I’m a big fan of bread. It’s incredible versatile yet it still makes for a great snack even by itself. There are countless different techniques, ingredients, styles, and cultures that can go into bread, so naturally I began to get curious about its history here in France. It actually started with Katelyn ordering something at a nearby boulangerie and none of us really knowing what it was. I looked it up (it’s called a viennoise au chocolat if you were wondering) and fell deep into the rabbit hole that is French baking, so now I’m going to write about it.
Bread’s been around pretty much as long as humans have lived in settlements. The oldest evidence (that I could find via Google) of what we would call “bread” was unearthed from Jordan, the site thought to be 14,400 years old, give or take a few centuries. In some of the fire pits around the area, some charred food remains were found and studied, revealing their makeup to be “bread-like” (article’s words, not mine; you couldn’t pay me to eat something that was described as charred and “bread-like”).
This is exciting for a number of reasons, mainly that baking represents a huge step forward for mankind. We eat bread on a daily basis so it’s easy to forget how much goes into baking it, especially since we have big ol’ machines that do everything for us. The prehistoric people would’ve had to de-husk the grain, meticulously grind, sieve, mix the kernels and then bake the bread, all by hand and with limited tools. They didn’t have any recipe books either, so measurements were all but non-existent. This is an arduous process to undergo for some bread where you could have gotten the same number of calories from a hunk of meat or some tubers, so the fact we have evidence of this shows an increase in how carefully we used to gather and prepare our food.
This kind of proto bread would have been similar to a flat bread and likely eaten alongside other things like meat or fish. The first instance of more a recognizable bread, similar to sour dough, is from Egypt around 4,600 years ago, and it was created by total accident. Some Egyptian baker probably left out some dough in the sun and heat where it fermented and rose, creating a way lighter, fluffier kind of bread. It’s tastier and easier to digest, so we’ve let our bread rise ever since.
I won’t get too deep into the Romans and their whole schtick (because dear god I would talk about them for the rest of my life and still not be done), but I’ll mention they invented water-milling which drastically sped up the process of creating and distributing flour. Prior to that, people would have milled by hand and baked in their homes or might have had a small local bakery. More large-scale baking operations began to occur after Rome invaded and settled all over the place, France included.
The Middle Ages are where bread really begins to shine in the lives of the common people. It began a staple of people’s diets, even becoming intertwined in culture and things like class or status. For example, it was said that the white the bread you ate was, the richer you were, as it had gone through more processes to get that smooth, silky texture and light color. This highly processed white bread was thought to be super healthy, so much of the upper class would ate some with every meal. Darker bread was supposed to only be eaten by those who labored often, as it was hard to digest and believed to cause stomach aches.
Peasants ate what is similar to multi-grain wheat bread, but without the sugar and instead made of rye or barley. Sometimes they added extra ingredients like legumes, acorns, peas, chestnuts, etc. The average European ate up to two pounds of bread a day, around 30 servings. People even used bread as plates, cutting them into thick, long slabs and serving dishes with meat or sauce on them. There was some religious significance behind bread as well, as the body of Christ, the Eucharist, was said to be in the form of small wafers (not the delicious cream-filled kind).
This is pretty much it for this week’s blog (and subsequent info-dump). I’ll focus more on the French side of things in my next post, as today was just about the origins and ancient history of bread in general. With all of the different kinds of baked goods and techniques in France, it deserves a post of its own, so that’s what I’ll do.
Talk to ya later! I’m going to go take a nap now.
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