Ancient history of bread

Bread has been an integral part of human history from the family ritual of breaking bread together to the tumultuous revolution ringing with cry for loaves. Bread began as a lumpy, oatmeal-like substance. It was a cried mixture of ground grain and water.

Archeological evidence from Italy, Russia, and the Czech Republic suggest that people were grinding plants into flour to make crude flat breads as early as 28000 BC.

Bakers built the first crude ovens in the Ukraine around 25000 BC; the first grain growers cultivated seed-bearing plants starting around 10,000 BC.

By 11,000 BC, emmer and einkorn wheat along with barley were cultivated across Mesopotamia.

In the Bronze Age, bread baking required a cast-iron or clay sac, or sheet, that went into the heat with an iron cloche perched like a bell jar over the loaves.

In Pharaonic Egypt state workers received wages in bread and bread grains, and soldiers were known for eating so much bread – a ration of four pounds per day.

The first Greek breads were cooked in the embers or under a dome shaped bell, but then Greeks invented the true oven, which could be pre-heated and opened at the front.

From the time of Pericles onwards the art of the Greeks bakers lay not only in the mixing of various kinds of bread dough, but above all in the different shapes of the loaves they made.

Rome was no different, building its vast imperial reach on a foundation of sophisticated bakeries and highly developed bread distribution system.

After the Anglo-Saxons supplanted the Romans conquerors of the British Isles, cooks relied in bread as part of the dietary triangle, the other points of which were roasted meats and dairy items and mead.
Ancient history of bread