Primitive tools do not need to imply primitive results.  exquisitely carved objects and elegant painting by societies tens of thousands of years before the invention of grain agriculture attest to the essentially unlimited possibilities for bread making in the context of the earliest gatherers of grains.

This from William Rubel’s new little book, Bread: A Global History.  Hear, hear.  From an aficionado of the simple grindstone, I can attest that nothing surpasses tortillas from that simple tool.  I wouldn’t want to prepare the dough that way except as an experiment, nor would I wish it on anyone else.  That doesn’t mean I can’t recognize the quality.  And the same quality, I suspect, could be achieved grinding wheat and other bread grains.

Bread has yet to have a general historian, excellent as certain histories of French or British baking are.  William knows his stuff and this short book is a trial run for a much bigger book that I am eagerly awaiting.  Both books deal with raised breads, not flat breads, and global is a bit of an overstatement on the publisher’s part.  Don’t let that deter you.  This is well worth reading.

It covers the early history of bread to the end of the Roman Empire, bread as a marker of status, bread and fashion, a tour of the contemporary breads of six countries, and a limited but eye-opening selection of historical bread recipes. One of these is the bread fed to privileged horses in seventeenth-century England.  As he says

Even in a society more used than ours to the idea of a fixed social hierarchy, it must have felt terrible to be able to see by the bread on one’s table that one’s food wasn’t worth the trouble the master put into that of his horse.

You might also look up William’s earlier book, The Magic of Fire. It’s a lyrical and practical introduction to the variety and sophistication of hearth cookery.

Edit. Here’s a favorable review of William’s book by Steven Kaplan of Cornell, one of the the experts on both contemporary bread and on the history of bread.   Thanks to Dan Strehl for the link.

I’ve just been reading E.A. Wrigley‘s Energy and the English Industrial Revolution which I highly recommend if you are interested in the transformation wrought by fossil fuels.

In passing, he gives these figures for the labor involved in growing maize in Mexico ca 1940. A hectare is roughly the area inside an athletic track.

Cultivating a hectare of maize by hand.   1,140 man hours

Cultivating a hectare of maize with an ox. 380 man hours (plus 200 ox hours)

His figures come from Cornell entomologist turned agricultural economist, David Pimentel “Energy Flow in the Food System,” in Pimental and C.W. Hall, eds.,  Food and Energy Resources (London, 1984).

They reminded me that I have always been frustrated that the “food system” so often ignores what happens after the harvest.  So here’s my effort to get an order of magnitude figure of the relative work expended by men and women in putting tortillas on the table prior to oxen, mules, tractors and mills.

In 1970, maize yield per hectare was 1,194 kg ( INEGI, 1999 cited in “El maíz en México,” by Massieu Trigo and Lechuga Montenegro).  Assume that you needed 1 kg of maize per adult per day when it was providing 65% of the calories, allowing for seed corn and wastage in storage.  Assume a family of two adults and four others, say three children and an old person (probably low), with the four others needing 1/2 kg of maize a day.  Multiplying 4 kg by 365 days and dividing by 1,194 you find that a plot of 1.2 hectares was needed.  And that means 1,368 man hours to grow maize for the family.

Now what about turning all that maize into sometime you could put in your mouth.  Assume that it took about 5 hours a day to grind the maize for a family of six.  Add in time to collect firewood, de-grain the maize, haul the water to nixtamalize it, and shape and cook the tortillas.  Say another hour a day for this (a low estimate I think).

That means 2190 woman hours to turn maize into tortillas for the family.

That is to say, processing maize took more time than growing it even prior to animal power. Once the man had the help of an ox or a mule, the woman spent four to five times as much time processing and cooking as the man spent farming.

Given what hard work grinding is, I would guess the woman spent at least four times as much energy processing and cooking as the man spent farming.

These are just back of the envelope calculations. Does anyone have any corrections or modifications to make?  Or any pointers to studies on the  relative energy involved in farming versus processing and cooking?

The succulent [literally juicy from the Latin succus] food of the West, rich and full of flavour, is eaten with a closed mouth, while appreciative lips, palate, and tongue relieve the teeth from hard labour.

But the Indian peasant’s dry thick cake of millet or wheaten meal must be steadily chewed, completely milled and masticated before it can be swallowed, and it is only when it is touched with ghi or dipped in stewed vegetables or pulse that the lips close on a morsel with any semblance of gourmandise. 

Beast and Man in India, first published in 1891, 137.

I think it is easy to forget how much chewing had to be done with traditional whole meal dishes and, if they were baked, how dry they were. Most societies have something to help it down, in this case ghee, or to soften it, soup in the case of French peasant breads.  And what Kipling does not mention is that this unpalatability was true of many European breads until pretty shortly before he wrote.  Sheila Hamilton (thanks) sent along this comment about The Long Affray, a history of poaching in Britain by Harry Hopkins.

It includes this note on the diet in Berkshire in 1795 (the information was gathered by a local vicar who was concerned about the poverty of his parishioners):

“Bread and potatoes – ‘tatters and shake’ (ie salt) – was now the basic diet, and in some areas that bread was heavy barley bread, bannocks, baked over the fire. Meat, butter and cheese, which the labourer had enjoyed earlier in the century, before he had been banished from the farmer’s board, had all but disappeared. Even milk could be hard to come by now that farmers were sending it in bulk into the towns. Tea – an extravagance much reprobated by the labourers’ mentors- was all too often boiling water poured on burned bread crusts.”

For a perspective on maize in South Africa here is an extract from White Food by the interesting blogger Tangerine and Cinnamon.  Worth clicking on the link to read the whole thing.

A recent article published by the magnificent Mail and Guardian explores South Africa’s taste for whiter, finer maize meal:

“In the poorest communities a bag of maize meal is often the only way of satisfying a family’s hunger, and the cost factor plays a role too. An 80kg bag of maize meal is about R400: on a 500g portion a person a day, an extended family of 10 people would consume an 80kg bag in about 16 days. The daily total consumption of maize meal in South Africa is about 10 000 tonnes.

But these maize-meal consumers demand a product that is white – stripped of roughage and nutrients – and manufacturers have remodelled their businesses to serve this demand.

South Africa’s best-selling brand of maize meal is White Star, produced by Pioneer Foods. White Star is whiter and finer than other brands. Premier Foods and Tiger Brands, the country’s other two big producers of maize meal, have also invested in technology which produces this whiter maize meal.”

For me the bottom line is this.

Either you assume that those who lived largely on grains were deluded or driven by an irrational desire for status to prefer white.  This seems an act of enormous condescension since neither I nor, I suspect, the readers of this blog have ever lived largely on grains.

Or you assume that they had good reasons.

Edit.  I did not intend to suggest that Tangerine and Cinnamon was being condescending.  Apologies to her for phrasing the last three sentences poorly.   I have now changed the wording.

Answer One. Whole grains are hard on the system.

Today we don’t eat many grains or grain dishes. They are just one element in the diet along with fats, sugars, vegetables, fruits, meats and fish. The recommended amount in the US is six ounces for a 2000 calorie a day diet.

In the past people ate huge amounts of grains.  Wheat bread provided 40% of the calories of Americans, almost certainly the most lavishly fed population ever in the history of the world, as late as World War II.  Through most of history, farm laborers and their wives (and that’s what most of us would have been) probably consumed between  70% and 90% of  their calories in the form of bread, porridge, or other grain dishes.

That means between one and two pounds of bread a day, or one to two average loaves of sliced white bread, between three and six times as much as we eat.

One pound of white bread

Except that these were whole grains. Only half the British could afford white bread in 1800.  It was 1900 before the whole population could afford it. And Britain was the earliest European country to go over to white bread.  They were chewing or swallowing their way through one to two pounds of oatmeal, oatcakes, barley bannocks, rye bread, or some mixture of grains and beans every day.

Without a bit of butter, jam, olive oil, or lard to lubricate the grains, chewing and swallowing are laborious.

Worse, digesting such a lot of whole grains is a difficult, energy-consuming business ( we spend about 10% of our energy intake on digesting).  Because of this whole grains  pass through the system quickly.  The laxative effect of a small serving of whole grains is great for us sedentary modern urbanites. For manual workers the laxative effect of a couple of pounds of whole grains was a pain.

Those who could afford them, therefore preferred processed grains with more of the bran removed. It’s even possible that they yielded more calories, perhaps even more nutrition, per unit weight because they were easier to digest.

Answer Two: Our Ancestors Thought Processed Food was More Natural and More Healthful

We tend to think of cooking as messing up.  We want fresh, natural foods that taste of themselves.  We like lightly cooked green beans, rare steaks, and the US government tells us whole grains are better for us than white bread, cakes, and pie crusts.

For most of history, the majority view was the exact opposite.  Raw meat, vegetables, whole grains were just the raw materials.  they had to be processed and cooked to get at their natural, healthful essence.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but eating whole grains was regarded a bit as we might regard eating oysters, shell and all.  We just don’t do that. We process the oyster (shell it) to get at its real briny oysteriness inside. Our ancestors thought about grains the same way.  They had to be processed to get rid of the husks, hulls, and bran and get at the pure white inside part.  The outside parts, like oyster shells, were impossible to chew, caught in the throat, and were thus not natural (in the sense of being the grain itself) and not healthful either.  And of course we still don’t eat the husks either. Or put another way. There is not a sharp distinction between processed and whole grain. It’s a question of where you stop taking off the inedible layers or the germ.

In short, in the past most people thought of processing and cooking as perfecting the rough and contaminated raw materials that were harvested or slaughtered.  Only in the past century have we done a complete about-face, coming to believe that processed grains (or sugar, for example) are neither natural nor healthful.

___________

Thanks to Maria Speck for the question that prompted this post. There are still things about grains that Maria can’t figure out.  A couple of weeks ago she sent me an email.  “What about the ‘white food’ preference of earlier humans?  After years of researching whole grains, that’s the  one question that I can only partially answer to this day,” adding that she didn’t think it could be just status or the power of big corporations.  What’s above is my answer to her question.

The first time I met Maria Speck she was already on a whole grain mission. “They’re delicious,” she said, waving her cup perilously to emphasize her point. “It’s just a lucky coincidence that they’re healthy as well.”

Now several years after our chat in the coffee shop in the cavernous atrium of a New Orleans hotel, she’s published her Ancient Grains for Modern Meals to great acclaim, as you will see if you follow the link.  I’ve been reading it, thoroughly enjoying Maria’s essays about her appealing philosophy of cooking and eating, and thoroughly frustrated that so few whole grains are available in Mexico.  Roll on January and a trip to the States so that I can get my hands on some grains.

Threat to the supply of basic products

The ad was posted by the National Chamber of Industrialized Maize, which it turns out is the association of enterprises that turn maize into edible products: masa for tortillas and tamales, snacks, and animal food.  Since the half dozen points where these robberies occur are well known, the Chamber is demanding that the government do something to stop this “leakage.”

It’s well known that large quantities of gasoline and crude ($2-4 billion’s worth) are stolen from Pemex, the national company and sold nationally and internationally (including the US).

Now Mexico’s other fuel, the raw materials for the tortillas and meat that keep humans going,  is being ripped off.   Assuming the facts in the ad are correct (and I can hear the conspiracy theories beginning to buzz) here are a couple of thoughts:

• It’s not clear what kind of maize is being stolen, imported maize (largely for animal feed essential for the rapidly growing consumption of meat, poultry, and eggs) or national white maize (for tortillas).
• Few people grind their own maize in Mexico.  Processors of some kind must be buying this (I think even if it’s imported maize). This quantity may be tiny in terms of total Mexican production. It’s quite enough to need some sophisticated logistics.
• I can’t help thinking of the poem in the Confucian Book of Songs composed by Chinese peasants several hundred years before Christ in protest at the way the aristocrats took substantial portions of their harvest by force. The refrain is:

Large rats! Large rats! Do not eat our grain.

Who are these large rats?   And where do they fit in the Mexican economy in all its shades from white through gray to black?

” In Devon, Somerset, Dorset, and Wilts, the breakfast commonly consists of tea-kettle broth, a milk broth or sop, or bread broth (consisting of bread, hot water, salt, pepper, and a little milk or a little fat of some kind, boiled together), or broth from bacon liquor with condiments, eaten with or followed by bread and treacle, and with or without tea or coffee.” (British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1860). Thanks to Adam Balic.

The The Frugal Cook by an on-line friend of mine, Fiona Beckett offers a modern version.

I’ve just been experimenting with what must be the most frugal drink of all: toast water which is, exactly as described, water infused with a slice of toast. It’s actually rather nicer than it sounds – it has a faint caramelly flavour which I think I’d want to accentuate by infusing two slices of toast in the recommended amount of water but that would obviously be rather less thrifty. (Thanks to Sheila Hamilton).

Fiona Beckett has a photo of dark brown toast infusing and some background on tea kettle broth as a drink for invalids and in the nineteenth century.  Invoking the trend toward interesting non-alcoholic drinks, she also suggests that it might even be the new green tea, made with whole wheat bread and a spoonful of honey and served chilled.

And why not?  If dark breads and polenta have shaken off the aura of poverty and become chic, why not tea kettle broth?  The upgrading of peasant foods to elite status is one of the great themes of the past twenty or thirty years.

Just a few days ago  the blog Simple Italy reviewed Pamela Johns’ Cucina Povera.  It has some moving stories of peasant poverty and a photograph of a woman winnowing farro in a basket. It included recipes for bean and pasta dishes that, like chilled tea kettle broth, I have added to my long list of “to try.”

Yet to make these acceptable, these authors must adjust the recipes to contemporary tastes. They include ingredients such as extra virgin olive oil, sea salt, and cherry tomatoes when any salt would have been welcome to poor Italians. They talk about saving every scrap of bread to make crumbs to put on top of spaghetti. I don’t have a quarrel with this. I admire the attempt to find new and interesting recipes and I understand that the authors need to make a living.

Yet by all accounts spaghetti was far beyond the reach of eight out of ten Italians until well after World War II.  And as to drinks, as Carol Helstosky reports in Garlic and Oil,  “The poor in Naples collected their neighbors’s pasta water to drink, in the late nineteenth century and in the early 1950s” (153-54).

It’s just one more reminder that contemporary cookbooks cannot be taken as food history.  They would never sell if they were. An almost unimaginable gulf separates the food of twenty-first century Americans and Europeans from–dare I say it?–their grandparents.  Michael Pollan may argue that we should eat nothing that our grandmothers would not recognise as food. The problem is we have no way of recognizing what most of our grandparents recognized as food.

Thanks to Adam Balic and Sheila P. Hamilton for the links.

Even so, my mother told us time and again, they never felt they lacked for anything. In particular, she said, they always had proper meals, bread and a bit of meat every day.

She contrasted her situation to that of other children in the same local school who had to make do with tea kettle broth. As my mother explained it, tea kettle broth, the sign of real poverty, was made by toasting bits of bread until they almost charred, then pouring water over them.  The charring turned the water brown, like tea or broth.

I’d never heard anyone else talk about tea kettle broth until I saw the Old Foodie’s recent post, Tea Soup.  As she says, the “tea” part of the name came from the kettle in which water was boiled, the soup from the older “sops” or pieces of bread.  A quick google shows that tea kettle broth was consumed across the British Isles.

My mother never mentioned adding milk, let alone butter which was sometimes added. I assume it was just too expensive to do so. Wiltshire, which for centuries had prospered on the wool trade, suffered very hard times in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Those who ate tea kettle broth might have welcomed a few empty calories.

Breakfast! Arepa stuffed with butter and white cheese

Maize is getting such bad press at the moment in the United States.  But it is such a wonderful grain, so flexible, so many appealing products.

Arepas, as you doubtless know, are the national dish, the daily bread of Venezuela (and other parts of Latin America).  I’d had the Panamanian variety last year and was rather underwhelmed.  They were silver dollar sized, rather tough, and rather greasy half inch pancakes.  I only had the hotel version so I may have completely missed what may be wonderful Panamanian arepas.

Arepas and Venezuelan culture. Photo of photo by Miguel Dorta

The arepa above, however, made by Miguel Dorta of the University of Venezuela in Caracas, with arepa flour he had brought with him to the culinary nationalism conference in Guadalajara, was stunning.  He simply mixed flour, water and a bit of salt into an English-muffin sized patty and toasted it on each side in a frying pan (the only implement available in the hostel where we were staying).

Miguel Dorta stuffing arepas

The outside, the concha or shell is crunchy.  The soft, white inside (on the right of the photo) is scooped out to make room for the filling of butter and mild white cheese. Miguel used queso oaxaca.   A wonderful mix of textures and flavors.  Especially with the agua fresca of lime and piloncillo (raw sugar) that you can see front left (I need to ask him the Venezuelan name again). Edit. Papelón (piloncillo) con limón. Thanks to Ana in the comments.

Miguel explained that the soft inside is given to small children and old people. When he was young, he and his siblings fought for the crunchy outsides.

Arepas are eaten with all meals with and without stuffing and with all kinds of different stuffing.  Their texture is quite unlike cornbread and corn cakes. Much finer.  And no, Wikipedia to the contrary, this is not like a Mexican gordita except in size and shape.  The taste (not nixtamalized) and texture (much finer), and color (much whiter) are distinct.

Miguel has a fascinating book in draft about the preparation of the meal (flour) for arepas and its complex historical development that involves pounding, grinding, African techniques, and Venezuelan and American manufacturers.  That’s for another post.

I’ve not seen arepa flour on sale in Mexico but you can certainly get it whereever there are Venezuelan immigrants. I saw it in Spain and it must be available in many parts of the United States. Edit.  It is. Again thanks to Ana.

And here in Catalonia, Spain where I am spending a few weeks, “bread and/with” or “pa amb” is a whole world.  Best known in the wider world is bread and tomato, pa amb tomaquet, pa sucat amb tomaquet,¨ the wonderfully delicious bread rubbed with a cut tomato and softened with olive oil.  And this can be topped with all the salty stuff, ham, sausage, jamon iberico (serrano), anchovies and the like.

But there’s more.

Bread with sugar and olive oil.  Sprinkle your bread with lots of sugar and a good slug of olive oil. A favorite with children.

Bread with wine and sugar.  As above but substitute wine for sugar.

Bread with oil and salt.  Olive oil, salt and a sprinkle of vinegar

Bread with allioli.  Spread with a good topping of allioli (emulsion of garlic and olive oil)

Bread with fresh cheese. Fresh cheese or whey cheese (ricotta type)  and sugar or honey

Bread with quince paste

Bread with figs

Bread with garlic.  Rub with garlic, add salt and oil

Bread with chocolate. Spread with one of the recently invented spreadable chocolates. A children’s favorite

Bread with cracklings.  And perhaps sugar too.

Bread and milk.  Pour over milk and sugar

No bacon. No jam. No peanut butter. No lettuce. No tomato slices. No onion.  Above all no butter, no mayo.

This is not me, of course.  I’m a novice.  Thanks to Jaume Fabrega, La Cuina Gironina (The cuisine of Girona)  (1985).  And to Joan Roca, La Cuina de la meva mare (My mother’s kitchen) (2004).

And I am still wondering about that white bread.  As described, I doubt these ‘bread ands’ go back before the nineteenth century.

Bread from local bakery, Girona

One week into our stay in Girona (a small town about an hour north of Barcelona in Catalonia in Spain) and I have two overwhelming impressions of the food.

First, wonderful bread is everywhere, better than I remember from Barcelona a couple of years ago.  Within about three blocks of our apartment are half a dozen bakeries, each belonging to a small chain with three or four outlets. The bread, mainly round loaves like the one shown, or long ones, is quite wonderful.

Second, salt is so important for the flavor of the food: for the charcuterie, for the olives, for the anchovies. Coming from Mexico, where different chiles carry much of the flavor, where drying is a common way of preserving, where the Spanish salt meat kitchen really didn’t make it, I can’t help but be struck by the omnipresence of salt as preservative and flavorer.

Bread and salt seem like good places to start, the ancient symbols of hospitality. The salt goes way back. The bread–well, yes.  But the peasants can’t have been eating white bread.  And the good citizens can’t have been eating peasant bread.  I suspect the present bread culture to be recent.