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Bread: The Staff of Life
| Article
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10343 |
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Section : |
Culture
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| Issue
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12 / 1986 |
3,594 Words |
| Author
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Erika Fabian
Erika Fabian is a well-published freelance writer,
playwright, and photographer and is co-director of PSI
(Photographic Society International). |
"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground..." (Genesis 3:17)
This, according to the Bible, was God's curse upon Adam when he and Eve were driven out of Paradise. We don't know what kind of bread the Bible talks about, but we do know that even in the Stone Age, 8,000 years ago, man ate bread. At that time, he very likely just collected seeds from wild grasses, crushed them over stones, mixed the resultant crude flour with water, and cooked it as a porridge or baked it as a flat loaf laid over a hot stone. In either case, hard and flavorless bread must have resulted, hardly the kind of porous, crusty, flavorful variety Americans and Western Europeans think of as bread.
The lack of yeast was actually the main reason for such poor quality bread. The kind of bread that we Westerners are familiar with, according to most historians, came into existence accidentally in Egypt. A housewife left her bread dough out in the sun too long, and it fermented. Thus, when she finally got around to baking it, she came up with the first spongy bread--something akin to what we know today. So precious was this discovery that until yeast was identified as the leavening agent for bread, "starter dough" was taken from each batch of ready-to-bake bread for the next day's supply.
The word 'yeast' is a derivative of the Sanskrit yas, which means "to seethe." Compressed yeast is a yeast culture that has been pressed, cut into cakes, and wrapped or bottled. Dried yeast is the same product, dehydrated. In our modern world, it is usually sold in packets. In Egypt, when it was first discovered, the Egyptians probably didn't know
... (1996 of 20604 Characters)
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