No Matter How You Slice It

OK it is amazing what happened after the invention of women, matches, wine and beer.

I often look at a recipe and wonder who was so smart to try mixing things and cooking them thus creating something delicious.

Think about this:


Bread is one of the oldest prepared foods, dating back to the Neolithic era.

Neolithic era is the "New" Stone Age, which was a period in the development of human technology that is traditionally the last part of the Stone Age.





The first breads produced were probably cooked versions of a grain-paste, made from ground cereal grains and water, and may have been developed by accidental cooking or deliberate experimentation with water and grain flour.




The development of leavened bread can probably also be traced to prehistoric times. Yeast spores occur everywhere, including the surface of cereal grains, so any dough left to rest will become naturally leavened. Although leavening is likely of prehistoric origin, the earliest archaeological evidence is from ancient Egypt. Scanning electron microscopy has detected yeast cells in some ancient Egyptian loaves. However, ancient Egyptian bread was made from emmer wheat and has a dense crumb. In cases where yeast cells are not visible, it is difficult, by visual examination, to determine whether the bread was leavened. As a result, the extent to which bread was leavened in ancient Egypt remains uncertain.



There were multiple sources of leavening available for early bread. Airborne yeasts could be harnessed by leaving uncooked dough exposed to air for some time before cooking. Pliny the Elder reported that the Gauls and Iberians used the foam skimmed from beer to produce "a lighter kind of bread than other peoples." Parts of the ancient world that drank wine instead of beer used a paste composed of grape juice and flour that was allowed to begin fermenting, or wheat bran steeped in wine, as a source for yeast. The most common source of leavening however was to retain a piece of dough from the previous day to utilize as a form of sourdough starter.

Otto Frederick Rohwedder is considered to be the father of sliced bread. In 1912 Rohwedder started work on inventing a machine that sliced bread, but bakeries were reluctant to use it since they were concerned the sliced bread would go stale. It was not until 1928, when Rohwedder invented a machine that both sliced and wrapped the bread, that sliced bread caught on. A bakery in Chillicothe, Missouri was the first to use this machine to produce sliced bread.

For generations, white bread was the preferred bread of the rich while the poor ate dark bread.
However, in most western societies, the connotations reversed in the late 20th century with dark (whole grain) bread becoming preferred as having superior nutritional value while white bread became associated with lower-class ignorance of nutrition.

Another major advance happened in 1961 with the development of the Chorleywood Bread Process which used the intense mechanical working of dough to dramatically reduce the fermentation period and the time taken to produce a loaf. This process is now widely used around the world in large factories.

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More recently, and especially in smaller retail bakeries, chemical additives are used that both speed up mixing time and reduce necessary fermentation time, so that a batch of bread may be mixed, made up, risen, and baked in less than 3 hours. Dough that does not require fermentation because of chemical additives is called "no-time bread" by commercial bakers. Common additives include reducing agents such as L-cysteine or sodium metabisulfite, and oxidants such as potassium bromate or ascorbic acid. Often these chemicals are added to dough in the form of a prepackaged base, which also contains most or all of the dough's non-flour ingredients. Using bases and sophisticated chemistry, commercial bakers have made possible the fresh production of imitation artisan and sourdough breads by semi-skilled labor working in smaller shops.

As a foodstuff of great historical and contemporary importance, in many cultures, bread has a significance beyond mere nutrition. The Lord's Prayer, for example, contains the line 'Give us today our daily bread'; here, 'bread' is commonly understood to mean necessities in general.

During the 1950s, the beatnik community used the term bread as a euphemism for money. The word bread is now commonly used around the world in English speaking countries as a synonym for money (as also is the case with the word dough.)

The cultural importance of 'bread' goes beyond slang, however, to serve as a metaphor for basic necessities and living conditions in general. A 'bread-winner' is a household's main economic contributor and has little to do with actual bread-provision, for example. This also goes along with the phrase "putting bread on the table." A remarkable or revolutionary innovation is often referred to as "the greatest thing since sliced bread. " The term "breadbasket" is often used to denote the stomach.



In the United States, the most popular bread is soft-textured, usually made with milk and slightly sweet, with a thin crust; this is the type that is generally sold ready-sliced in packages. It is usually eaten with the crust, but some eaters or preparers may remove the crust due to a personal preference or style of serving, as for afternoon tea. Though this "sandwich bread" is the most popular, many other native bread varieties exist in the US, including scali (an Italian-style bread made in New England), San Francisco sourdough, Native American frybread (a product of hardship, developed during the Indian resettlements of the 19th century), Jewish rye (a mix of wheat and rye flours is used, and the bread is commonly associated with delicatessen cuisine), as well as numerous whole-grain styles. In addition, many foreign styles of bread, particularly the French baguette, the Ashkenazi Jewish bagel and the Middle Eastern pita bread, have become naturalized in the United States

Women invented the bread recipes and learned to make the bread; men invented the match, the wine and the beer.

From those humble beginnings men and women have lived in harmony forever after.

Please pass the butter.

Bread is the king of the table and all else is merely the court that surrounds the king.
--Louis Bromfield