Knead to Know (eBook)

GRIDDLECAKES AND PANCAKES

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I have laid out what I have and have not counted as baking in the introduction, so now we can begin our origin story properly, and ask ourselves: ‘What was the first thing to be baked, and how was it achieved?’ I hope I am on fairly solid ground when I say that the stuff – the raw ingredients, as it were – must have been some flour mixture of one or more grains: wheat or barley most likely. Grains had been toasted and cooked in pots of water before someone had the idea of grinding them up first, this we know. Grinding is a natural progression from roasting; if you have ever toasted your own grains or whole spices, you will know just how brittle and easy to break they are, and just how delicious they taste when broken. Combining cooking with grinding was an extremely important notion: cooking breaks down a food and liberates nutrients, making it easier to chew and digest; in science-parlance, the food is more ‘nutritionally available’. Grinding or crushing is like pre-chewing, making the food quicker to cook and easier to ingest. When mixed with water, the starch and gluten inside a cereal grain can mix to form simple batters. These batters could be made into porridges or gruels, or the basis of soups, but how were they baked? It has been long established that from some time in the Mesolithic Age (10,000 to 8,000 BCE) fires were built inside rings of stones, which eventually became hot. However, archaeological evidence from the Black Desert, Jordan, in 2018, moved the date back 2,000 years. Remnants of flatbreads cooked by a hunter-gatherer society on flat stones were unearthed and analysed and were found to contain wild wheat and barley and mashed roots.

Stone is a poor conductor of heat, but once it is hot, it remains hot for a long time, and a blob of dough or a thick batter will cook very well on a flat stone. After this discovery – perhaps by accident – flatter stones were chosen and they were worked to be smoother. The first bakestones were made, and humans got their first taste of hearthcakes, the origin of all baked goods.

Processing and cooking carbohydrate, protein and nutrient-rich wholegrains changed the course of human history: nomadic tribes settled in a single spot in order to grow more of these cereals. The hunter-gatherer had become a farmer and from this point, villages, then towns and cities – civilisations – would form. This meant humans would become more and more dependent upon these grains and better at cooking with them. They also became better at processing and refining them, and at the same time were able to select the plants with the highest yields, domesticating them. Grinding and cooking them maximised the nutrition inside those plants. This could be achieved by making gruels of course, but with baking, you get something extra: toasty crusts, soft and fluffy interiors.

Archaeological digs at and around Stonehenge have revealed that the people who lived and probably celebrated or worshipped here certainly ground wheat, grew a lot of hazelnuts and spent a great deal of time searching for honey. Simple cakes made with ground wheat, ground hazelnuts, honey and probably a little water have been cooked up on hearthstones and found to be not only very ‘nutritionally available’ but also very delicious.

FIRST GRAINS

In recent decades the variety of foods we consume has gone through somewhat of a bottleneck, and this is certainly true for the different types of grains, and flours made from them. There was a time when most British communities grew several different cereals, the precise proportion of wheat, barley, oats and rye dependent upon locale. Cereals were first domesticated in a bow-shaped strip of land sitting across what is today the Middle East, somewhere around the eighth and seventh century BCE. This large strip is known as the Fertile Crescent. Here barley and wheat (and pease*) were the first to be grown, with rye and oats coming later. Two key changes also occurred in the farming and selection of barley and wheat. On the stalk of cereals, each grain is covered by an outer husk which must be removed (shilled); these skilled farmers managed to produce strains that were ‘naked’, i.e. had a husk that easily shilled itself before harvest time. Second, the ‘ears’ of corn and barley were bred to cling more tightly to their stalks and not blow away in the wind as the wild types do; grasses disperse their seeds via wind, so it’s an adaptation they have naturally, one that humans have managed to undo.

Let’s have a look at the four main cereal crops in turn:

The first wheat to be domesticated was called einkorn. It has two sets of chromosomes (this is the DNA we receive from our parents, one set from mum and one from dad), which makes it a diploid (‘two-sets’) organism.* At some point, it hybridised with a wild goosegrass to produce a new species. Hybridisation is common in plants and means that the plant then receives sets of chromosomes from two species, producing a hybrid with four sets of chromosomes (a tetraploid). From these plants, emmer and durum wheat were created. The former preferred arid conditions and was taken to Africa, while the latter was used in Europe for pasta. Then the tetraploid domesticated wheat hybridised again with another species of goosegrass, producing a variety of wheat with six sets of chromosomes (it was now hexaploid). From this new form of wheat, spelt was derived, and all modern wheats are derived from this hexaploid ancestor. Why? The hybridisation is key: there was a huge amount of genetic variation trapped inside, so many different strains could be created. Today 30,000 varieties of wheat are actively grown. Of all wheat grown around the world, 90 per cent of it is hexaploid, and coming in second place, just a smidge under 5 per cent, is tetraploid durum for pasta.

HEARTHSTONES, BAKESTONES AND GRIDDLES

Cooking on a flat piece of stone, as opposed to cooking in a pot, meant that instead of having a liquid gruel or thick porridge, you had a solid cake cooked on a hearthstone that was portable, could be eaten with fingers, passed around and wrapped around other foods. It could soak up the juices from meat, it was brown and toasty. Hearthstone cooking was, simply, more versatile and more delicious, and the products from the bakestone have been enjoyed for millennia. One of the reasons foods cooked on bakestones or griddles have endured is simplicity: a flat, hot surface can be made by just sweeping ash away from a hearth and cooking some dough straight on it. Eventually folk started to make bakestones (or bakstones in Northern England and Scotland) from ‘thin slabs of any locally available stone which could withstand the heat of the fire’.1 However, from the Elizabethan Age, most common were the cast-iron griddles (or girdles in Northern England and Scotland). Curiously, in some regions, they retained the name of bak(e)stone, despite the fact that the material they were made from had changed. The great benefit of iron is that it can be fashioned into a variety of shapes. The standard shape, however, quickly became a round disc with a large, curved handle reaching right over it, perpendicular to the base: this meant that you could move it without burning yourself and that you could hang it over a fire.

Bakestones and griddles are...