Bread first or beer first? A bad question
Published November 21, 2009 by Rachel Laudan
I should never say what I will write on next, I have discovered. I am invariably sidetracked. And this time it’s by commentators who raise the fifty-year old question: which came first, bread or beer.
Now the very possibility that we brewed beer before we baked bread sounds–well–it sounds sexy. How titillating to think that people rushed to make something intoxicating. How mind bending to think that farming was all in aid of a bit of tipple.
And when I first heard the idea, I was as titillated and mind bent as could be. Over the years, though, I’ve come to think it’s actually the wrong way to go about the early history of cereals. It’s a barrier to asking the kinds of questions that will yield interesting answers.
It was one of the cliches of the history of technology, a field I labored in for many years, that asking for the first invention, the first appearance of something was asking the wrong question. Let me take a modern example from food.
“Who invented the pineapple upside down cake?” might be an example. It’s an understandable question and the first instinct is to scurry around looking at magazines and cookbooks for the first pineapple upside down cake recipe and then annoint Mrs. X of Cakeville the inventor of the cake. What have we learned? Zilch. Well, actually more likely we’ve probably learned that Mrs. X has staked her fame on a dubious priority claim.
Now suppose we ask different questions. Why were people interested in cakes? What were the preconditions for these kinds of cakes? What problems did pineapple upside down cakes solve?
Now we can begin to talk. Oversimplifying a bit, the preconditions for cakes are molds, enclosed ovens, chemical leaveners, fine white sugar, fine white flour, etc. When do these all become available? Well tail end of the nineteenth century.
Why does anyone want to make cakes? Well the big millers in Minnesota want to sell more flour, the housewife wants to look cool and modern and sophisticated and cake hits all those notes. Nice alliance of interests.
And right around this time, Jim Dole begins massively advertizing an incredibly cool new ingredients, canned Hawaiian pineapple, the height of cosmop0litan sophistication. Bingo. Lots of people are going to simultaneously invent some kind of pineapple cake.
So back to bread and beer. If I were tackling the question of why we turned to grains or cereals, I be asking questions like these:
What problems did grains solve, what tools did humans have? Well, the problem they solved was one of fuel. Humans need fuel. Grains, if you can process them for fewer calories than you get out at the end, are great sources of fuel. Maybe you can even increase the calories by processing.
Why are breads good fuel? Well, let’s get rid of the idea that bread was anything like our puffy white loaves. It was probably more like this, the kind of thing that Gilgamesh or Plato might have called bread (and I’ll post on this later).
Let’s say it was a baked paste of some kind, something that can be produced in a wide variety of ways. Well breads are portable, dividable into equal portions, act as spoons or plates, keep you satisfied for a long time, great for people on the move, even if only to the fields.
Why are beers good fuel? These too are not like our beer, probably thickish soupy slightly alcoholic things that again can be produced in very, very different ways. Well, (apart from the buzz), they can be stretched with water to serve lots of people, and they have lots of very easily digestible calories, but not good for people on the move.
On the other hand, They almost certainly were not desperate for a high. They had a whole range of psychotropic plants from mushrooms to datura. If they wanted booze, honey drinks would have been easier to prepare in the honey bee regions, sap drinks in the sap regions (palm wine, pulque, etc) and fruit drinks in some regions where there are really sweet fruits such as grapes.
But why are we restricting the discussion to beers and breads? If people are going to all the trouble of tackling seeds aren’t they going to try everything they can? Gruels, porridges thick enough to scoop up with the fingers, pottages with other stuff mixed in, toasted grains, toasted powdered grains, sprouted grains (more posts coming on these).
Humans by about 20,000 years ago when they get going on grains were smart experimenters. They had been surveying the earth’s edible resources for thousands and thousands of years.
They had a huge range of techniques at their fingertips–all kinds of hearth cookery; pit cookery; probably treating with mud, water, weak acids, and strong alkalis; probably various kinds of rotting and molds. They knew about pounding for sure. They had been grinding rocks for pigments (and grains are hard like rocks). They had super sharp stone knives and a wide variety of containers. They came to the grains with lots of technical baggage.
So I assume people are going to boil grains, toast grains, pound grains, grind grains, sprout grains, rot grains, dunk grains in acids and alkalis to see what they can do to get fuel.
And they are going to be satisfied with the results only if they are reproducible (another lesson I gleaned from the history of technology). Getting an alcoholic brew (which can be done in at least three radically different ways) or a bread, both fairly tricky operations, is only worth it if you can do it on a regular basis. Sitting around remembering that lovely thing you produced that made you feel so good isn’t much use if you can’t pull the trick off again.
Most ways of making bread and beer are tricky multistage operations, from the start best done by professionals.
So instead of asking bread or beer, I’d rather ask–what can you do to grains with grindstones, mortars, acids, molds, rots, alkalis, and so on. Which is why I like to fiddle around with grindstones and mortars. Until we get a grip on what you can and can’t do with them, it’s all just idle speculation.
Coming. Yes, we do pound grains. So why? What grinding does to the grinder? Toasting grains. I’m just getting started.
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“Symposium: Did Man Once Live By Bread Along,” American Anthropologist 55 (1953), 15-526; Solomon H. Katz and Mary M. Voigt, “Bread and Beer: The Early Use of Cereals in the Human Diet,” Expedition 28, 23-34.
Filed under Food History, Grinding, bread
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Great points, Rachel. But I’m curious — haven’t done any deep checking so maybe I’m asking a dumb question — what references are there later than 1953 and 1986 for the beer and bread issue? Knowing what I do know about honey and mead, etc., it’s not hard to visualize grains being softened to chew in water, maybe after being toasted, and forgotten. It’s not really beer per se, but … throwing out the liquid would be unacceptable (knowing how far women have to walk these days to get water in developing countries, etc., makes me think that throwing out the water would be a reaction of so-called modern people with running water or at least with a dependable well at hand). So the water might have given people ideas that led to beverages before bread. The question does imply a certain technological advancement.
But what would have prompted people to start grinding the grains in the first place? I have not looked into this at all, so I also wonder how come — once the Spanish arrived with oxen and horses and mules, animals unknown to the Mesoamericans — the grinding of corn by hand continued instead of using those large animals hitched up to grinding stones/mills? You say that grinding was the job of slaves and convicts. Certainly also of women. Lower status people? People hooked up to grinding stones?
fascinating discussion – i am enjoying your approach to asking good questions to lead to interesting answers
But I think that “bad” questions can also lead to good discussions. You have to start somewhere!
In the original question I asked about beer v bread in the context of why bother with bread at all. And did in fact mention gruel.
In context of the original blog entry, where you talk about the effort and infered a well organised group of people was required to produce flour, I think the question a fair one. In addtion there were links to people that process grain for food in a anner that doesn’t result in flour and bread, but beer and gruel. Many extant cultures don’t bother with bread. I consider cornmeal tortilla to be “bread”, the vast majority of the Old World that eat maize do not do so in the for of bread.
So why bread? Hard tack is and advantage and in England/Scotland oats were eaten as a gruel (porridge), soft oatcake pancakes and the latter was also dried for later use. A similar process is used in much of Northern Europe of a wide range of grains. If grinding was such a burden to the individual and the culture then why bother? More calories generated?
One issue I can see is the technology. The saddle quern looks like a lot of effort, but that isn’t the only technology. Hand rotary querns look like a more efficient technology for producing flour (not idea if this is the case in practice). When grinding corn, why Metate not Rotary Quern?
So why
Well… First off your premise about the availability of fruits is somewhat tenuous. Fruits (especially dates) require significant effort to cultivate and maintain. Orchards and groves were mostly under the purview of ruling / elite class. I doubt that the availability of honey or fruit was substantial enough for any peasant to start a home brewing project. Although I am sure meager amounts of such beverages were consumed, it is doubtful anything on any wide scale was possible.
The next question would be how did agriculture start at all. I agree with Sauer that it could not have been some group looking for a new food source, no one on the brink of starvation can afford the experimentation (and constant failure) that such an endeavor would entail. We aren’t even sure animal husbandry wasn’t the first of the agricultural sciences. It matters not because the crux is storage technology. Surplus had to be stored, or raising a surplus was useless. Grains spontaneously sprout under less than ideal conditions – and would create primitive malts. While I agree that the first uses of grains were groats and gruels, I assume the next step was beer – or at least some similar fermented beverage. I say that because that would use those spoilt grains in the bottom of the jar. Roasting them would yield ash, and pounding them mush. While I agree that querns and such appear early, I also tend to believe brewing was probably also known. While it was important to grind acorns and treat them with alkali, that wasn’t a demand for grasses, which could easily be prepared without substantial effort. (Just add fire.) So what prompted widespread fields? Was the appeal of groats and gruels so enticing that pastoralists abandoned their yearly journey to stay at home and consume grass seeds? Or was life on the trail so hard? The choice between bread or beer seems to be perfectly valid to me, as I doubt those preparations required the sedentary lifestyle that so characterized that dramatic transition. I find it difficult to believe that ancient Sumerians were able to marshal the populace into building elaborate irrigation with promises of a bowl of gruel.
Delwen Samuel’s discussions on Egyptian beer trade, and the paper Drinking beer in a Blissful Mood by Jennings et al covers the topic fairly well. As a brewer you overstate the complexity of the process, it’s rather easy if the goal is something that is palatable and consumed over the next two days. Finally, the punishment for a barmaid shortchanging the consumer in Hammurabi’s code is telling.
Thanks for the long comment. I have a long reply that I’ll post as soon as I can.