“Give us this day our daily bread”: making wheat into flour by hand
Full details
| Authors & editors | |
| Year of publication | undated |
| Languages | |
| Medium | Digital |
| Edition | 1 |
| Topics | Energy & power > Muscle power |
| Tags | |
| Scope & content | As agriculture superseded ‘hunter/gatherer’ methods of food production, the need to process grains became more necessary. The husks of most cereals are inedible, and make it difficult to get to the nutrient rich inner seed. By breaking apart the seeds and removing the inedible parts, man developed a way to make wheat into food, most notably flour, the key component of bread, which has been a staple of the diet ever since. With the advent of commercialization and industrialization, making flour moved away from the farmer and homestead, and the methods used for small scale manufacture disappeared from common knowledge. This paper explores the development of flour milling technology in Europe, and includes information about my own experiments making flour using Iron Age hand milling for living history demonstrations. |