Bread or wine? Why not both?
Bread: Not just fluffy stuff in plastic wrap
Originally appeared June 5, 2009 in Research, Writing Fiction, Writing Non-Fiction | Tags: writing, Research, food
Bread is a basic staple for many people; we pick up our weekly loaf of plastic-wrapped squishy soft bread at the grocery store without thinking about where it comes from. I think we’ve all had to rescue a flattened loaf from the bottom of the bag at some point, and our ranting at that ignorant bagger can strip paint off the walls. . . .
But let’s take a moment to look at bread that isn’t so easily overcome by the weight of a couple apples and a box of tissues. Long ago and far away, in a world rather less clean and much less obsessed with plastic wrap, bread was something that you could balance a piece of fruit on top of without fear. According to “The Year 1000″ (Lacey & Danziger), which I’ve also quoted from in a previous post, “The bread of the early Middle Ages was round, coarse, and quite flat by modern standards, not baked in a tin, with the texture of a pita bread, nan, or chapati today. The natural gluten in wheat bread provided a ‘raising’ agent which gave it more air than bread made with rye or barley, but it was probably quite old and tough by the time most people ate it. . . .”
And then there’s the link to harvest-time; with our vast modern resources it’s easy to forget that in order to make the bread there has to be grain of some sort, which means there have to be farmers out there sweating in the sun and cursing too much or not enough rain . . . such a simple thing, bread, but such a big and important one to anyone in preindustrial times.
What happens in a land where there isn’t any grain? How about desert cultures: do they eat bread? If so, it implies, by its very existence, an intricate network of trade with more fertile areas. . . .
Bread, once you get away from those suspiciously squishy loaves, is a surprisingly complicated subject. Here are a couple sites worth looking at for more information:
http://www.kitchenproject.com/history/Bread/
http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodbreads.html
And now, back to ‘baking’ my book . . . which is also a surprisingly complicated subject!
