A Reflection

As I thought about my last posting I began to muse on how bread baking may have been discovered. Of course there is no way to actually know but I had a few thoughts.

California aborigines would never have developed farming. They didn't need to because their staple food grew on oak trees. They would peel and grind acorns which they had to leech in order to remove the tannins. For grinding, they would use a mortar and a pestle which was any nearby flat rock. Over time it would develop a nice hollow which kept the "flour" from scattering (I've seen these hollows in the granite several places in the Sierra Nevada as I prowled the mountains in my youth; occasionally they are marked on topographical maps of the area). They also used a mano and metate like the Mexicans used for grinding maize. How grinding grains was discovered is beyond me but I assume European people used the same methods.

I'm guessing here, but I imagine a sort of porridge can be made directly from cereal grains but that can be improved when the grains are hulled. From hulling a grain to grinding flour is only a short hop and it seems that every primitive culture ground "flour" of one sort or another. Mixed with a little water, the flour can be patted into cakes which could be placed on a flat rock supported over the coals of a fire and heated. The early Californians did it that way, Brits were still doing it that way when Alfred defeated the Danes. I assume that was also the origin of tortillas.

So how do we make the jump to leavened bread? Yeast is omnipresent, you might even say it is ineluctable. The spores can even be found on the grain itself. Now, cast your mind back, way back. No, even further back to when you skinned an animal with a blade made from flint or obsidian. There you will see a woman who had just finished grinding her flour and placed it in a bowl or tightly woven reed basket, added some water and is preparing to pat the dough into cakes to bake over the fire. A baby cries, her baby. She jumps up, leaving the basket or bowl right next to the fire and goes off to find her daughter has fallen on a rock and cut her arm rather badly. It takes a while to stop the bleeding and bind up the wound. She then takes her daughter back into the round house or hut or cave and rocks her lovingly until she falls asleep. Then it's back to the fire but, what's this? The dough has grown. There is much more than she had when she was called away. Oh well. She pats the dough into flat cakes anyway and places them on the baking stone. Even though flattened, they puff up as they cook. Intrigued, she picks one up and, shuffling it from hand to hand and blowing on it to cool it, she takes a bite. Oh my, isn't that delicious. When Ogg and Zork get home from a hard day of ploughing and taste the cakes, they agree. Eventually, it occurs to the woman that the difference was leaving the dough near the fire where it was warm for the time it took to tend her injured daughter. The rest might just be history.

I can imagine beer came to be in a similar way. A bowl of grains ready to be cooked for porridge and forgotten for a while, possibly even a few days in the summer when it was warm. Ogg might have been tempted to taste the slightly foamy water and even drink it down. Oh boy, don't he feel nice all of a sudden? Might have to try this again. A lot. Maybe he could open a bar.

I often ponder how things came to be. The marvel of Homo Sapiens discovering how to chip flint or obsidian to make objects helpful to daily life. Who dreamed up rope or baskets or pottery and how? Originally, it was serendipity and the capacity humans have to figure things out from observed phenomena. Our capacity to reason and conceptualize.

I have tried here to conceptualize how Ogg discovered beer and his wife discovered leavened bread. There is no way to actually know but it's fun to imagine.