Bread History
Bread doesn’t grow on trees. It is an invention. Bread is always a cultural product. Bread could have been been invented — and adopted — as soon as people began grinding grain. People have had both grain and grinding stones for more than ten thousand years. Is bread more than ten thousand years old? This, we will never know.
Bread can be leavened or unleavened. It can be enriched or unenriched. The flour used to make bread can be refined to eliminate all the bran, or not. Bread can be leavened with yeast or with a sourdough culture. Just what combination of general preferences — not mention specific ones like a preference for a crispy crust, or no crust at all — or a preference for a bread with an open crumb as opposed to bread with a tight crumb — area all issues of culture. For most history we have no information about the bread eaten, or even if it was.
The minimal ingredients needed to make flat bread is flour and water. Leavened breads require the addition of a leavening agent — historically yeast or sourdough and now also possibly a chemical leavening like soda of the Irish Soda Bread. Most modern breads include salt — even as much as 2% salt by weight of the flour. Salt is not a requirement for bread — and whether it was added to bread, and in what quantity is a cultural choice.
For over one-hundred years American bread has tended to be enriched with fat, and also lightly sweetened. Since the later part of the twentieth-century there has been a strong artisan bread movement that looks to France and Italy — and unenriched breads — for its inspiration.
I have twelve-feet of notebooks with research material for the book I am writing on the history of bread. From time-to-time I will post material of historical interest that will, hopefully, get you thinking about the breads of the past — and how we may be able to use ideas from the past to enrich our breads today.