Passion for toast, rolls and all things bread

Maude McDaniel, Columnist

When I was young, “Heidi” was one of my favorite books. Not much of it stays in my head after all these years, but there is one thing I remember about it which, for some reason, I will never forget.

That is the old grandmother who never had any kind of soft bread to eat but always had to endanger her elderly teeth with hard crusts of black bread. One of the things Heidi made sure to do, when she got into cushier circumstances, was to take home whole loaves of white bread for the dear old grandmother to eat, thus saving, no doubt, her remaining teeth.

Or maybe not.

Now, from a modern standpoint, we have to wonder whether Heidi was doing the old lady any favors, since we are constantly being told that the coarse dark whole-grain bread is by far the healthier food. Heidi was feeding the grandmother Wonder Bread, for heaven’s sake, and you know all about Wonder bread, right?

Still, whether it was because of Heidi or not, the fact remains that when I was a child I adored soft white Wonder bread, and any sandwich made of it. Like all bread, it’s irresistible fresh out of the oven, and a wonderful delivery system for butter, jelly, cinnamon sugar, eggs, bacon lettuce and tomato, and peanut butter, when the wind is right. (Not out of Georgia.)

But I like all kinds of bread, not just white. Currently I am fond of rye bread with the seeds in it, and a kind of cheese bread with cheddar cheese melted into the soft spots. They make the best toast ever, which is all I eat for breakfast. (I love doughnuts any other time of the day but the dear things are too sweet for a bracing morning wake-up.)

You didn’t ask, but I looked it all up on Internet and the history of bread is a long one. Baking, it seems, is one of the oldest occupations in the world, with ossified loaves (similar to some I have baked) found in 5,000 year old Egyptian tombs. It was mentioned a lot in the Bible (the unleavened bread in the Exodus, shared sacramental bread at the Last Supper), and even the ancients seemed to agree that white bread was more desirable.

Stone-crushed barley and wheat and the millstones that crushed them have been discovered from 7,500 years ago. Some experts believe that it was “bread” that lured our ancestors out of their private caves to live together in groups so they could farm bread grains and share them.

I have no idea when yeast was discovered — I suspect it might have been when a cavewife drank too much barley water on a very hot day and forgot to bake her loaves until they were long gone. (Or maybe, a rival theory, she accidentally spilled the barley water into the flour.)

Anyway, in Rome a bakers’ guild was formed in 168 BC, and unlike other craftsmen, these workers were freemen, not slaves. The Guild of Master Bakers still exists, somewhere or other.

Apparently, some thousand or more years ago in a competition for the best bread, the city of Athens won, and its best baker was renowned through the Western world of the time. (In case you get this question on your next Historic Trivia game, his name was Thearion. Amaze your friends!)

However, rolls from the city of Rhodes were reputed to make drunk men sober, and full men hungry, and you don’t find that much these days. (Nowadays, instead of the best bread, we vote on the best show biz types — over and over again. Most of these you couldn’t call wholesome, but they wear pretty clothes.)

In the European Middle Ages, you’d make your own dough and take it to local bakeries, some of whose owners were not above stealing snippets of Mrs. Murphy’s bread dough to bake for themselves. That might be where the whole idea of monkey bread came from. (You make it out of little bits of dough — wonderful stuff!).

Somewhere in this moment of history we come across that timeless reference to “A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou.” I’m not much into wine, but the other two concepts definitely have their appeal.

For some reason, the rich, from Rome to Russia always preferred their bread white, and it became a class symbol, which is where we came in, with Heidi. By 1880, steam mills using steel rollers drove out all those interesting millstones all over Europe, while increased production of cereal crops from the U.S. helped make white bread more available to average consumers. Thus the rich were obliged to find something else to make them feel special which is why we have HGTV.

Today, it seems there are scores, if not hundreds of flours available to bakers for their bread output, which might seem like a Good Thing.

However, I love every one of them.

Which, I am told, is a Bad Thing.

Maude McDaniel is a Cumberland freelance writer. Her column appears on alternate Sundays in the Times-News.