in Ivor who brought homemade, whole-wheat sandwiches to school. There was certainly never a recipe for whole- wheat bread in the locally published Smithfield Cookbook. My father’s family was originally from Georgia, so my mother learned to incorporate some of his childhood culinary preferences into her cooking. Every year on Thanksgiving, my mother rose before the sun to start on the turkey. After prepping the bird, the next step was always making the cornbread for the stuffing using a recipe from my father’s mother, Grandma K-Z. Marie Callender’s boxed mix may have been sufficient for our weekly chili night, but it Flohr 2 wouldn’t do for Turkey Day. For this feast, the only acceptable cornbread was true southern cornbread baked in a lard-greased, cast iron skillet. The perfect, steaming, golden disk was cooled, crumbled, and mixed in with stale breadcrumbs, celery, onion, turkey broth, eggs, herbs, and spices to create the traditional Flohr family Thanksgiving stuffing. When I got married at 21, my husband and I went through our own newlywed poverty phase. I remembered what I had learned from my mother growing up and began budgeting and baking bread. It’s a shame that there is such a strong connection between being destitute and baking. Baking bread is a beautiful and satisfying craft, not something one should only turn to out of desperation. My first loaves were the modern poor-man’s loaves: white bread. I later learned to make scones, cakes and pies from scratch, yeasted cinnamon rolls, whole wheat bread, chapatti, and finally a successful rye sourdough. Thirteen years later, with two kids, uncountable loaves, and a divorce, I am finally coming to appreciate the fine art of baking a good loaf of bread. It is a rewarding, meditative experience and a skill that more people should acquire. The Origins of Bread: From Wheat to Eat Much of the food we consume is steeped in tradition. Considering that humankind has been evolving for a few million years, bread consumption is relatively new in the timeline of human history; its origins only date back to approximately 8,000 BCE in Egypt. The earliest forms of bread were simple pastes of ground grain and water left to bake on rocks in the sun or near a fire. Eventually, wild yeast made its way into the mix, likely by accident, and leavened bread was born. Though it is difficult to pinpoint when yeasted bread became commonplace, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics depict loaves of bread rising near ovens about 5,000 years ago. Flohr 3 The transition from hunter-gatherer tribes to stationary communities was precipitated in part by the domestication of plants. The ease of growing wheat in large quantities gave humankind a plentiful source of simple food: bread. Lance Gibson and Garren Benson from the Iowa State University’s Department of Agronomy note in their 2002 paper “Origin, History, and Uses of Oat and Wheat,” that, “Wheat is grown on more land area worldwide than any other crop and is a close third to rice and corn in total world production.” As of 2009, wheat production has surpassed world rice production. Wheat, like other grains, starts as a grass. It looks rather plain and weedy with its tall, spindly stalks waving across the plains. It is able to grow in harsher conditions than corn or rice and is the primary food crop for human consumption. This grain is highly adaptable and easily storable, making it an ideal food product. With the exception of sufferers of celiac disease and gluten sensitivity, wheat is highly nutritious and easily digestible. It is higher in protein and fiber than corn or rice. Wheat is divided into two main types: hard wheat and soft wheat. Hard wheat is higher in protein and is commonly used for baking bread. Soft wheat has more starch and lower protein content. The greater starch makes it sweeter; it is preferred for making piecrusts and pastries. When the wheat is fully-grown and its golden head is bowing down, it is ready to harvest. The stalks are cut down and the seeds separated from the head. Peter Reinhart, a master baker and theologian, noted the symbolism of harvesting wheat in his TED talk on bread, given in 2008 at the Robert Mondavi Winery in California’s Napa Valley. He said that the wheat has to give up its life in the process of bread making. The wheat and the yeast each go from being alive to being dead. The process of baking the bread gives the ingredients a second life, and the bread, in turn, sustains the life of those who consume it. Reinhart calls bread transformational food. Flohr 4 Although the domestication of wheat began several thousand years ago, the technology for milling wheat may be even older. To make bread, the wheat seeds, called berries, must be crushed and ground into a fine powder. Ancient bread makers would use a saddle quern, like a large mortar and pestle, to slowly grind the wheat berries into a coarse powder. In 2010 evidence of very early grain milling was found in several locations in Europe. Starch was found on the surfaces of Paleolithic grinding tools in Russia, Italy, and the Czech Republic, indicating that some ancestral woman sat before these tools and crushed the grain for the family bread. Stone mill technology progressed very slowly over thousands of years. The ancient Greeks and Romans built huge rotary querns where slaves or livestock rotated immense circular millstones to grind large quantities of flour. The Greeks soon followed this with the water mill, which was the primary type of large-scale flour milling until the Industrial Revolution and the invention of steel-roller mills. Steel mills enabled mass quantity production of white flour. The steel rollers were better able to strip away the tough, fibrous bran and the wheat germ from the sweet, starchy inner kernel called the endosperm. Factory flourmills could cheaply produce white flour on a large scale. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, especially in medieval times, white flour was reserved for the upper classes, as it was extremely labor-intensive to produce. Lower classes tended to make bread from coarse ingredients: whole-meal grains and filler ingredients like peas. The unforeseen consequence of quick white flour production was the removal of much of the nutritional value of the wheat, which is found in the bran and the germ. Flour producers later corrected this by creating “enriched” flour, where the lacking B vitamins were added back in to the nutritionally void white flour. Flohr 5 Once it became widely available, white flour was extremely popular. White bread was soon on every family’s table. Generations have grown up eating the soft, squishy fluff known as Wonder Bread, which first came out in 1921. White bread was a novelty for me, since my mother never bought it. After moving back to California in fourth grade, I remember trying a piece of white bread. A friend from school lived down the street from me; her mother only bought white bread. I picked the middle out of the slice and balled it up between my fingers. The sticky, sugary texture was like the inside of a donut; it was vastly different from the rich, brown bread my mother had baked in Virginia. I haven’t cared for white bread since. Regional Breads: French to Rye Though most of the world’s bread is made of wheat, there is some variation according to the grains commonly available in a given region and local methods of preparation. In India, one finds naan, roti, and chapatti—all wheat-based flat breads, with naan being leavened to create thicker, chewier bread. Chapatti and roti are similar to the Mexican tortilla, also a type of unleavened flat bread, which can be made from wheat or corn flour. The Americas were corn- based before European settlers arrived and so pre-European North American breads were derived from cornmeal. Some flatbreads from the Middle East are like crackers: lavash and matzo. Naan and lavash are cooked by adhering to the inside of cylindrical clay oven called a tandoor.