Older than farming
In 2018, archaeologists digging at a site in the desert of north-east Jordan found charred crumbs of bread about 14,400 years old, baked by hunter-gatherers from wild cereals and roots. That is thousands of years before people began farming, and it suggests that the wish to make bread may have been one of the reasons people started to grow grain in the first place. The earliest breads were flat, like a FLATBREAD or NAAN, baked on hot stones. Flatbreads are still the everyday bread across much of the world, from the TORTILLA in Mexico to the PITA of the eastern Mediterranean. Naan is slapped against the inside wall of a tandoor, a clay oven that can reach around 480°C, and peeled off moments later.
Rising bread needs YEAST, whose bubbles of gas are trapped by gluten, a stretchy network formed when WHEAT flour is mixed with water and kneaded. RYE flour makes less gluten, so rye loaves are dense and dark. CORNBREAD, a favourite of the American South, is raised with baking powder instead.
A starter passed down for generations
SOURDOUGH is made without shop-bought yeast. Instead, bakers keep a starter, a paste of flour and water full of wild yeasts and bacteria, feeding it every day and using a little in each LOAF. The bacteria make acids that give the bread its sour taste and help it keep. Some bakeries claim to have kept the same starter going for well over a century, and San Francisco's sourdough bakers kept theirs alive through the earthquake and fire of 1906.
The best thing since sliced bread
In 1928, in the town of Chillicothe, Missouri, a bakery began selling bread cut by a machine invented by Otto Rohwedder, who had spent years on it and lost his first prototype in a fire. Shoppers loved it, and sales of pop-up toasters rose with it. In January 1943 the United States government banned sliced bread for a few weeks to save the wax paper and steel it used during the war. There were so many complaints that the ban was lifted within two months.
Words baked into English
Bread is hidden in some everyday English words. A companion was originally someone you shared bread with, from the Latin com, with, and panis, bread. Lord comes from an Old English word meaning loaf-keeper, the head of a household who handed out its food, and lady from a word meaning loaf-kneader. Money is still called dough or bread in slang, and a family's main earner is the breadwinner.
Loaves from France and Italy
People often say that Marie Antoinette, told that the poor had no bread, replied let them eat cake. The French actually says let them eat BRIOCHE, a rich bread made with butter and eggs, and the writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau told the story in a book he wrote when she was still a child, so she almost certainly never said it.
The CIABATTA, whose name means slipper, looks ancient but was invented in 1982 by an Italian baker, Arnaldo Cavallari, who was worried about how many French baguettes Italian sandwich shops were buying. FOCACCIA from Genoa is pressed with fingertips to make dimples that hold olive oil. A good baguette, a ROLL, a BUN or any CRUSTY loaf is best judged by its CRUST, and the WHOLEMEAL kind keeps the whole of the wheat grain, bran and all.