Breasts. Bread. Notice any affinities beyond the voluptuous curves of those twinned B’s? Breasts and bread are humankind’s most universally venerated objects. Both sustain life and, in English, the two words may share roots in an ancient (and very observant) Indo-European civilization’s word for “swelling”-bhreus. Breasts and bread also share symbolism: At their idealized best they are plump, warm, yielding and toothsome. Yum.
What this litany of praise overlooks is a dirty little secret: Like all treasured icons, bread is power, and people have done most anything-anything!-to get their share.
Breasts, we know. Bread, we only think we know. Even the Israelites, who greeted talking clouds and pillars of fire with an extraordinary nonchalance, looked upon heavenly bread and found themselves stumped. “Man hu?” they asked. “What is it?” Good question.
Long before the Hebrews’ encounter with manna, however, regular old bread was a menu staple. It was bread, in fact, that lured Homo sapiens to abandon the glamor of life on the road and settle down. Compared to stalking mastodons, baking was easier; just parch wild grain, mix it with water, leave the little patties in the sun and-voila!-food that did not dodge the spear or gore the hunter.
When it was discovered, around 11,000 B.C., that the fallen kernels reliably sprouted new plants, agriculture-and villages and a boom of babies to populate those villages-was born. So from the beginning, bread was a player, a cultural force. For bread, people were willing to stay put and live in proximity to their mothers-in-law.
Still, for all its burgeoning influence, early bread was prototype rather than perfection. It was lumpy, flat and very likely hard as the rocks it baked on (think of matzo) or lumpy, flat and gooey (think of congealed porridge). Of course, back then almost everything was rather flat: Cave wall drawings lacked perspective, and Earth was a plane, not a sphere. Achieving the pleasant swell of a rounded loaf that resembled . . . well, a breast . . . required two future developments: a different world view and the intervention of a lively and voracious little fungus with a sweet tooth-yeast.
Early bread also suffered from early bakers’ confusion about what constituted choice ingredients. Peas? Sure, let’s try peas. Rice? How about acorns? Acorns might be nice. Science was not Mesolithic people’s strong suit, and they lived in far too early an era to understand that only rigorous one-variable experimentation can prevent unproductive deadends.
Until their search narrowed the candidates to wheat as the chief or sole grain, their recipes lacked gluten, the amazing elastic-webbing protein. Without gluten, bread is brittle or crumbly, not spongy. Nonetheless, the first bakers earned an A for effort and honorable mention for producing a grain-based concoction that kept alive more family members than it killed.
After 7,000 more years of trial and error, breadmakers hit upon a truly novel idea: Milling. Kernels ground between hard rocks break open into the seed coat (bran) and the pulverized germ and endosperm (flour). Bread made from flour rather than whole kernels was easier on the teeth, smoother on the tongue and a spur for 4,000 B.C.’s newest industry: the manufacture and operation of querns, elementary little mills on the order of a mortar and pestle.
Any civilization finicky enough to cut the 2.5-ton stones of its kings’ tombs so precisely that a postcard cannot be slipped between them millenia later could be counted on to build a better bread. Just 500 years after milling swept the known world, the Egyptians contributed two simple innovations to the baking arts: the oven, which rendered hot-rock cookery obsolete except in camping circles, and yeast leavening, which made the old-fashioned dense flour-water paste go ballistic.
Yeast, with its miraculous ability to create airy pockets within the stretchy gluten web, was less the Egyptians’ invention than their discovery, and an accidental one at that. Yeast spores, the tiny capsules of dormant fungus that drift around waiting to land on something hospitably warm, wet and sweet, were (and are) everywhere. Provided with these amenities, the spores awaken, convert starches to sugars, digest the sugars and give off alcohol and carbon dioxide gases as byproducts.
If the medium is a liquid mash of, say, grapes or barley, the result of yeast fermentation is wine or beer. If the medium is dough made with wheat, the gases are trapped within the gluten web, and the dough expands. The heat of baking burns off the gases and dries the swollen loaf.
That crafty baker near the Nile may not have understood the science of yeast, but he (or she) certainly recognized a big problem when it invaded the kitchen. The supposition goes that a swarm of spores made a forgotten batch of dough their home. When next spied by the baker, the dough had swelled to distinctly telltale proportions. Terrified this gaffe would lead to a pink slip (i.e., a beheading), the baker thought to destroy the evidence by beating the dough until it flattened. This, of course, was kneading, which only temporarily expels the gases and further develops the gluten web. In the oven, the yeast, as yeast will do, fell thrall to the heat and again puffed up the bread, which exited the oven tall, brown and, lucky for the baker, tasty.
Bread’s bulk was not the only thing to rise when the Egyptians wedded yeast to dough and tucked it into heated chambers. Bread’s status as a desired and politically useful commodity skyrocketed. Always nutritious (before the Industrial Revolution got hold of it, anyway), bread was suddenly comely, delicious and easily baked. It soon became-and for another 5,000 or so years remained-the mainstay of the average person’s intake to the tune of two to three pounds per day.
Always alert to opportunity, politicians saw bread’s potential as The Great Pacifier, knowing that peasants with full stomachs tend not to mount embarrassing revolutions, and The Great Revenue Raiser, knowing there was money to be made by taxing agriculture and its cousin enterprises-milling, baking, sales, cartage and import. From 3,500 B.C. the rise and fall of civilizations came to be tied more and more closely to the rise and fall of the not-so-humble crumb.
Once the Romans got their hands on the new technology, there was no way to staunch bread’s popularity or power. The Romans harnessed animals, wind and water to drive the mills and nurtured a ready supply of yeast by skimming the mold from fermenting wine. Commercial bakeries sprang up to churn out the bread that, together with the famous circus entertainments, kept the population tractable. Well-fed on good bread, the Roman legions spread out to divide Gaul into three parts, and the rest, in short, is the history of Western civilization.
Other civilizations, of course, had their breads and ate them, too, but none quite achieved the cultural and political influence of the variety born around the Mediterranean basin and cheerfully exported by military and commercial adventurers. No wonder. Bread fed not only the ancients’ bodies but those portions of heart and mind where law, ritual, custom and superstition get hatched.
In many cultures, grain was sacred and presided over by assorted goddesses, a belief that, by extension, bestowed a mystical significance on bread itself. Muslims, Jews and Christians may have a history of tussling over dibs on select Holy Land sites, but ecumenism has reigned over an article of faith they all share: Bread is the gift the Divine keeps on giving.
Muslims so revere bread that to touch a knife to a loaf is a sacrilege-only the hand will do. Even discarded pieces are treated with respect and sometimes with devout kisses.
References show that, manna aside, there was indeed a whole lot of baking going on in the Old Testament. The most memorable-and commemorated-breadmaking occurred when the enslaved Israelites confronted a choice: Flee Egypt before Pharaoh could rethink his request that they and their pesky plagues hit the trail or take the time to knead yeast into their dough. They decided that while leavened loaves were nice, freedom was better. To this day observant Jews’ annual Passover celebration features the very flat bread, matzo.
In the New Testament, bread both miraculously multiplied to feed a crowd that came to meeting without packing provisions and mystically united supper guests in a holy communion that has continued for 2,000 years.
With God so clearly on bread’s side, the staff of life became a pillar at the base of secular custom too. To unite the medium with the message, breadmakers started fashioning loaves into symbolic shapes. The braided Jewish challah suggested a stairway to heaven, while Greek bread circles reminded the eater of eternity. Sometimes the shapes reflected seasonal themes: hot-cross buns at Easter, Italian panettone at Christmas baked tall to resemble the Wise Men’s turbans, and finely wrought dough wreaths depicting a harvest’s bounty. Bread became art.
Bread also became status symbol. Dark was downmarket, light was elite. Generally any serf could toss together oats, millet, barley or rye to produce a dense, squat, dark loaf so tough it rocked the teeth in the jawbone. High-risen white bread, however, took some forethought, muscle and nimble fingers. Wheat, with its pliant gluten and creamy beige heart, initially was not as widely available as the other cereal grains, and what wheat there was further required laborious sifting (called “bolting,” for the fabric sieves) to separate the flour from the oily germ and the dark, crunchy bran. Fewer dark parts equaled greater whiteness and bragging rights.
With the advent of bolting, white bread became the rage, but only the privileged could afford it. English bakers, endowed with an entrepreneurial eye for an underserved market niche, were routinely accused of lightening their brown dough with alum (a sulphate of aluminum and phosphate), chalk, white lead or bone ashes. The little ditty the giant recited when Jack (of beanstalk fame) paid a visit-“Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread”-was regrettably not just the stuff of fairy tales.
Those in society for whom bread was a culinary accent rather than main course devised highly ingenious ways of showing off their wealth. In medieval England, the lord of a household plucked an honored lackey from anonymity, equipped him with a set of special bread knives and a ceremonial bread cloth and dubbed him the panter. It was the panter’s job to cut the choice upper crust (ahem) of fresh bread for his lord’s consumption and trim the days-old bread into platters called trenchers on which other foods were served. At meal’s end the servants, among them the butler, who was keeper of the butts of alcoholic brew, feasted on the sopping trenchers.
Those too low-born to partake of even this largesse made do with coarse breads unless the crops failed, the lord’s minions hauled off the harvest or some army trampled the conventional cereal grains into the mud. Ever inventive, the peasants mixed their dough with whatever came to hand. Some selections, such as cabbage and dried ground locusts, did not score high on taste tests but offered the advantage of being benign; other ingredients resulted in loaves that were the equivalent of the marijuana brownie.
These makeshift flour substitutes such as darnel (a weedy rye grass), poppy and certain berries, roots and rotted grains were chemically liable to make anybody wig out, and history suggests that most everybody who ate them did go berserk-in droves. Medieval chroniclers throughout Europe recorded veritable epidemics of bizarre behaviors such as orgies of dance fever (St. Vitus Dance), collective hallucinations and disoriented stupors. The most educated observers of the times, safe within their white-bread and often ecclesiastical enclaves, drew one conclusion: the wages of sin and demons.
For hundreds of years, tainted bread remained a persistent danger, and official deductions about the cause of the weirdness continued to miss the mark. In the late 1600s the rye crops in Salem, Mass., fell prey to ergot, a fungal infection whose toxin, lysergic acid, is the parent compound of LSD. When the good citizens who ingested the unknowingly poisoned bread experienced hallucinations, fits, sterility and other physical and psychotic symptoms, Salem Colony’s no-nonsense leadership drew one conclusion: bewitchment.
Evading deserved blame for the misery toxic loaves actually caused, bread ironically developed a reputation for magical interventions not likely to succeed. Bread became talisman. Many societies made bread a centerpiece of funereal rituals. Paid mourners in England ate bread over an occupied coffin, thereby “eating” the deceased’s sins to ensure the soul’s unblemished entry into paradise. Andean peoples even today sculpt “bread babies” for cemetery dining on the annual Day of the Dead in the belief that the living are conduits of nourishment to the departed. And no Egyptian mummy of note was properly entombed without a larder stocked to hearten the soul for its journey beyond the hieroglyphs.
From antiquity onward, class warfare was essentially a set of skirmishes over who got the white bread or, indeed, who got any bread at all. Bread unmade kings and made nations. Testy when drought-induced wheat prices forced 85 of every 100 centimes to be spent for food, French bread-lovers vented their pique outside the Bastille in 1789. Cake, Marie Antoinette’s suggestion for an alternative nosh, wouldn’t do; it has no satisfyingly chewy gluten sponge.
Two hundred years later, Soviet consumers concluded, after seven decades of standing in line for a loaf, that Communism, as economic systems go, left a lot to be desired. Thinking better bread than Red, they went democratic.
Whole-grain, crusty, white, trimmed, yeasty, brown, dense, flaky, cubed, buttered, toasted, flat or fried, bread has fed the human army in its stumble through the ages toward the honey pot of a better life and the jam jar of wilder appetites. Even after some 13,000 years, it is as common as dirt, as treasured as gold and as holy as God.
Bread is money, money is dough and a pending addition to the human family is a bun in the oven.
People pray for bread, break it, earn it, cast it, eat it and give thanks for it. Bread. Is good. Yum.
