|
|
|
Strabone, an historian and geographer born in 60 B.C., placed its origins in India. Diodoro Siculo, a Greek historian of the 1st century B.C. and born in Agirio in Sicily, claimed this area as the legitimate birthplace of the cereal. Beroso, supreme priest of Babylon in the 3rd century B.C. and author of a History of Babylon, maintains that wheat, along with barley and sesame, grew naturally along the Euphrates River. Many centuries later, in 1800, Alphonse Louis Pierre Pyramus de Candolle, a botanist from Genevra, in his work "Géographie Botanique Raisonnée" also claimed that wheat was of Asian origins, but from the valley of Jordan, where still today, wild ears of wheat continue to wave in the wind which blows over the western hills of the great river. According to a more modern theory soft-grained cereals (Triticum monocucuum) were probably of western Asian origins, while hard-grained cereals (Triticum dicocuum) originated in the mountains of the western Africa. The actual date of the first wheat is also a mystery. It, however, looked very little like the wheat of today, the results of many cross-fertilizations. But it is certain that grains of cereals were found in caverns of Neolithic age (6,000 to 5,000 years B.C.), in amphorae of the pyramid of Dashur (3,000 B.C.) and from the same period cereals have been found in instruments for grinding in Assyria and Babylon. It is also known that the Chionese cultivated cereals from 2,700 B.C.
With a little imagination the many ovens all over Egypt could have been considered their mints, as bread represented the currency of the kingdom. Salaries were based on a variable number of loaves. An average farm worker earned three loaves per day, as well as two pitchers of beer, another invention of the Egyptians. Also the priests were paid in bread and beer. The high Priest of the temple, who had the right to wear on his shoulders a tiger skin, a sign of his position, received 900 fine-grained loaves, 36,000 loaves cooked on the coals and 360 pitchers of beer each year. The Pharaoh was the god of wheat, who every harvest had to pour on the grains to be distributed to the salaried officials and those used for maintaining the royal house. He was the owner of numerous irrigation canals which lined the fields.
The invention of leavening The news spread and finally reached the eras of the Pharaoh who wished to try this strange bread and on finding it absolutely delicious, had eyes on the inventor of the first leavened bread, of course a beautiful girl, he fell in love with her and married her. Of course, the reality is more down-to-earth- the day surely arrived when someone decided that it was useless to leave all the bread dough to go sour and it was enough to keep just a small piece of the soured dough adding it to the fresh dough and letting it in turn ferment. From them, the soured dough for leavening was jealously guarded in every Egyptian house.
The mistery unveiled Yeast spores are deposited on traces of sugar contained in the mixture of flour and water, breaking down the sugar onto alcohol and carbonic acid. The bubbles of carbonic acid in the dough make it swell up and go soft. During the baking the carbonic acid and alcohol evaporate. The alcohol disappears completely while the carbonic acid leaves traces of its presence in the bread's pores.
The first public ovens were set up where housewives could take their already prepared dough to be baked. The proximity to Egypt and the continual trading between the two nations allowed the Greeks to be familiar with the leavening process from the earliest times. The first bread-making goes back to 240 B.C. and was recorded by Crisippo of Thiana.
Rome They called it placenta and in using this vocabulary they thus distinguished the bread products made from flour, oil and salt. From the beginning the Romans didn't place much importance on the ingredients and form of the bread, but over time and thanks to continual contacts with other peoples, it was improved. Roman bread underwent many changes. In the period of Augustus, the shapes and ingredients became many and yeast, which remained unknown until the wars with Macedonia, began to be used more skillfully. The shapes of the bread were very varied and often very well-studied. The most usual were in the shapes of squares, rolls and sticks and almost always marked in heels making it easy to divide. For feasts or even out for pure vanity, the shapes could be changed - into the shape of a lyre if a very important poet was invited, into interwoven rings if it was a wedding feast, into dice if the host had gathered together fellow gamblers, or into a key, a plait, a flower, a dagger and so on. The Romans were good bread-eaters - for breakfast they dinked it in red wine, at lunch they preferred it accompanying vegetables or olives, at dinner with eggs or honey. Soldiers were given a portion of bread of a kilogram per day and were prohibited to sell or trade it. The earliest bakers were often freed slaves, often enterprising and capable men. Aware of their power they ended up forming corporations which became increasingly important. In the era of Augustus there were 300 of them in Rome and they owned real estate, some of which they had been granted by the state in recognition of their worth. They owned the bakeries and the capital to manage them - slaves, animals and mills. They also exploited the earnings from properties in the various provinces.
To build water-mills the inhabitants of the plains would have had to create canals and artificial rises in water levels and the mills would have had to have been constructed below the level of the water table so the water could have fallen with enough force to drive them. Instead, with a wind-mill built at right height, the windy country of northern Europe would have provided all the energy needed. To construct the first wind-mill in 1393 in Spira, Germany, a Dutchman was called upon, building one with a moveable head and sails set to catch even a minimal breath of wind. In Holland where waterways flow very slowly, the importance of this invention was immediately appreciated. Thus, Holland became the main European center for the building of wind-mills. The wind-mill, along with the tulip, is still considered today the symbol of this country.
The dream of white flour However, the millers complained about their millstones - not hard enough, they had to be continually renewed. They tried a harder stone but over time also this was worn away by the grain. Thus, the white flour that we know so well today continued to be a dream. A certain engineer, Muller, a builder of mills and a highly respected man, came up with the idea of crushing the grain instead of grinding it. To do this it would be necessary to fix iron cylinders to the steam mills driving it a hundreds of revolutions per minute and turning in the opposite direction. Finding Swiss businessmen ready to finance it, the engineer, vaunting work already carried out in Poland and in Russia, began to make plans to construct his invention. A fantastic invention. The mill had five floors, each fitted with cylinders. From top to bottom there were different types of grinding, from the coarsest on the fifth floor to the finest on the first. Unfortunately the invention was enormous and therefore slower than the normal mills. It produced less flour and its costs were higher than the older mills. Ruined by accusations of incompetence, Muller disappeared. However, his invention did not disappear. It was studied again and improved by Jacob Sulzberger, an engineer who had never been involved with the mills but who was able to do what his predecessor had only projected. He completely rebuilt the cylinder system, placing two pairs on the same armature, one set over the other and causing each group to move separately. The iron cylinders were all located on the first floor while the lightest machinery was on the upper floors. The mill worked well from the first moment and was also sold abroad, especially in Hungary, a major wheat producer and which, in a short time, became the world leader in the mill industry. With the advent of the cylinder-driven mill the old dream for white flour was realized. It was at the World Exposition in Vienna in 1873 that the Americans were introduced to this type of flour for the first time. In 1879, Washburn, governor of Minnesota, invited Hungarian engineers to his state beginning the large scale American wheat industry. Courtesy of AOLMAIA small groups tours in Tuscany Breads and cereals
|
