Ask a Question
or
Create a Poll
  1. Home /
  2. Questions /
  3. Food And Dining
  4. / Foods
  5. / Bread And Grains

by Anonymous on April 28th, 2006

Anonymous

Question

Help answer this question below.

How did early man first come up with the idea of bread? Isn't the method awfully complex to have come across by accident?

Share:
Other

Answers. 2 helpful answers below.

  • by Alatea on May 9th, 2006

    Alatea

    We don't know when or how the first leavened bread occurred; only that the first records of any sort of bread are in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Possibly one day a mixture of flour meal and water was left longer than usual on a warm day and the yeasts that occur in natural contaminants of the flour - or even in milk that may have been added for flavour - began to ferment before baking. The resulting bread would have been lighter and more tasty than the normal flat, hard cake.

    Gradually it became the norm to produce leavened breads, keeping a soft lump of one day's fermented dough to add to the next baking session's fresh batch to speed up fermentation. Although we mostly use commercial yeasts today, bread from a sourdough starter is not uncommon - and is more or less what the ancient Egyptians would have been baking.

    In the Bible, when the Israelites left captivity in Egypt, they took their dough with them before it was leavened in their rush to depart.

    It seems likely that the next step - the interdependence between flour and yeast, bread and fermenting liquid - was established sometime later in ancient Egypt. There are hieroglyphs from over 5000 years ago which show bake-houses with dough rising next to bread ovens.

    In ancient Egypt wine-making and brewing occurred alongside baking3 and it can't have taken long for some fermenting brewing liquor - a kind of liquid yeast, or barm - to have ended up in the bread dough, whether accidentally or experimentally. We just don't know. However, bread made with dough and fermenting liquid is even lighter than sourdough. So the first barm-raised bread was developed.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2791820

    Grown in Mesopotamia and Egypt, wheat was likely first merely chewed. Later it was discovered that it could be pulverized and made into a paste. Set over a fire, the paste hardened into a flat bread that kept for several days. It did not take much of a leap to discover leavened (raised) bread when yeast was accidentally introduced to the paste.

    Instead of waiting for fortuitous circumstances to leaven their bread people found that they could save a piece of dough from a batch of bread to put into the next day's dough. This was the origin of sour-dough, a process still used today.

    In Egypt, around 1000 BC, inquiring minds isolated yeast and were able to introduce the culture directly to their breads. Also a new strain of wheat was developed that allowed for refined white bread. This was the first truly modern bread. Up to thirty varieties of bread may have been popular in ancient Egypt.

    It was also during this time that bread beer was developed. The bread was soaked in water and sweetened and the foamy liquor run off. Beer was as popular in ancient Egypt as it is in America today.

    The Greeks picked up the technology for making bread from the Egyptians; from Greece the practice spread over Europe. Bread and wheat were especially important in Rome where it was thought more vital than meat. Soldiers felt slighted if they were not given their allotment. The Roman welfare state was based on the distribution of grain to people living in Rome. Later the government even baked the bread.

    Through much of history, a person's social station could be discerned by the color of bread they consumed. The darker the bread, the lower the social station. This was because whiter flours were more expensive and harder for millers to adulterate with other products. Today, we have seen a reversal of this trend when darker breads are more expensive and highly prized for their taste as well as their nutritional value.

    In the middle ages bread was commonly baked in the ovens of the lord of the manor for a price. It was one of the few foods that sustained the poor through the dark age.

    Bread continued to be important through history as bread riots during the French Revolution attest. The famous quotation attributed to Marie Antoinette that if the poor could not get bread for their table then "let them eat cake," became a famous illustration of how royalty had become ignorant of the plight of the lower classes. Actually, Marie Antoinette never said this and was merely being slandered by her detractors.

    Still thought of as the "staff of life", for centuries bread has been used in religious ceremonies. Even the lord's prayer requests of God to "Give us this day our daily bread" - meaning not merely loaves, but moral sustenance.

    Today, even with the competition of a growing variety of foods, bread remains important to our diet and our psyche. It has a prominent place in at the local market, in our cupboards and even in our language. The word "bread" is commonly used as a slang term for money. It connotes importance as when we say that some aspect of our work is "our bread and butter". In many households bread is still served with every meal.

    Bread has a long history for a reason. It is a healthy and nutritious food that fills the stomach as well as the soul.

    Whether you do it by hand or a machine try some of the recipes at this site and discover the magic that is in the very taste and smell of fresh baked bread!

    http://www.breadinfo.com/history.shtml

    Edit - Grandma Roses - Maybe you didn't see all the text here. It includes - There are hieroglyphs from "over 5000 years ago" which show bake-houses with dough rising next to bread ovens.

    • Like
    • Report

    1 comment | Post one | Permalink

  • by Grandma Roses - my avatar is my real dog on May 8th, 2006

    Grandma Roses - my avatar is my real dog

    It was more probably early woman who came up with the idea!! She was home in the tribal settlement area with the kids while the menfolk were out getting the meat course of woolly mammoth or mountain goat or trout, and she was in charge of getting everything else ready for the evening meal.

    Early bread bore almost no similarity to what we know today as bread. It was most probably just beaten or crushed grains mixed with water, patted together and left to dry in the sun or by the fire pit. It might even have been made of nuts rather than grains, as grains were not as common until agriculture became more advanced. Different ingredients were used in different parts of the world; for example, the First Nations in North America used corn, as it was readily available. Later, other ingredients were incorporated such as honey and raisins (dried grapes).

    Cooking methods range from letting it dry in the sun or before the fire, to cooking on hot stones, between hot stones, and later, in clay ovens or on metal plates. Bannock can be cooked by wrapping balls of the dough around long green hardwood sticks and holding above a fire until it is cooked. These would all have produced a bread that was heavy, chewy and very unlike what we today would call bread.

    The secret of bread is in the leavening, what makes those carbon dioxide bubbles that give bread its chewy texture and differentiate it from weapons suitable for hand-to-hand combat. All sorts of things can be used and have been discovered at various times - eggs, baking soda, yeast, etc. Amusingly, using yeast in bread might be a by-product of the beer-making process :

    'In fact, fermenting grain to make alcohol is almost certainly as old, and may even be older than the cultivation of grain to make bread. Ancient Mesopotamian texts from the third millennium BC refer to no fewer than 19 different varieties of beer. And a model found in a 2000 BC Egyptian tomb, in which a bakery and a brewery are joined together, is testimony to the longstanding link between the use of yeasts in both brewing and baking.

    Until recently, it was often thought that Iron- and Bronze-Age peoples would have eaten only tough, unleavened breads. In fact, yeast has been used in making bread since at least the late Neolithic period, and the Roman writer Pliny even described the Celtic peoples of Gaul and Spain as producing a 'lighter kind of bread than others' by adding beer to the flour before cooking. '

    from http://www.channel4.com/history/timeteam/snapshot_cooking.html

    All through the years, the techniques were also being refined until today we have proofing the yeast, kneading, first rise, second rise, temperature controls, etc, none of which existed when the first woman first pounded some nuts to make a meal. The equipment has also come to include metal bread pans, serrated (or electric) knifes, special stones for baking pizza in the oven, etc., etc.

    So, the answer, I guess, is that bread wasn't discovered by accident, but is the result of millennia of refinement of ingredients, equipment and methods.

    I hope this answers your question to some degree.

    This is a really neat site for bannock recipes....

    http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/rsi/fnb/FNB.htm

    Bon appétit!

    No comments. Post one | Permalink

Want to attach an image to your answer? Click here.

Did this answer your question? If not, then ask a new question or create a poll.

More Questions. Additional questions in this category.

You're reading How did early man first come up with the idea of bread? Isn't the method awfully complex to have come across by accident?

Follow us on Facebook!

Related Ads

Related Questions

Professionally Researched

ANSWERBAG BUZZ

Where did bread come from
Where did bread originate from
Where did bannock come from
When did bread first come to the uk
Who was the first person who made bread

Answerbag

a Demand Media company