People were baking flatbread thousands of years before anyone farmed wheat
In Jordan's Black Desert, archaeologists found charred crumbs of flatbread baked by hunter-gatherers between 14,600 and 11,600 years ago, from wild grains and tubers. Bread went on to anchor towns, pay Egyptian labourers, serve as medieval plates, and in 1928 finally meet the machine that sliced it.
Those Natufian crumbs at Shubayqa 1 predate bread from cultivated wheat by thousands of years, and grinding stones found in Australia push seed processing back some 60,000 years. Once wheat was domesticated in the Fertile Crescent, loaves appear at Neolithic sites in Turkey and Europe about 9,100 years ago, and farming spread in every direction, encouraging people to settle in towns. Egyptians before coinage paid poorer workers partly in bread and beer. Leavening usually meant saving yesterday's dough, though Pliny noted that Gauls and Iberians used beer foam for a lighter loaf.
Greeks seem to have invented the preheated oven with a door. Their everyday maza, made from barley meal, was neither leavened nor baked, and Solon reportedly restricted wheat loaves to feast days. Athenians could buy bread from shops by the 5th century BC, and Greek bakers reached Rome in the 2nd century BC. So central was bread that the Greek word for everything else on the plate meant simply an accompaniment. Under the Abbasid caliphs, bakeries became a guild trade supervised by the state, and 10th-century cookbooks devoted whole chapters to sandwiches, including one named for Caliph al-Ma'mun.
Medieval Europeans ate off trenchers, slabs of stale bread about 15 by 10 centimetres, which the hungry ate afterwards and the better-off gave to the poor or the dogs until wooden versions took over in the 15th century. England regulated bread's price and weight from the 13th century. Later came scandal: loaves padded with chalk, sawdust or alum, first exposed by Frederick Accum in 1820, prompting Sylvester Graham's 1837 treatise urging home baking with unrefined flour. The Corn Laws kept British bread dear until their repeal in 1846.
Industry transformed the loaf. Otto Frederick Rohwedder built a slicing prototype in 1912 and a slicing-and-wrapping machine in 1928, and Britain's Chorleywood process of 1961 cut fermentation time dramatically at some cost to flavour and nutrition. Poor diets among Second World War recruits pushed the United States to require fortified white flour from 1941. Meanwhile status flipped: white bread, once the luxury of the rich, lost ground to wholegrain in most Western countries by the late twentieth century.
Source: History of bread
