Grind his bones to make my bread...

So everyone knows the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. One of the most famous lines from Jack’s story is “Fe Fi Foe Fum, I smell the blood of an English Man.” Then everyone gets fuzzy on the next line until he says “Grind his bones, to make my bread.” Alright now that is just gross but it brings up the point, anything if you really want it to can be ground down to make flour. In fact some friends and I recently read the ingredients on a Gluten free and apparently flour free cake. It was not in fact flour free, just wheat flour. Gluten is a protein found in the seed that when mixed with yeast, baking soda or baking powder that lets the dough rise. What the cake was made out of was rice flour.

van Gogh 1885, wheat field

In the 16^th and 17^th century English documents the word grain is used but not as often as the word corn. Corn during this time period referred to any good that could be ground down to a powder. In a number of sources the word corn is found following anything that might be ground down to make flour, wheat corn, rye corn (though this is falling out of favor by the late 17^th century being referred to as just rye), barley corn, Native Corn (Flint corn, or the very colorful corn we use to decorate our table at Thanksgiving time), Pea Corn (also falling out of favor like rye, becoming just peas), Gun Corn (referring to the ingredients that get ground down to make gun powder) and so on. Now based on archaeological evidence the first bread seems to be made in the Fertile Crescent, what is today Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, Kuwait, Syria, Israel, and Palestine.  Bead was the staple food of the people in this area and they were harvesting vast fields of wild barley and wheat 22,500 years ago.

Now with the creation of fire, people have been cooking with fire for almost as far backs as Homo sapiens which is around 4,800 years old. (That is us by the way,) The earliest evidence of human cooking heaths dates to 250,000 B.C. That dates to Homo heidelberenis (350,00 years old,) but a few years ago, charred bones and primitive stone tools were found in a cave in South Africa, moving cooking on a fire to 1 Million years ago (That dates to Homo erectus).

Small Morter and Pestle

Ignoring when fire was created it, using it to cook caused not only our bodies to get used to cooked food but also our bodies to adapt to cooked food, hence body parts like the appendix that we don’t need anymore. This means that when 22,500 years ago when we start eating wheat and barley our bodies couldn't digest it in its raw state nor could our teeth handle it. So we “grind grains to make our bread” to paraphrase the giant.

Grinding Stone

Now a statue out of Old Kingdom Fifth Dynasty Egypt (2,465-2,323 B.C.) shows a woman grinding flour on with a flat rock and almost round pin. Evidence of this method for grinding are found the world over. Examples are found all over Mesas in the Western Americas. Mesa Verde in Colorado has some beautiful examples that date to over 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. Mortar’s and Pestles are found all over showing the pounding method everywhere. Eventually these gave way to mills. The first mill was run by slaves or mules around 300 BC and by 89 BC the first water wheel was created. Archaeologists are still determining if it is in Greece, Norway or one of the other few locations that gets to claim who had it first. The grinding mill allowed flour to be readily produced for the masses, strengthening breads grasp on cultures around the world.

5th Dynasty Egypt

So grind on, enjoy bread, and I prefer stone ground over steal ground (today's method) when I can get it.