Our Daily Bread
Our grateful thanks to Frank Morley for this, the first of
a series of articles covering the development of milling.
Far back in time man's source of food was by hunting and relied almost entirely on the wild animals where he lived, but his natural desire for variety in his diet led him to cultivate grasses which were collected in their wild state and used to obtain the seed they produced.
Whilst Rye and Barley are harvested for food in some parts of the World, by far the main grain of classical antiquity is Wheat because of its high percentage of carbohydrates capable of being turned into glucose, one of the main fuels in our food.
Wheat has been grown as a food as far back as history can tell. The cave drawings of the Magdalenian cave people show that crushed seeds were made into a porridge like diet some 25,000 years ago. Scientists excavating the remains of ancient civilisations in the Middle East discovered wheat grains estimated to be over 9000 years old and wheat seeds taken from the tombs of the Egyptian kings have been successfully grown and cultivated. It is now the largest cereal crop in the World and has amazing storage properties. There are so many references to wheat and milling in the Bible that it would take a complete article to list them all. Today it is true that wheat is being sown, being harvested and being milled somewhere in the World every month of the year.
There are, of course, many types of wheat. Hard wheat for making pasta, semolina and. Macaroni. Soft wheats for biscuits, custard powder, confectionery and the like. Hard wheat is high in protein, soft wheat has a low protein. Wheat alone of all the cereal proteins forms the remarkable product gluten which is so essential in providing the risen loaf. Because we like a risen loaf our bread is generally made from a high protein flour, whereas the French stick is baked from a lower protein flour
A grain of wheat showing the several skins of bran that have to be removed from the endosperm.
It appears a wild grain called Einkorn was the original parent of today's wheat, but a grain similar to what, we have today only appeared on the scene 6000 years ago. It was thought that Persia was the primary area for the cultivation of wheat, which only came to Europe some 2000 years later. Animals are capable of eating and digesting grain as it comes from the plant, but man does not have that ability and so the wheat has to be cooked or baked in some way. As bran is less digestible than the white endosperm of wheat a method had to be found to separate the two, especially as some wheats have up to six skins of bran. Therefore to reduce the grain berry into small particles to make it freely accessible to cook or bake and for the chemical changes needed for it to be digested by man a grinding or milling process had to be found.
In the next article we will examine the origins of milling of reducing the wheat berry to flour to provide a basic human food.
Frank Morley