Bread: A Global History

108 Pages·2011·0.57 MB·English

by  William Rubel

BREAD
Edible
Series Editor: Andrew F. Smith EDIBLE is a revolutionary new series of books dedicated to food and
drink that explores the rich history of cuisine. Each book reveals the
global history and culture of one type of food or beverage.
Already published
Apple Erika Janik Lobster Elisabeth Townsend
Cake Nicola Humble Milk Hannah Velten
Caviar Nichola Fletcher Olive Fabrizia Lanza
Champagne Becky Sue Epstein Pancake Ken Albala
Cheese Andrew Dalby Pie Janet Clarkson
Chocolate Sarah Moss and Pizza Carol Helstosky
Alexander Badenoch Potato Andrew F. Smith
Curry Colleen Taylor Sen Sandwich Bee Wilson
Dates Nawal Nasrallah Soup Janet Clarkson
Hamburger Andrew F. Smith Spices Fred Czarra
Hot Dog Bruce Kraig Tea Helen Saberi
Ice Cream Laura B. Weiss Whiskey Kevin R. Kosar
Bread
A Global History
William Rubel
REAKTION BOOKS
For Jane Levi
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V 0DX, UK
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2011
Copyright © William Rubel 2011
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publishers.
Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.
Printed and bound in China by C&C Offset Printing Co. Ltd British Library Cataloguing in Publication
Data Rubel, William
Bread: a global history. – (Edible)
I. Bread. 2. Bread – History.
3. Cooking (Bread)
I. Title II. Series 641.8 15-DC22
eISBN 9781861899613
Contents
Introduction
1 The Early History of Bread
2 Bread as a Social Marker
3 Parameters of Taste
4 World of Bread: An Eccentric Travelogue
5 Bread in the Twenty-first Century
Recipes
Glossary
Select Bibliography
Websites and Associations
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index
1
The Early History of Bread
Who was the first Author or Inventor of making Bread,
I will not take upon me to determine.
Thomas Moffett, 1655
We do not know who made the first breads. What we do know is that bread
formed the economic and nutritional underpinnings of the civilizations that grew
up in the Fertile Crescent and along the Mediterranean Sea. Bread was central to
the civilization of Uruk (founded around 4000 BC) and later Mesopotamian
cultures. Bread built the Old Kingdom Pyramids, it was a staple in the
civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, and bread fed most of Europe even
into the nineteenth century as Britain and other European nations became the
world’s dominant powers. Even today, the economic power of the United States,
Canada and Australia is not entirely dissociated from their vast wheat fields.
The history of bread begins in the Fertile Crescent, that part of the world
centred on Iraq and including parts of adjacent countries: Afghanistan, Turkey,
Kuwait, Syria, Israel, Palestine. It is here, and in particular in the lands that lie
between the region’s two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, that the
world’s first urban cultures developed. Bread was their foundation.
Cuneiform record of food supplies, including bread (top left). It seems easy to imagine breads having been
stamped with cuneiform texts. Iraq, c. 3000 BC.
But the invention of bread seems to pre-date its use as a staple food. Long
before the Neolithic Revolution, when the hunters and gatherers in the Fertile
Crescent made the cultural shift to farming and raising large animals (cows,
goats and sheep), the peoples in the region were harvesting and eating grains
from vast fields of wild barley and wheat. It is here, at least 22,500 years ago,
among these wild grains, among peoples not yet tamed and settled by their
domesticated plants, animals and accumulated material possessions, that recent
archaeological research suggests the story of bread may begin.
Humans cannot live on raw grain; we don’t have the teeth or stomachs for it.
We must transform grains into food through cooking. The basic methods for
making grains palatable are sprouting, fermenting, roasting, boiling and baking.
Compared with consuming grain as whole grains, grinding and baking into bread
radically increases a grain’s glycaemic index, releasing otherwise nutritionally
unavailable carbohydrates. Bread also stores easily and is transportable, offering
significant practical advantages over porridge and alcoholic fermentation for the
primary use of the grain crop.
Left: Free-threshing hull-less wheat was quickly adopted by ancient farmers and remains in use today.
Right: Einkorn, an early domesticated hulled wheat, now rarely grown on a commercial scale.
Without getting drawn into an argument about who invented what and when,
and what it was that Fertile Crescent hunter-gatherers ate more of, we know
from recent archaeological digs that systematic collecting and grinding of
starches can be traced back thousands of years before the invention of
agriculture. Starch grains from barley and possibly wheat imbedded in a
grindstone found by the Sea of Galilee at the Upper Palaeolithic site of Ohalo 11
are between 22,500 and 23,500 years old. Dolores Piperno, the archaeologist
who published the discovery, speculates that one particular grouping of burned
stones at the site suggests a simple hearthstone oven.
Bread, as we now usually think of it, requires dough stiff enough to trap gases
when it bakes so that a cross-section reveals an aerated crumb, not a dense mass
of starch. The Fertile Crescent grains that could trap gases and were harvestable
in their wild forms were barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) and two forms of wheat,
einkorn (Triticum monococcum L.) and wild emmer (Triticum dicoccoides). We
speculate that these grains were the first used for what became bread as we know
it today.
Both the wild and the first domesticated forms of barley and wheat were
hulled, meaning that the grain is tightly enclosed within a tenacious chaff
structure called a ‘glume’. After threshing to break up the stalk head, hulled
wheat must be further processed to release the seed from this tightly fitting outer
husk. This was usually accomplished by pounding in a mortar. Once freed of the
husk the grain is cleaned by winnowing. It may be further cleaned by sifting or
hand picking to remove impurities. Modern wheat and barley (though ‘modern’
is relative as they are many thousands of years old) are ‘free threshing’. This
means that chaff freely falls away from the grain and central stalk. Once the
grain is separated from the seed head by threshing it just takes winnowing and
further optional cleaning to prepare grain for the miller.
‘The Threshing Floor’, from Diderot’s Encyclopédie, Paris, c. 1770.
A woman grinding flour, Old Kingdom Fifth Dynasty, 2465–2323 BC.
Grindstones are commonly found in pre-agricultural settlements in the Fertile
Crescent. They were used in pre-agricultural societies for many purposes and so
their use with grain was probably merely an adaptation of an already familiar
tool. Historical evidence and contemporary practice suggests that the miller was
usually a woman bent over a flat rectangular stone holding a smooth-sided
oblong rock in her hands. Grain was placed at the near end of the grindstone,
relative to the grinder, and crushed against the large stationary flat stone in a
long sweeping motion. Though the form of the grindstone changed slightly over
the years, the matate used by women in the Mexican countryside to grind maize
that was boiled in lime water into the dough called masa for forming into
tortillas would have been recognizable and useable by Upper Paeolithic Fertile
Crescent hunter-gatherers 20,000 years ago.
The grindstone, particularly the type called a ‘saddle quern’, is a versatile tool.
Even on my first attempt to grind grain on a saddle quern I was able to produce