Loaf guardians of yore

I’ve been doing a bit more historical sleuthing into bread, and came across these old Anglo-Saxon references . . . 

It turns out that Anglo-Saxon lords were called hlaefward – or ‘loaf guardian’ – and their other halves (the ladies of their manors) were called hlaefdige – or ‘loaf kneader’. 

So  why did bread become so Euro-centric? 

Simple . . . After its ‘discovery’ in the ancient Middle East, and its spread and further development to Egypt, it was a hop-skip-and-a-jump to ancient Greece, before being adopted by the Romans. 

And as the Romans had perfected conquest and the concept of settled empire, it spread through the then-known western world like wildfire. 

To facilitate large-scale bread making, you needed several factors coming together: 

·         * An agricultural system that could ‘mass produce’ cereals rich in gluten (like wheat)

·         * Milling – the ability to grind grain into flour

·         * Leavening – a way of making dough light, tasty and more digestible

·         * A sophisticated baking system – capable of regularly cranking out multiple loaves 

In short, you needed a well-developed agrarian society with more than a modicum of industrial nous – otherwise known as ‘civilisation’. 

But what about the rest of the world? 

Rice, the staple grain of east Asia, and maize, the staple of the Americas, are unsuitable for bread making as we know it. 

That only left the Australian Aborigines (and I believe they were knocking out simple bush breads and seedcakes eons before the Neolithic farmers of the Middle East – see my reference to Aborigines elsewhere on my blog), but they appear not to have discovered the magic of leavening .