There may be an actual answer to this, but I’m going with IMHO because I haven’t found one.
Whenever I’m eating I wonder about how what I’m eating came to be discovered or invented. Usually it is pretty basic. Og watched the animals eat something and got Thag to eat it, and if Thag didn’t die, it was edible. Or some slob cook cooking for Emperor SoAnSo who didn’t want to get his head cut off, mixed up some stuff and got a cake out of the deal.
A while back I was eating a cheeseburger and started thinking. Burger, that’s easy. The veggies, that is always happening. Cheese, some guy forgot he was carrying milk in the sheep stomach and found cheese a month later. The mayo… well… mixing eggs with oil, weird but I kind sort of see a bored cook coming up with that. Bread, hey bread has been around for what, 10,000 years give or take? But wait… The bread. Okay, Og mixed up some flour and water to make a flatbread mammoth burger and got called away from the fire to fix some water leak in the cave, and came back to find it all poofed up because of wild yeast. Got it. But…
Where the hell did Og get the flour? The basic ingredient of human existence. Flour. Where did it come from? Who invented it? It is not like flour is a natural thing. It takes a good bit of work to make flour, rather than just eating the seeds that they knew were edible, or boiling them in some water. Where did people get the idea to sit down, put food they ate every day on a rock and smash it up with another rock so they could mix the powder with water and then have the basic food of human life? This isn’t a fairly modern food invention brought on by bored kings and adventurers.
I would think that people first ground grain to make beer. Bread came later with a much finer grind, maybe as an experiment to make a kind of travel food like Pemmican along with nut flour and dried ground meats.
In his book “Near A Thousand Tables,” Felipe Fernandez-Armesto notes:
No convincing theory of how or why bread making began has ever been proposed.*
He does point out that the earliest unquestionable evidence of wheat farming available to date comes from excavations in the Jordan Valley, around Jericho and Tell Aswad, in strata corresponding to the seventh or eighth millennium BCE, where varieties of both einkorn and emer were grown.
Imagine OG is carrying various grains in a bag, any wheat like grain. Grains in a bag rub together as Og walks, abrading the
individual grains, this results in a powder. Og somewhere got really hungry, and in desperation ate the powder in the bottom of
their grain bag. He would probably add water to this normal dietary grain to make it easy to eat (like water softens rice, or
oatmeal, etc.), so he probably added water to this dust too; hence flatbread. Then, as you say, add natural yeast and a
delay, you have bread.
I suspect that Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History Of The Universe is fairly close to the mark.
In it, the cavewomen are testing various plants for edibility after cooking. In one panel, they are seen boiling various grasses. One of them says, “Boiled stems,” and the other says “Yuck.”
In the next panel, they are seen boiling barley. “Boiled seeds,” says the first one. The second says, “Better, but still yuck…”
I suspect that the cavewomen who first tried boiling rice didn’t say yuck. The ones who experimented with oats didn’t say yuck. And the ones who had to work with wheat or barley simply stuck with it, perhaps drying and grinding the stuff, until… one day…
Og had a crabby old father. He honored him and always brought him all the food he needed, but when his teeth fell out, Og would bring the grains and get crabbed at for the next six hours (it seemed longer since they did not have clocks or watches at the time), because chewing the grains made Og Senior’s gums hurt.
Og tried boiling the grains to soften them, and even smashing the grains after boiling them, but it still wasn’t enough, old Pa still crabbed. Then Og tried grinding the grains before boiling them, using two rocks, then mixing with water and baking on a flat rock like pancakes, and that worked the best, partly because the grinding of the dry grains
Also Og’s physical strength and grace in doing the grinding, and the resultant muscles, impressed Ogina who then became Mrs. Og.
Hey, the hamsters ate some words! Please substitute:
Og had a crabby old father. He honored him and always brought him all the food he needed, but when his teeth fell out, Og would bring the grains and get crabbed at for the next six hours (it seemed longer since they did not have clocks or watches at the time), because chewing the grains made Og Senior’s gums hurt.
Og tried boiling the grains to soften them, and even smashing the grains after boiling them, but it still wasn’t enough, old Pa still crabbed. Then Og tried grinding the grains before boiling them, using two rocks, then mixing with water and baking on a flat rock like pancakes, and that worked the best, partly because the grinding of the dry grains drowned out old Pa’s pre-meal crabbing about being hungry.
Also Og’s physical strength and grace in doing the grinding, and the resultant muscles, impressed Ogina who then became Mrs. Og.