History of Bread

Bread, like cheese, is a fundamental food and is more common than cheese, with form of bread found all over the Old World, including Europe, Ethiopia, India, the Levant, and Central Asia. Bread is very versatile and can go with just about anything, so let’s look at how bread became a thing.

12,000 years ago humans started realizing that if you take seeds and plant them and gather new seeds from the plant, you can farm plants. This was the start of the Agricultural Revolution. The start of farming led to surplus food (which was mainly wheat and barley) that led to cities and people ultimately eating that surplus food. Unfortunately, humans soon found that it is rather hard to crack or digest raw, hard wheat grains. And that’s how bread came to be.

Of course, bread has many types and forms. Not all breads are flour or wheat-based. Injera is an Ethiopian flatbread that is made of teff, a type of grass. And many wheat-based breads can be made with barley as well. Cornbread and corn tortillas are popular in the Americas, while rice cakes are a staple in East Asia. Pretzels became popular in Central Europe in the Late Middle Ages as dough was soaked in lye as leavening.

When Europeans came to America, they brought traditional methods of bread-making but sometimes replaced wheat with corn, the native staple. Thus, the American staple of cornbread came to be. And with that, much of the major timestamps in bread have been covered, so we’ll end here.