B is for Bread

It’s not the barley or the wheat
It’s not the oven or the heat
That makes this bread so good to eat
It’s the kneading and the sharing that makes the meal complete

Johnny Cash, “Breakin’ Bread”

I have a confession to make; I sometimes eat bread for dessert. Put a fresh-baked rustic French baguette in front of me with some aged cheddar, and I’d give you the keys to my house. And I’m not persnickety. I’ll take brioche, English muffins, black bread, rye, bagels, challah, biscuits, ciabatta, or foccaccia. It doesn’t even need yeast. I can eat naan, tortillas, lavash, or pita with the best of ’em. Not super-fond of those corn tortillas unless they’re fried with meat, but wasn’t that the point? Wonder bread is probably the only kind I don’t like and never did, otherwise, pretzels count, crackers–hey, don’t get me started on dumplings.

Humans have been making forms of bread for about 30,000 years +/-. They needed fire, but they didn’t need yeast or even organized farming. How yeast got there is its own story, and something of a controversy. They’ve been arguing for the past fifty years, about whether beer came before bread or vice versa. Let’s start without yeast and work our way forward. As with each of my A to Z ancient invention posts, the story of Bread will cover the basics:

1. A core definition of the “thing”
2. Where and when it happened first “around the world”
3. How it influenced human development

As this is only my second “ancient invention” post, it’s worth noting that there is kind of a dividing line when it comes to such inventions. What we know is based on trace evidence, so if the invention depends on something organic, we may only know about it from ancient documentation. If people painted it on the walls or wrote about it stone tablets that can be read, that sets a date, even if it’s not the earliest date. We know about bread from Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics, but what kind of evidence would predate recorded history? You can’t exactly see bread, thousands of years later, can you?

The Formula Only Sounds Simple

GRAIN + GRIND + WATER + HEAT. That’s bread. If you add yeast, it will puff up. If you knead the mix of ground grain and liquid, it will improve the texture. Eggs, patterns, shapes–all that is augmentation. You start with a grain, frind into a powder, i.e. flour, add some kind of liquid, then heat it.

Yet even in the cradle of civilization, in the Middle East 20,000 years ago, wheat cereals weren’t particularly convenient. Wild wheat seeds known as einkorn burst open when ripe, dropping the edible bits on the ground. A gatherer accustomed to picking up fruits and tubers, ready to eat, would have had to do a lot of work, between stooping to pick up one tiny seed and another, grinding them together, adding filtered and purified water, then heating the result. The first person to do it put in a lot of effort just to vary their diet. Even later on, the intrepid wild wheat gatherer was probably using up more calories gathering and cooking than the bread provided.

Still, worldwide, almost every culture had access to cereal grains. Some were known to bake the cereals, even before they were farming, i.e. improving the cereal crops. Once the gatherers had experimented with forms of wheat where the ripe seeds stayed on the plant (tougher “raiches”) to be gathered by the handful, humans were much happier on their bread-making journey.

How to Find Ancient Bread

For a long time, bread being organic material was only known from recorded history. Archaeologists had found grindstones as old as 350,000 years. They knew these stones were for grinding seeds as well as animal pelts, but smashing and grinding don’t get you to a lovely loaf of brioche. The seeds could have been mixed with water and eaten as “gruel.”

They also found fire pits–evidence of fire goes back a million years or more–but there is a difference between a pit and an oven. Communal-style ovens have been uncovered in large archaeological sites in Turkey, i.e. 6600 BCE, but that came after wheat was cultivated as a crop. Occasionally, researchers even find preserved material in graves. The Egyptians were known for their sophisticated techniques in preserving bodies and sealing tombs off from air, so cone-shaped loaves have been found in tombs that go back 5000 years. But that’s still not when bread was first “invented.”

Enterprising scientists looking at a site in Jordan called Shubayqa got very clever with microscopes. Shubayqa had been picked over since the 1990s. Archaeologists knew that it had large fireplaces which had been expanded and rebuilt, more than once. Over 65,000 samples of organic material had been collected, including tubers, cereal seeds, and fruits. But until 2018, it was hard to claim that tiny bits of charred remains were not simply cooked seeds or legumes. What Amaia Arranz-Otaeguia and her smart colleagues were able to do was use new technology to look a lot more closely.

They saw bread, 14,400 years old. “Macroscopically, all fragments showed a starchy, often vitrified, microstructure and irregular porous matrix, indicative of well-processed food components … This idea is supported by the size of the voids.” This was organic remains that had been mixed before cooking and ended up with baked air holes (voids). Even bread makers who work without yeast or gluten know that holes can occur in unleavened bread because of steam.

To date, Shubayqa still holds the record, if you will, for the oldest bread found. But it’s not the only organic bread material found.

Not Wheat, Still Bread

If you buy the definition of Bread as Grain + Grind + Liquid, then you might agree that the resulting dough doesn’t need to be formed into a loaf, cone, or even a circle. Professor Houyuan Lu from the Academy of Science in Beijing, digging in northwestern China in 2008, also made an amazing discovery. He found earthenware bowls that dated back to 4000 BCE (to be explored further in “D”). When he upended one of the bowls, the results got a lot more interesting.

Lu noted thin strings, about 20 inches in length, swirled together. But these were not made of animal sinew or any human-made fibers. These were noodles.

These world’s oldest known noodles were not made of wheat but a grain called millet, a grain available before buckwheat spread across eastern Asia. Lu believes the noodles were hand-stretched and pulled, not that different from the process still in use. Even with a gluten-free grain, stretching can improve the pliability and ensure even distribution of ingredients. The find also may end the controversy about whether noodles migrated from China westward or the other way around. Ain’t no 4000-year-old noodles in Rome.

Mesoamericans also had no wheat, but made their own version of bread. Maize–a cousin of corn–was the staple crop across southern Mexico and further south. As far back as 6500 BCE, maize was believed farmed by the Olmecs, the earliest civilization of the region. It was pounded and mixed, very similar to wheat without yeast, and baked in underground ovens or on heated stones. Maize was such a vital crop that it was linked to heaven, first to goddesses (think Ceres in Rome) and then gods.

The Great Beer-Bread Debate

As someone who does not imbibe in alcohol and eats bread for a dessert, I find the beer vs. bread debate a little silly. Who would care whether beer came first? Apparently, a lot of people! So let’s do a little recap.

Robert Braidwood in the 1950s was the first to argue that beer, rather than bread, might have been domesticated first. He claimed that beer would have been easier to process from the tough-husked early wheat, which was so hard to harvest and turn into food. He also noted that alcohol’s psychopharmacological properties would have been revered, perhaps even connected with spiritualism. Harvard professor Paul Mangelsdorf snarked back that man did not live by beer alone: “Are we to believe that the foundations of Western Civilization were laid by an ill-fed people living in a perpetual state of partial intoxication?”

Despite my abhorrence for beer, I’d say Why not? From whenever alcohol was invented, it was handier than water as a drinking source. Fresh water had to be purified and kept pure; beer or wine would last longer and were drinkable even when sour. Beer is made, as one writer put it, from “rotten gruel,” with added yeast, time, and heat. However, the yeast might come from honey, insects, acorns, or other random sources. Fermentation was more likely to happen accidentally than grinding, forming a dough, and baking a sheet of bread.

The Egyptians, by the time they were writing about beer and bread, loved both. They brewed more than a dozen kinds of beer and called it a gift from Osiris, who left his gruel too long in the sun. The Assyrians also recognized fermentation by the time they were hosting feasts, which may have included beer and bread.

Beer needs yeast but also creates a foam. Pliny the Elder argued that putting that foam into dough would have created leavened bread. Food experimentation might have been something of a circular process. Wheat seeds were made sometimes into gruel and sometimes into pounded bread “dough.” Maybe the gruel fermented and turned to beer; maybe the foam was skimmed off to make the dough better.

In 1972, geneticist George Beadle discovered that modern corn’s ancestor was a grain called teosinte. It had ears like corn, though it wasn’t edible in the same way and didn’t provide the same caloric value as maize did. What teosinte did provide is a sweet juice that ferments. Assuming Beadle was right, it meant the Mesoamericans might also have created multiple crops, some of which could be processed into alcohol and others into bread.

It’s impossible to prove which came first. To me, it seems plausible that they developed together, some 15,000 years ago. I don’t mind agreeing that beer came first as long as bread came along. They can both share the limelight.

However long the journey took to cultivate the best form of wheat, corn, millet, pea flour, or rice, the early cultures enjoyed their bread products. The Egyptians had 17 different kinds of beer, but the Mesopotamians had 300 different words for bread. I would be happy to taste test those at the Bread Banquet of Ashurbanipal!