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.

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.

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.

Tamasin Day-Lewis is spot on in her Saveur piece on tea sandwiches.  The always wry and informative Old Foodie pondering  why cucumber sandwiches?  My response on how to make cucumber sandwiches that the Old Foodie kindly posted on her blog some years ago. Me on the sequence of English farmhouse meals in the 1950s, on an attempt to replicate Sunday tea in Guanajuato, on what teas were and the fact that they have vanished, and on bread and the problems of getting the right kind.

And finally, Sunday tea at my grandparents.  And no this was not upstairs, downstairs, no crowds of servants, my grandmother made the food and my mother or one of us children were sent to make the tea.

Tea was important when I was growing up in England, and nowhere more so than in my grandparent’s farm house. You can see it in the photo above taken in very early spring, everything still dun brown and grey green. The village street and front garden are hidden by the curve of the hill. The front of the house was added in the eighteenth century, the working part at the back went back hundreds of years before that. That’s the background. Now to tea.

Tea began with water. Water was the topic of much conversation in the family. Most of the the various aunts and uncles had their own springs for their farm houses. We did too for our farm house. These produced gorgeous, gorgeous water. But my grandparents had a problem. Mains water had come to the village and with its added chemicals it was deemed to be quite inadequate for drinking.  So they had had a well dug and an electric pump installed.

So step one in making tea was to turn on the small electric pump attached to one side of the old porcelain kitchen sink that looked out over the back farm yard. After a few gurgles, clear, fresh well water began to trickle out to be collected in the kettle. This took a while. The big kettle was put on the AGA to heat. This took a while too, partly because so much water was needed, partly because the well water was icy cold.

Step two while all this was going on was to assemble the tea equipment: large brown tea pot, tea cozy, water jug for topping up the tea pot, strainer for collecting tea leaves, slops bowl for throwing out tea dregs, sugar bowl, and milk jug.

Step three means backing up a bit. Milk was another problem. Not its availability. My grandparents always had at least a hundred cows in milk. But they were now all Friesians (Holsteins) because the British Milk Marketing Board paid by volume not fat content.

Well, now, we couldn’t drink that kind of milk, could we? So my grandparents had a dear little Channel Island cow that gave the most glorious rich milk. It was a bit of an indulgence, I realize in retrospect. An “old chap,” one of the farm workers who was now past heavy work, had to milk her by hand morning and evening. What the cost per pint can have been I cannot even imagine. At the time, though, she was a friend, to be greeted when she was walked up the village street, her big dreamy eyes, her slobbery tongue and muzzle, her black fringed ears.

By now the kettle was boiling.  The tea pot was rinsed out with boiling water to warm the pot. Then the tea caddies were taken down from the shelf over the AGA. My grandparents bought a selection of different teas from Stokes the grocer in the town three miles away. Depending on their preference for the day, different proportions were spooned from different caddies in a flat caddy spoon and added to the pot. Then came the boiling water, and water for the water pot too, and tea cozies to keep them warm.

Then the whole equipage was carried up the couple of steps to the breakfast room (they ate almost all meals in the breakfast room because the dining room filled up with farm paperwork).

We children sat on the bench under the endlessly fascinating prints of the Grand National showing horses falling about all over the place, and facing the fire on the other side of the room and the two miniature barrels one of port and one of brandy that we never got to touch. My grandmother sat at one end, everyone else sat in Windsor chairs around the table, never less than a dozen or so.

There was bread (and that was an even bigger story than water) and butter (hand churned from Channel Island milk), and scones (little flaky rounds, not the great dense hunks that now go by that name) with raspberry jam from the kitchen garden and clotted cream (thank you cow), and Victoria sponges. They had to wait.

With great ceremony, and much asking of preferences for milk and sugar, my grandmother poured tea into angular blue and white tea cups. Those who took milk got Channel Island milk. Not ideal even then, in my opinion. Thick gobs of cream rose to the surface, making it almost like a tea-flavored dessert. Once I had learned to drink it without milk it was clear and astringent and glorious.

Only then began the elaborate ritual of handing around the eatables, and we were expected to sit, and eat, and listen, and no getting up from the table.

Why tell this story? Nostalgia, of course. The fact that English farmhouse teas of the kind I assumed happened every Sunday without fail have yet to find their chronicler. The fact that stories like this show that just perhaps Elizabeth David is not the last word on how bad English food was. The fact that this quality of eating (and I know that high quality eating is usually located with dinner not other meals, but be that as it may) is not necessarily open. Only the rare visitor to England would ever have known that such teas existed, let alone be invited to participate. The fact that such quality is not  democratic, that it may mean pretty ghastly economic and social distinctions. The “old chap” for example did not eat like this. For all those reasons.

Of the top 20 wheat importers for 2010, almost half are Middle Eastern countries. The list reads like a playbook of toppled and teetering regimes: Egypt (1), Algeria (4), Iraq (7), Morocco (8), Yemen (13), Saudi Arabia (15), Libya (16), Tunisia (17). For decades, many of these regimes relied on food subsidies to ensure stability — a social contract so pervasive that the Tunisian scholar Larbi Sadiki described it as dimuqratiyyat al-khubz, or “democracy of bread.” But over the past several years, grain prices reached record levels, and these appeasement policies lost their luster.

And bread riots have ensued. Very interesting and informative piece by Annia Ciedazlo ¨Let them eat bread¨in Foreign Affairs.  And so much to say about it I can only gesture, and I am not even saying anything about the massive literature on bread riots in, say, Europe.

Just a few comments

1.  A reminder to those of us in the US who think that bread is more or less irrelevant to a good diet (or inimical to it) that bread remains crucial for much of the world. The possibility of a shortage is both a motive for unrest and a symbol of discontent.

2. Providing bread (or its equivalent) is extraordinarily tricky and always has been.  As the article hints, since World War II both the Soviet policy of ensuring cheap bread for citizens and the US policy of using bread as carrot and stick, aid and political tool, have run into huge problems.

3.  Uneasy about the way the author jumps from Egypt as part of the Fertile Crescent ca 10,000 BC to now.  Lots of food policy in between, including its use as bread basket for the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, the land grab of the rulers in the early nineteenth-century that beggared the poor, and cotton as export agriculture under British influence.  No simple food security story to tell through all this.

4. Uneasy also about the way the author presents the story as one of imported grain vs local grain.  In the long history of food, this is one dynamic. Just as important is the urban versus rural dynamic.  States keep urban populations quiet  and prevent rioting by ensuring by  cheap bread (or rice or maize).   This is often done at great cost to rural populations.  I would be curious to know about internal migration in the past generation.

5.  Uneasy also about the way the author assumes that American wheat is cheap because it is subsidized.  In the nineteenth century, before subsidies (well, leave aside cheap land!! railroad paths acquired by eminent domain), the huge fertile, rain-watered areas of the US and mechanized agriculture meant that from Britain to China buyers were snapping up cheap American wheat.  Wheat as aid or loans to buy it are another matter.

But American wheat would, I suspect, be cheaper than anything that could be produced in Egypt even without subsidies.  Please correct me if I am wrong.

6. I am very struck by the intrinsic difficulties of matching food production to consumer needs.  If the meta narrative of this piece is that if only small farmers were encouraged, then food security could be achieved (and I am not sure that is the meta narrative), I am deeply suspicious.  States since Antiquity have tried and failed time and again to get production and consumption of bread in sync.  Political boundaries change, cities grow and shrink, populations grow and shrink, people move from one spot to another, weather changes, not all soil is created equal.  Monarchs and emperors, warehouses and land grabs, socialism and capitalism have all struggled with the problem.  No simple answers here, just constant vigilance.

Which, of course, is not to say that I am writing in support of repressive regimes in the contemporary Middle East or anywhere else.  Just that I want to give some context.

The last few days I’ve been corresponding with several people about how to use the internet to record the cuisines of the humble.

This site, Forgotten Recipies of the Venezuelan Andes strikes me as just a lovely example.  The collector and recorder, Gamal El Fakih Rodriguez, trained in the Hotel School of Mérida in Venezuela and is now Associate Director of the Institute of Hotel Management and Tourism in Quebec. The photographer, Jean-Luc Crucifix, lives in Venezuela.

They let the people speak for themselves, they neither editorialize nor do they promote.  And that allows us the space to reflect on the photos and recipes.

I´d begin with this song, the cook, sung by Doña Mercedes Muñoz de Rodríguez in April of 1978.  It´s a story of escape from the kitchen, where you have to get up at the crack of dawn, where the wood of the cooking fire won’t take, where your mama scolds you, to the arms of your lover who gives you what you need to eat and drink, nice clothes, and whose kisses taste like chocolate, glowing orange, like tomato.

Jean-Luc Crucifix

Here’s a recipe for bread, using a home made starter.

ANDEAN CREOLE BREAD

It is, together with the Arepas, one of most popular side dishes in the Andean mountains. Its recipe has evolved over the years, but we present it here in its most traditional way.

Ingredients

(For 50 rolls)

1 cup wheat bran

6 kilos of wheat flour

4 ounces of “yesteryear butter” (milk cow butter wrapped in Frailejon sheets)

¼ pound of loaf sugar

4 eggs

Lukewarm water

Salt to taste and a pinch of baking

Various spices (cloves, allspice, anise, etc.).

Prepare a yeast, formerly known as the “Talvina”: Place in wooden boxes, wheat bran, a little warm water and a drink called Papelon, (made with sugar cane) Cover and let stand for three days until it ferments and beyond.

Once you get the ‘Talvina’ add eggs, butter (which can substitute lard), spices and salt. Stir a bit and add the flour and baking soda.

Mix well to form a dough that pulls away from the sides of a pan. Place on a floured plate and knead for about 10 minutes. Divide the dough in half, cover with a cloth and let stand for about 20 minutes until it swells.

Preheat the oven preferably with branches of Cinar (wild tree that grows in cold and wet areas) until the embers glow bright red. At this point, sweep the oven with a broom and thoroughly clean it.

Once the bread has puffed, spread on buttered plate and bake for about 45 minutes.

In some areas it was customary to also add oat and milk which enriched the taste of bread.

Nowadays we can use baker’s yeast instead of “Talvina”, which obviously simplifies many things. In this case it is however necessary to add grated Papelon, which taste is a hallmark of our Andean Bread.

Jean-Luc Crucifix

And here’s a recipe for a probably more everyday dish.

PLANTAIN BANANAS SOUP

Ingredients

(8-10 people)

2 green plantains

1 cup potato

1 cup pieces of arricaria

1 cup cassava

1 cup pumpkin

¼ fat oxen (leftovers)

Pork fat and salt.

Peel, wash and finely chop all ingredients, fry in lard and add cold water. Simmer until all’m cooked. Add salt and serve at the last minute.

Thanks so much to my friend and colleague, María Luisa Lares Ríos for putting me on to this.  The book is available in Spanish, French and English.  You can buy it in bookstores in Montreal and Toronto or by mail order.  I can’t wait for my copy.

Samuel Palmer, Gleaning for Wheat under a Harvest Moon, 1833 from Feasts and Festivals

Sometimes things just come together.  Last week I spent a good bit of time at a seminar on Nutritional Anthropology and more writing about how in nineteenth-century Europe, famines ceased to be a regular part of life, as well as going through Frank Trentmann’s fine book Free Trade Nation on why free trade roused as much moral fervor  in nineteenth-century Britain as anti-corporate food politics does in twenty-first century America. And then this morning three blog posts popped up on my feeder, very different posts, but all circling round hunger and trade.

But first, the hungry season.  Most of us aren’t much used to hunger, real gnawing hunger, that is, and we´re not much used to its varieties, tending to think of it in terms of out-and-out famine.   But through most of history, the annual hungry season, the time when last year´s stores were depleted and the harvest had not come in was how many people experienced hunger.  The fruits and vegetables of mid to late summer in northern Europe, for example, could seem a poor joke when you craved something substantial, bread, porridge, a heavy steamed pudding, and the meals of barley, wheat, rye, and the other cereals.

So here’s Liz, in Feasts and Festivals talking about the ancient English festival of Lammas, the first of August.

The first of August is half way between the Summer Solstice and the Autumn Equinox. This is when the agricultural cycle moves from growing to ripening and harvest. In pre-Christian times this was celebrated at the pagan festival of Lughnasadh and Lammas is its Christian successor.

Lammas marks the gathering in of the first summer harvest. In Saxon and medieval societies, when the first grain crop of the year was ready to cut it was an occasion of enormous importance and relief. There were two main times when starvation threatened in agricultural societies – early spring and immediately before harvest time. At Lammas the medieval housewife could bake new bread from the first cut of the grain. No wonder it was a time to celebrate.

When Lughnasadh became Lammas, the first bread was offered at a special mass. The word Lammas derives from the Anglo Saxon ‘hlafmaesse’ – meaning ‘loaf mass’ so technically people were celebrating not the raw grain but the bread made with it – which may distinguish Lammas from Church’s Harvest festival, when all is safely gathered in later in the season, and which is actually a Victorian innovation. Its origin is in Morwenstow in Cornwall when in 1843 the extremely eccentric Rev R.S. Hawker reinvented it.

Given that grain was so expensive to transport except by ship, prior to railroads, containers, and trucks on asphalt roads, given that most governments in an attempt to protect the landowning classes and control the politically-sensitive grain had protectionist policies against grain imports, the hungry season tipped over into famine all too easily.

And here´s a very short clip from the Seattle Times a day or so ago signalling a situation that once might have tipped the hungry season in Russia and some of the former Soviet Republics into famine.

Wheat prices surged in July by the biggest amount in more than a half century as severe drought conditions in Russia and other former Soviet republics destroyed grain crops.

In the mid nineteenth century, Britain did away with its protectionist agricultural tariffs, just as railroads and steamships made wheat from old wheat-growing areas like south Russia and new ones such as the Punjab, Argentina, Australia, Canada and the US available.

Consumers gazing at cheap loaves, jam and cheese

And here´s Frank Trentmann on bread and Free Trade in nineteenth century Britain.

Free Trade put the consumer on the political map. . . .Through a focus on ‘necessities’ or basic goods, cheapness became primarily a language of social justice, distracting from more selfish, acquisitive aspects of consumption.  Consumers, in this view, were part of civic life–not just customers in a shop.  Free Trade, it was hoped, would instil consumers with consideration for the rest of the community. Instead of a retreat from public life, consumption would foster civic participation, and, over time, raise the quality of production.  With the ‘cheap loaf’ as a symbol of the right of all Britons to the cheapest goods available on the world market, Free Traders painted a picture of equity and social solidarity . . . Millionaires and capitalist trusts, as well as hunger and social anarchy, in this view, were the products of protectionist societies abroad.

In short, Free Trade then roused the same kinds of enthusiasm that the local, natural, fresh, doing-good-by-eating-well, slow-and-small trumps fast-and-big movement does today.

As an example, here´s Diana Buja quoting the nineteenth-century British explorer, David Livingstone, extolling the necessity of free trade world wide, including Africa, in 1857.  It´s a perfect example of the harnessing together of the consumer, civic society, civilization and commerce that made up the Free Trade movement.  Don´t be distracted by the bits of Victorian terminology that grate today.

Sending the Gospel to the heathen must … include much more than is implied in the usual picture of a missionary, namely, a man going about with a Bible under his arm.

The promotion of commerce ought to be specially attended to, as this, more speedily than any thing else, demolishes that sense of isolation which heathenism engenders, and makes the tribes feel themselves mutually dependent on, and mutually beneficial to each other.

With a view to this, the missionaries at Kuruman got permission from the government for a trader to reside at the station, and a considerable trade has been the result; the trader himself has become rich enough to retire with a competence.

Those laws which still prevent free commercial intercourse among the civilized nations seem to be nothing else but the remains of our own heathenism.

In the years following World War I, the Free Trade movement lost ground for a whole variety of reasons that I won´t go into in this post. But the problems it addressed–how to make food accessible and cheap year round, how to balance the interests of farmers and consumers, how to handle food trade between nations–are as pressing as ever.

Here’s something I’ve been wanting to post for some time.  This ad appeared in Honolulu in a weekly, The Polynesian, in June 1840.  If it’s hard to read the words, here they are:

Good people all, walk in and buy

Of Sam & Mow, good cake & pie:

bread hard or soft, for land or sea,

“Celestial” made; come buy of we.

Now if this ad had appeared in 1880, when the Chinese (Celestials as immigrants were called in the nineteenth century) from Canton began arriving in the Hawaiian Islands in force, when bread making and European foods in general were making inroads across East Asia, it would not be so surprising.  But 1840!  That’s really early.

Bakeries are pretty tricky things, after all, demanding a good bit of equipment and skill.  You have to be able to build an oven and (if you are to bake pies and cakes) have to have various molds and forms.  You have to have some kind of leavening.  Hard to believe there were lots of yeasts floating around in these remote islands just waiting to be capture, but perhaps some microbiologist can correct me.  And few of the plants there (unlike say the maguey that produced pulque that could raise bread in Mexico) would have been suitable.  So probably some kind of sour dough starter.  Or perhaps (see below) some kind of chemical raising agent.

And of course you needed flour.  Don Marin, a Mexican from California (which was of course Mexican then) had tried sowing wheat in the second decade of the nineteenth century, apparently to no avail.

No, in the early nineteenth century flour was shipped round the Cape from the East Coast of the United States. “On opening a barrel stamped ‘Flour’ *said J.S. Green in the Transactions of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society in 1852( a chisel and mallet were always put in requisition to prepare the way for sifting, and these even were so ineffectual oftentimes that a pick axe or crow-bar seemed necessary for the work” of breaking up the solid cake.  Usually it was musty and sometimes sour, and often riddled with bugs and worms.  “In those days the demand for saleratus (a naturally occurring sodium or postassium bicarbonate, also imported) was imperious” to alleviate the indigestibility of the flour.

Into this world of weevil-ridden compacted flour come Sam and Mow from Canton, even advertising themselves as being from Canton, as if that had some connection with bakery.  Is that even possible?  Canton, after all, is in the rice-eating south of China.  If they ate wheat products, it was most likely noodles of various kinds.

Even so, a story begins to form in my head. The British in particular had been trading in Canton, porcelain and then opium, for well over a hundred years.  This indeed was the time of the Opium Wars and the attempt to open China to European influence.

Is it possible that the key to this story lies in the third line, “bread hard or soft, for land or sea?”  Ships sailing into Canton would have been running low on ship’s biscuit it may be assumed.  It would have made sense for entrepreneurial Chinese (who had perhaps sailed on British ships and observed bakeries in other parts of the world) to supply this need by setting up bakeries in Canton.  And perhaps the few British residents there, missionaries and merchants, provided the link to the soft bread, the pies and cakes.

And by 1840, there had been links between Canton and Hawaii for over half a century.  There had been Cantonese sailors with Captain Cook when he arrived in the islands in 1778 and others had come in the intervening years on the merchant ships that commonly had a few Chinese sailors, some of whom stayed. Apart from bakeries, they set up rice farms, sugar mills, stores, restaurants, and sold wine and liquor.

And then there’s one last factor to consider.  The market.  Who in Honolulu is 1840 is going to be buying bread?  The population of the islands is overwhelmingly Hawaiian, perhaps 80,000 or so, sadly down due to disease, but still the majority.  Their food was taro, perhaps just beginning to shift to rice.  There are about four hundred foreigners, thirty or forty of them Chinese.   So say 350 Europeans and Americans (including missionaries who arrived in the 1820s) who were most of the other foreigners. Enough just to support a bakery.  But dicey, I would think.

Ah ha. The ocean again.  In the 1820s whalers from New England started wintering in the Islands.  They would have wanted pies and cakes and soft bread.  And hard bread for going to sea again, for the long haul north back to the Arctic or southward home round the Cape. Now there’s a market for Sam and Mow.

One last question.  What is the green sprig that the Celestial is holding?  Tea?  Any thoughts?

I don’t have conclusive evidence of any of this but that is the story I tell myself.  But what a way for bread to come to Hawaii.