Flour and flower were once the same word, meaning the finest part
People were grinding cereals into flour more than 32,000 years ago, long before farming. The word itself comes from Old French for blossom, used figuratively for the best of something, because milling stripped away the coarse husk and left the choicest part of the grain. Industrial milling later made that refining step much more drastic.
Flour is any powder milled from grains, beans, nuts, seeds, roots or even vegetables. Wheat dominates because it is the basis of bread, but maize flour has fed Mesoamerica since ancient times, rye underpins breads of central and northern Europe, and teff makes the flatbreads of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Arrowroot thickens sauces twice as effectively as wheat. Archaeologists in Jordan have found signs of bread-making at Shubayqa 1, a Natufian camp of foragers dating back over 14,000 years, and grindstones for seed at Madjedbebe in Australia date to the Pleistocene.
Milling drove technology. The Romans were the first to grind grain on cone mills, and the push to make grinding less laborious helped give rise to watermills and windmills. In 1786 Albion Mills in Southwark, London, became the first steam-powered flour mill, and roller mills displaced millstones during the nineteenth century.
Industrial scale brought a storage problem. The germ of the grain contains fatty acids that start oxidising once milled, turning flour rancid in six to nine months, too quickly for long-distance distribution. Because vitamins were barely understood in the late nineteenth century, the solution was simply to strip out the germ. Degermed white flour became standard, spreading from cities to the countryside over about a generation. The nutrients lost that way are why flour began to be enriched with iron and B vitamins from the 1930s, and why 86 countries required wheat flour to be fortified as of 2016.
Protein content decides what flour is good for. Cake flour, at about 6 to 7 percent protein, crumbles easily; all-purpose sits near 10 to 11 percent. Chlorine treatment weakens gluten so cakes rise better and hold more moisture, yet chemically bleached flour is banned in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Before chemicals, some millers whitened grain by layering it with Syrian rue leaves, whose fumes loosened the bran.
Source: Flour
