A field of wheat in the French Haute Alps

Wheat fields are rare in today’s Alps, but if you look closely at hillsides near villages you will often see evidence of terracing. Until comparatively recently, the European countryside was a patch-work of grain fields. While there has been a huge trade in grain for thousands of years, most people — and all subsistence farmers — made bread from grain they either grew themselves, or grain that was grown within what we today would define as their region.

We look at cookbooks for bread recipes. I think it is worthwhile to think about where the recipes that subsistence farmers used to make bread came from. To a large extent their fields were their cookbooks. They had to make breads that worked with the grains they grew. If growing wheat, then whether it was hard, soft, large grained, or small, whether grayish in color, yellowish in color, or perhaps sprouted because it had rained heavily just before the harvest, they worked with what they had. And if they didn’t grow wheat, if they grew rye, or rye and wheat mixed, which was common from the time of Rome up to the modern era, or barley, or spelt, or millet, or some other grain — whatever it was that they could grow — that is what they made bread out of. As I think of it, external circumstances determined the general outline of their breads.

There is a wonderful book called Maison Rustique that was published in France in the late 1500’s. The author is Charles Estienne. The first English edition was published in 1600. There is a large section on bread. In addition to discussing the fitness of each type grain for bread, such as rye, barley, oats, et cetera, when it comes to wheat, there is a large section in which the challenges facing the baker is discussed cultivar by cultivar.

When we buy flour, what we are buying is a blend of cultivars. The flour mill tests the grain coming in from the farmers and creates a blend — a blend of different varieties of wheat, and also sometimes a blend of the same cultivar grown by different farmers. This blend changes with each grain shipment which is why modern flour is reliably the same from one batch to another. Big bakeries do work with millers on the blend they buy. There are artisinal bakeries in the United States interested in their white breads having a yellow cast. Millers, to make a finished bread more yellow, add more of a wheat cultivar that has yellow pigmentation. Prior to the current era with its scientific labs testing for the protein content in grain, the ash level, the color, and for other qualities important to bakers, buyers looked for qualities in grain that they could easily identify. Color was one factor.

There is an intriguing entry in the French/English dictionary written by Randall Cotgrave in 1611 for a bread called ‘Pain sarain.’ Cotgrave defines it as, ‘A very yellow household bread, of the better sort, and made in great loaves.’ I don’t think that pain sarain was made with semolina flour because Cotgrave, in his definition for ’semole’ says that it was rarely used in bread. I recently spoke with a grain scientist who said that, indeed, there are yellow wheats, and that if one selected for yellowness one could develop a yellow strain. Was there such a strain in France at the turn of the seventeenth century?

Wheat and rye have been the main bread grains in most of Europe for almost two thousand years. Rye grows best where it is cool — and thrives where wheat cannot. Historically, rye was found in the mountains, even in Southern Europe, and it was grown with increasing frequency as one moved north, first as a grain planted mixed in with wheat, and then in stands of pure wheat where wheat could not grow at all. Thus, in Northern France and Southern England wheat and rye were commonly grown together, and thus baked together, in the eighteenth century. The English name for a mixed loaf of rye and wheat is maslin. While maslin loaves can never be as light as loaves made from pure wheat, many authors remarked on its nice flavor. Thus, while white bread was definitely the high status bread — the bread that would have been served on the best tables anytime company came to dinner — it is not outside the realm of possibility that maslin loaves graced the household table, even in the houses of the wealthy.

Reading the ingredients on pain de compagne packages I sometimes see rye as an one of the grains, but the look and taste of the bread suggest that the rye is a very minor addition, perhaps used in the sour leaven. I have been very happy with my own maslin bread experiments and suggest that my readers begin experimenting with maslin breads, too. This is a bread from the past that deserves a new look.

Before continuing to talk about grains, I will talk about flour, as this has a direct bearing on experiments you might make with maslin breads. Historically, European bakers took their grain to a miller and then brought it back to their bakery — or their house — in the form of while grain flour. As a rule, flour was used soon after it was milled. Whole grain flour spoils quickly so it was used within days, and certainly within weeks of being ground. At least, that was the ideal. European breads were divided into broad categories based on the degree to which the bran and germ and had been sifted out of the flour. As rule, the coarser the bread, the larger the loaf; the whiter the bread, the smaller the loaf. The very white white bread seen in Dutch seventeenth century still lives are rolls. The finest white flour was used in wafers and pastries.

While many writers extolled the virtues of breads made with rye and wheat, they were probably not referring to whole grain breads. At the least, the coarse bran would have been sifted out. Our own approach to flour tends to be to see it in the terms defined by the moderns mills. The usual choice is ‘white’ or ‘whole wheat.’ Prior to the modern era the baker did his or her own sifting, and thus the choice of flour was a range of infinite gradations between white and whole wheat. Flours were sifted through sieves to remove the coarser bran, and then through cloth, known as bolting cloth, to further refine the flour. Fine silk yields the finest white flour.

Yes, creating white flour was a tedious, labor intensive process, but labor was comparatively cheap, and so one should imagine that bakers had at their disposal — depending that is, on their budget — a range of flours from the whitest to the coarsest. Multiple-pass milling was practiced — the first description I have read is in the 1616 Gervase Markham edition of Maison Rustique in which he advises that the best way to get the whitest flour is to first have the grain ground coarsely, to sift that, and then send what did not fall through the sifter to back to the mill to be made into flour for bread for the servants. Markham does not go into detail, but in my experiments I can see that very fine, and very white flour can be developed this way.

The lesson to take away from the historic record is that bakers had a broader vocabulary of flour to work with. When working with whole wheat flour I definitely suggest that one begins to explore sifting ones own flour to change the level of bran in finished breads. The removal of the coarse bran makes a huge difference to the quality of the finished loaf. If you do plan to do some of your own refining, then the flour you want to buy is a coarse whole wheat. This applies also if you grind your own flour. The less bran that is ground up with the flour, the lighter the finished loaf.

The first domesticated wheat — the wheat of the Neolithic Revolution — was hulled wheat. This is what that has an out hull that must first be removed before the grain can be ground. Hulled wheats — these are the wheats going under the name farro, spelt, and einkhorn — are more difficult to process than unhulled wheats. Unhulled wheats supplanted the hulled wheats in Europe almost two –thousand years ago — with notable exceptions. In parts of Germany spelt remains popular to this day — and through Germany spelt breads came to America via the Pennsylvania Dutch. While Germany remained the primary foothold for hulled wheat, hulled wheat stayed in cultivation in tiny pockets elsewhere in Europe — for example, in the Garfanana region in Italy, and in a tiny area in Spain. Spelt makes wonderful bread.

In parts of England, barley was the main bread grain. William Ellis, writing in 1750 in his book ‘Country Housewife’s Family Companion’ describes a number of barley breads. William Ellis, clearly an inveterate talker, recorded the breads of his near-neighbors in Hertfordshire, England. Most of the recipes he recorded were barley breads leaved with barm, the sediment thrown of during the brewing process. These were yeast breads. The most interesting variant is that a couple of his sources mixed the bread with milk. In European beads, milk is normally associated only with high status white breads, so I think it is interesting — even revealing — to see country women using milk in barley breads.

There has always been a give-and-take between the recipes of the city and the recipes of the countryside. Beginning in the seventeenth century, however, as written recipes began to assume some importance, there began to be a tightening of recipe definitions — a limiting of possibilities. We now live in a time when there is no give-and-take between the country and the city with respect to bread recipes as there is, effectively, no country. Few farmers at all, and in the rich countries, no subsistence farmers. I know this may sound like an odd thesis considering the uncountable bread recipes that are circulating in books and over the internet, but when one looks through internet recipes, and looks at breads in bakeries, one finds a structural uniformity. I’d like to close this discussion of grains and flour with a quote from the first major author of bread recipes written for an English audience.

Gervase Markham, writing in 1615, in his book, The English Housewife, summed up the bread-making options of his readers, as follows: ‘…you may bake any bread leavened or unleavened whatsoever, whether it be simple corn, as wheat or rye itself, or compound grain as wheat and rye, or wheat, rye, and barley, or rye and barley, or any other mixed white corn….’ Gervase Markham points to a world in which recipes were fluid, in which grains were often mixed together. Elsewhere in his recipes Markham refers to sifting and bolting flour, and to the use of yeast and sour leavens. In this passage just quoted, he also refers to the whole world of unleavened breads — pancakes, crackers, biscuits, and crisp breads.

As we don’t have our grain fields or country markets to focus our attention on one flour or another, it takes a little more will to invent out of thin air what amounts, in the context of modern bread-making, an innovative approach to flour selection. I can say that my own experiments with flour suggest to me what might seem obvious — that it is the flour that makes the bread.