I was excited to see today’s column title, How did bread get invented?, as it is a question I’ve been pondering for years, along with other “how did prehistorical humans figure out X” questions. The column left me disappointed, though. Cecil just kept saying it was obvious without explaining how.
I very much doubt that prehistorical me would view pre-domestication wheat and consider it an obvious crop. Today’s version of me might manage to do the graham cracker thing but only because I knew it was possible. How is it obvious? How are the intervening steps obvious? Especially the addition of yeast, which Cecil at least concedes might have required insight. Insight acquired how?
I’m sure hunter-gatherers tried eating wheat for the reason Cecil outlines, but how did that lead them to conclude you could create something edible out of the stuff?
I realise these questions are ultimately unanswerable without time travel, but obvious I think they are not.
If I may, I’d like to propose a scenario for wheat => bread, based upon my interest in wild food foraging.
Many grass seeds are abundant and worth the effort of collecting, and the easiest way to make a meal of a pile of grains is to add water and heat the resultant gruel. Overcooking or drying out the gruel inspires the next step of cooking the grain paste into patties. Our old friend Yeast joins the mix at some point, and if you’re hungry enough you’ll go ahead and bake* the mush that’s gotten bubbly. And hey, these wheat cakes are (relatively) light, and tasty! Thus, bread.
*Or you could leave the pot of thin gruel even longer before daring to sample the contents, which tastes gross but gives you a slight buzz. Which came first, bread or beer?
Probably hand in hand. Once, Anchor Steam Beer made a batch of Sumerian beer, based on a recipe found in an ancient poem. It is mentioned in the link’s history section but the source I read at the time said it was a micro-batch made for a company party.
It involved milling the barley, twice-baking it into bread, then breaking up the bread into the vat along with some honey (and no hops). The resulting brew was low in alcohol, considerably sweeter than modern beer, and had a lot of sediment floating on the top. Egyptians had pottery bowls with a tube leading to the bottom molded into the side. At the party they settled for Solo cups and straws.
The spokesman for Anchor said it was tasty enough but making it really mucked up the vat so they probably would not be repeating the experiment.
The article could have been a little more explicit about how easy it is to make bread once you have wheat. I have no idea why insight is even required. Mix water and wheat together and wild yeast in the air will start feeding on it and multiply. In the right proportions of wheat and water you get dough and beer. I don’t see the next step of baking the dough to require much insight either.
Great article … wonderful way to lay out a framework with plenty of room for crackpotism … thank you Unca Cece, I love you man …
We can just throw grass seed into boiling water to make the stuff edible … let me throw out here that maybe grain wasn’t the first thing early humans ground up … I’m thinking our local Native Natives here in the PNW ground up acorns to make them edible by necessity … it’s an easy step to say early humans did the same and someone at sometime tried grinding up grain just for the hell of it … given the propensity of humans to bang things with rocks …
The introduction of yeast may be as simple as the wind blowing … we’re talking about centuries of fat-headed human experiences passed down through the wonders of verbal language … we could have many generations of hard praying to the gods until someone noticed that a little of the god-touched wheat powder mixed in with fresh wheat powder caused all of it to be divinely blessed … the tribe that discovered this would greatly benefit by not having to sacrifice as many of their children …
Wheat, corn and (although not mentioned in The Master’s article) rice may just be species most suitable for domestication AND have excellent nutritional properties AND can be stored for long periods of time … would early humans try a number of different grasses and just by trial and error stumble upon wheat/corn/rice … and once stumbled upon then “evolved” to thrive on these grains …
Alas we had to wait until the 20th Century to fully enjoy all the benefits of sliced bread …
Yeast is the one step in the process that does seem obvious to me. Leave anything sitting out, and it’s going to get some wild yeast growing in it, no human intervention required.
I don’t think saying “it is obvious” is a very good answer at all.
Obviously, humans had to be eating something – probably learned from their forebears. Better would have been to point out that humans were eating wheat for more than 2000 years before bread was invented. Early strains of wheat did not have enough gluten to support yeast. Before the invention of unleavened bread, people were probably boiling the grains – and they were probably using any grain they could find, not just wheat. In fact, it took thousands of years for wheat to spread beyond the Fertile Crescent. Neolithic Man was eating something else in all the rest of the world.
Apple juice and grape juice readily “turn hard” … yeasties floating in fermenting the sugars into ethanol … it’s more difficult preventing these fruit juices from fermenting in my experience …
The one that always makes me think is coffee. I’m sure it was one thing at a time, but how did we get to:
Let’s grow this plant,
Let’s pick the berries, throw the plant away.
Take the seeds (beans) out out the berries, throw the berries away.
Roast and then grind the beans.
Pour hot water through the grounds and throw the beans away.
Drink the water!
what gets me is food things that are claimed to be invented like supposedly in the first 2-300 years of cookies and processed chocolate no one put the two together until the 1930s…
Ethiopian Goat herders noticed that eating coffee berries made goat hyper. They found out that eating the berry and spitting out the seed didn’t give the energizing effect, therefore the energy is in the seeds. Boiling hot things in water is an ancient method of food prep. Throwing away the beans is a recent addition. They used to sit in the bottom of the cup, like tea leaves.
We’re talking about a fairly long time … in any given millennium, there’s going to be one hell of a lot of starving people willing to eat anything and everything … it’s just a matter of trial and error to find which foodstuffs are nutritious and which are toxic …
Wild yeasts and other things. When you stumble upon a combination of bugs that makes good bread (or booze), you cultivate a starter (unless you’re Belgian: lambics are brewed by the “hope for the best” method). I reckon folks figured that out relatively early on.
It might be worth mentioning that the proscription against “leaven” at Passover isn’t about ingredients per se, but about how long you can leave dough out before baking.
There is an outstanding brewery near me (but not near enough, IMO) that makes all their beers that way, or at least started them that way. (I imagine they cultivated their own starters once they got good results, but they use all local wild yeasts.) I love sour beer, and everything they make has at least a little tang from the wild yeasts (similar to lambics). Wild-fermented IPA is surprisingly nice! Of course, his is California, which is known for favorable yeast strains.
That’s an interesting point about Passover bread. I remember the explanation in Exodus that the Israelites made bread in preparation for fleeing Egypt, but didn’t have time to let it rise, but I didn’t put two and two together and realize that they weren’t just waiting for the yeast (or starter) they added to make the dough rise, they were waiting for yeast to spontaneously cultivate in the dough.
I agree that it is incredibly long winded but doesn’t provide much information.
Cultivation is not needed to start bread making. People were harvesting grains long before cultivation. In fact, it is rather obvious that such harvesting had to be done for quite some time before cultivation begins. No one’s going to try and cultivate something they haven’t been using already. So forget that aspect.
Grinding and pulping grains is also something that would have been done for many millennia. You don’t chew dried out grain. You mash it up and wet it down. So that’s also ancient.
Cooking, baking food also goes way, way back.
As noted, once you have some wet ground-up flour sitting around, yeast is almost a certainty. But it’s a hit or miss prospect. Takes too long, get a bad kind of yeast, something else takes over and makes the mix go bad, etc. People have to be careful and not waste food.
So the real trick is keeping a bit of the last batch of dough to start the next batch. This is the key step by far. It’s not obvious at all nor would ancient people understand bacteria and all that. There might have been some related knowledge: take some hard cider and add it to new cider to speed up things or some such.
But it is still the biggest step and the hardest to figure out it was done the first time. But it was.
Yet it is not mentioned in the article.
(I like that in Snow Crash bread making is given as a prime example of a tech meme.)
I would think ancients just added a bit of the last batch ‘for luck’, like in other cooking, or making log fires with a bit of the previous charcoal ‘for luck’.
I seem to remember reading, possibly in Guns, Germs and Steel, which I read a long time ago, that wheat is a particularly easy grain to harvest as a hunter-gatherer–that it’s easy to walk past a stand of wheat growing and pick several ripe heads of grain, with the individual grains easily accessible for a quick, nutritious snack.
I also seem to remember that there is a simple mutation that causes the wheat not to release the grains when they ripen. This requires threshing to remove the corns from the chaff, but it means it’s easy to gather whole heads of grain and take them back to your village. Normally, these grains, not being released, wouldn’t germinate and produce new plants, but humans harvesting them would inevitably spill a few grains leading to new generations with the same mutation, which would then be harvested preferentially by humans. So the first steps in domestication were entirely accidental and “natural,” caused by a spontaneous common mutation and the normal behavior of humans.
Can anyone confirm any of this? I hate relying on half-remembered and unsourced factoids.
Indeed. If you had some dough already rising it’s no leap to add some of that to a fresh mix to see if starts to rise sooner. Dough rising from yeast in the air isn’t as consistent as the sun rising everyday but it’s more regular than rain, so the need for starters may not have been great but it wouldn’t be difficult to figure it out.