Making flour

Not so easy, as I learned long ago.  Of all the possible food sources, grass seeds–which is all that grains or cereals are–have to be one of the most improbable.  They’re impossibly tiny, or at least they were when humans first began to use them, and even more impossibly hard.

When I was just a child, I must have been less than ten, my father decided that since we grew acres and acres of wheat it would be interesting to try making his own bread.  He would turn the wheat into flour, my long-suffering mother would take the next step and turn it into bread.

Well, now, he would just have checked on the web to see how to do it or gone off to the health food store and bought a small electric mill.  But health food stores were a long way in the future, as was experimental archaeology, and web resources for this sort of thing were just beyond the imagination.

So my father had to tackle the wheat with the tools at hand.  His first tack was to put a handful of grains into a mortar and begin pounding away with a pestle.  Bits of grain flew around the kitchen, a few grains were pulverized but nothing like flour appeared.

Perhaps this was not forceful enough.  He mounded a small pile of wheat on the flagstone flour and this time he tackled it with a hammer.  Same result.

It was becoming clear that even parents were not omniscient.  He went off to the kitchen cupboard, hauled out my mother’s meat grinder, and screwed it on to the edge of the table.  Depending on the disk he inserted, the grains either came through slightly mangled or did not come through at all.

Greatly to my mother’s relief, I am sure, that was the end of that.  No flour from our wheat, no bread.  It was sobering to think that even with a barn filled with sacks of wheat waiting to be picked up by the millers, we could have gone hungry.  We might have been able to boil the grains but we were completely incompetent to turn them into bread.

Now, years later, I am the proud owner of half a dozen grindstones of various shapes and sizes and can do just fine, something I’ll talk about in another post.

But what I have learned is that almost anything you read written more than about five or ten years ago about the early history of grinding when archaeologists finally began to investigate it is likely to be–how shall I put it delicately?–unadulterated rubbish.

A note to my readers.  As I see the deadline on my book on world food history approaching, I’ve decided to blog on bits of material relevant to the book.  I love comments but may not have time to respond.

• ← Mexican Foodways at the University of Texas
• It’s the shear bloody work of it (sic). Grinding →