"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground..." (Genesis 3:17)
This, according to the Bible, was God's curse upon Adam when he and Eve were driven out of Paradise. We don't know what kind of bread the Bible talks about, but we do know that even in the Stone Age, 8,000 years ago, man ate bread. At that time, he very likely just collected seeds from wild grasses, crushed them over stones, mixed the resultant crude flour with water, and cooked it as a porridge or baked it as a flat loaf laid over a hot stone. In either case, hard and flavorless bread must have resulted, hardly the kind of porous, crusty, flavorful variety Americans and Western Europeans think of as bread.
The lack of yeast was actually the main reason for such poor quality bread. The kind of bread that we Westerners are familiar with, according to most historians, came into existence accidentally in Egypt. A housewife left her bread dough out in the sun too long, and it fermented. Thus, when she finally got around to baking it, she came up with the first spongy bread--something akin to what we know today. So precious was this discovery that until yeast was identified as the leavening agent for bread, "starter dough" was taken from each batch of ready-to-bake bread for the next day's supply.
The word 'yeast' is a derivative of the Sanskrit yas, which means "to seethe." Compressed yeast is a yeast culture that has been pressed, cut into cakes, and wrapped or bottled. Dried yeast is the same product, dehydrated. In our modern world, it is usually sold in packets. In Egypt, when it was first discovered, the Egyptians probably didn't know that the chemical properties of the yeast made their dough rise.
Yeast is actually a living substance that can break down starch and sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide gas. At about 80 degrees Fahrenheit, yeast becomes active. Then when mixed with flour, it converts into gas and alcohol, forming bubbles in the dough, which causes it to rise and give the baked bread its porous texture. The alcohol that is produced evaporates during the hot baking process.
Not too long ago, in a tomb near Thebes, remnants of Egyptian bread, known as ta, were found and analyzed. Sealed in the spring of 1494 B.C., it was composed of a mixture of wheat and barley. In that period of Western civilization, other cultures used millet and oats as well as barley and wheat for their bread or porridge. The eating of oats, however, was disdained by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Later, in the Middle Ages, French or English knights considered it as food fit only for animals. Samuel Johnson defined oats in his English dictionary as "food for men in Scotland, horses in England." The Scots response was, "England is noted for the excellence of her horses; Scotland for the excellence of her men." A part of this disdain must have sprung from considering animals as lower than human beings: How could humans eat the same food as beasts?
Egyptians were called "the bread eaters" in the ancient world. Egyptian bread, complemented by onions and beer, was a meal. Often it was stuffed with vegetables and meats, or prepared with raisins or honey, similar to "gingerbread."
The quality of Egyptian bread, however, left something to be
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