And puffy, well, that takes fairly skilled baking plus either yeast from beer or the kind of climate that sourdough does well in. In a world of scarcity, this made wheat bread pricey. Whiteness was achieved by sieving out the skin of the grain (bran) and the germ (the bit that feeds the new plant). White puffy wheat bread was for even fewer. Wheat did not yield well (only seven or eight grains for one planted compared to corn that yielded dozens) and is fairly tricky to grow.
If grains are ground into flour, mixed with water to make a paste, and then that paste is cooked usually by dry heat, the result is bread. This would have been true of farm laborers and their wives (and that’s what most of our ancestors would have been).Įven when the outer protective husks of grains had been removed they were hard to digest without further treatment: pounding, grinding, sprouting, fermenting and so on.
Only in the late nineteenth and twentieth century did large numbers of “our ancestors”–and obviously this depends on which part of the world they lived in–begin eating white bread.įor most of history, after the shift to agriculture, a large proportion of the world’s population depended on grains such as wheat, rice, corn (maize), barley, oats, rye, or millet for as much as 70-90% of their calories. Before white bread became ubiquitousīear with me while I lay out the background. This is a complete re-write of the original post. It’s been consistently one of my most popular. By Rachel Laudan JanuBread, English Food, Food History, Food Processing, Cooking and Kitchens, Grinding, Modern Food, Taste 44 CommentsĪ couple of days ago, a reader contacted me to ask me to clarify my post on why our ancestors preferred white bread.
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