Chapter One
A Brief History of Bread
There are no existing legends or documents that tell us when man began making bread to use in his diet. We know that in prehistory, cultivation of various grains began over eight thousand years before Christ. Most probably, the first grain used to make bread was barley. The use of millet, a more nutritious grain for breads, came next. In Africa and the hot-dry regions of southern Asia, the use of millet was widespread until the end of the Neolithic period. Rye and spelt were used in the Bronze Age as evidenced by the presence of these grains in the caves of that era. The cultivation of wheat was widespread in Western Europe around the fourth century b.c. This indicates that wheat bread is among the most ancient of foodstuffs.
The first step toward bread making began when people began to grind wheat and other grains between two flat rocks. This coarse flour was mixed with water and eaten as cold cereal. When fire was discovered, the grains were toasted to make them tastier and more digestible. When this flour was mixed with water, the dough was cooked on hot flat stones. Thus, the first flat breads came into use. The ancient Egyptians invented the first ovens to bake their flat breads.
The next revolutionary step in bread making was the discovery of yeast. Scientists and archaeologists cannot fix the date when natural fermentation was first found; they guess that someone threw a handful of dough into a dark and warm corner of a cave, forgot about it, and found it days later bubbling with life and smelling sour. This brave unknown person baked the dough anyway, and so the first loaf of leavened bread came into existence. The ancient Egyptians were the first to learn, through experiments, how to control fermentation and became the first bakers of leavened bread in the ancient world.
During the period of Greek civilization, leavened bread baking reached new heights. The ancient Greek bread bakers made fifty different types of loaves. The Romans' conquest of Greece brought bread into the Roman Empire. Bread became the "staff of life" as evidenced in the building of public flour mills and ovens throughout the Roman Empire. It was the Romans who invented flour mills, where grains were ground in between giant slabs of granite, and thus produced finer grades of flour.
It was near the end of the Roman Empire, when the emperors decreed free bread and entertainment for Roman citizens. "Panem et Circenses," bread and circuses, were an effort to maintain a semblance of Roman law among the increasing disorder of the declining Roman Empire.
However, the glorious Empire fell when invaded by the barbarian tribes of France and Germany. This was the beginning of the Middle Ages of European history, when the monks in their monasteries not only preserved great classic literature but the art and science of bread making. The monks began wine making later in history.
Food history is as important to study as an integral element of the history of mankind as are wars, philosophies, theologies, and social movements. Without food there would be no history at all.
Bread in Italy
Bread" in Italy is rough country loaves with thick chewy crusts and flat disks of focaccia seasoned with the wild herbs of the fields. Their tastes and shapes are fragrant reminders of a tradition of baking that is older than the Roman monuments and Romanesque cathedrals that we travel to Europe to see. These breads are expressions of an earthy culture that still talks about its most fundamental experiences in terms of bread. In Italy, a down-to-earth man with a real heart of gold is described as buono come il pane—good, like bread. When Americans talk about being direct and straightforward, we say we're calling a spade a spade, but Italians say pane al pane e vino al vino, "calling bread bread and wine wine." Bread gives us real glimpses into the complex and fascinating history of all the regions of the country. Italy wasn't even even united until a little over a hundred years ago, so many of the roots have remained a little more exposed than might be true elsewhere. All the rivalries and bloody battles between neighboring cities and regions brought the inhabitants an intense pride. So just as each village and city had its own bell tower looking over its own fraction of countryside, ready to call citizens to arms and alert them to danger, their breads expressed a passionate attachment to local customs and ingredients.
Bread is so fundamental to everyday eating that the Italians are forever using the word companatico, an all-purpose term for what one eats with bread. "What's for lunch?" Pane e companatico—bread and something that goes with it. And bread is such a basic part of life that while there are no cookbooks devoted to baking bread at home, many recipes begin "Take 500 grams of bread dough that you've bought from your baker." Pizzas, focacce, enriched breads, and holiday breads often begin just that way.
Each day in Italy, more than thirty-five thousand bakers rise early to knead their dough and shape their loaves, and of that number 90 percent are artisan bakers, working on a small scale and dedicated to keeping a family and regional tradition alive. They are preserving the past by making it a living part of the present, but they are also showing the baker's dazzling imagination, producing "new wave" breads that turn the luscious provender of the vines and fields into tantalizing loaves.
They have taken the olive paste of Liguria, made from the first crushing of salty, aromatic olives grown near the sea, and incorporated it into a bread. They have taken pesto and sweet peppers and tomatoes dried by the sun under a dappled screen of latticework arbors: use the humble potato and the most expensive aged cheeses; they have taken dark grains that once belonged to a peasant culture and given them new companions and shapes to make a range of breads that appeal to the Italian passion for fantasy, in the most inventive and tantalizing tastes imaginable.
Life without bread is inconceivable in Italy, and yet if I had decided to write this book twenty years ago, it would have been an elegy, a bittersweet testament to breads of another time. In the 1950s and 1960s, massive companies took over the bread baking of Italy, turning out airy white loaves like the spongy, cottony slices Americans know from our own supermarket shelves, and threatening to homogenize a tradition of breads, pastries, cookies, and pizzas that were once the culinary equivalent of Italy's numerous dialects. Gone were the indigenous specialties. The tastes and flavors of the past were interred by high-speed rollers that milled grain to a bland, highly refined flour without texture or nutrients, and by huge machines that mixed and kneaded faster than the human eye could see—by automation that removed the human touch from the most basic of all human food. Suddenly, giant Italian companies were making deals with American consortia to produce biscuits and crackers by the millions to be eaten instead of bread. They were replacing grissini, the archetypal artisan-made bread stick, with pale little batons all the same color and width and length, extruded from the dies of a machine. Gone were the knobby thick bread sticks whose length was determined by the span of the baker's arms. Blandness suddenly ruled, leaving the centuries-old tradition conquered, as one writer puts it, "by the imperialism of city bread."
But just as the monks kept culture and bread alive during a dark time in the country's history, there were a few bakers who refused to follow the new ways. To them—those who safeguarded tradition and perpetuated the taste of the countryside—this book owes its inspiration and its recipes.
In Florence, a pastry and bread baker has given life again to the Tuscan specialties that were once a part of country life and tradition. He put the tastes of this extraordinary landscape into oil-drizzled schiacciate and pizzette with elegant slices of vegetables and fine powderings of herbs, into festival specialties such as sweet rosemary-scented buns and breads bursting with fat golden zibibbo raisins.
A Roman baker made one hundred kilos of pizza a day in his wood-burning ovens in Rome, and rendered the rustic loaves of tiny towns such as Genzano and large cities such as Terni, and created a coccodrillo (crocodile) bread that people in Rome travel far across the city to buy.
A Venetian baker has worked in Venice since he was a very young boy. His skill with pastry was phenomenal and his flights of imagination created the ossa de mordere, the focaccia laced with zabaglione cream, and the bolzanese in this book. In Venice, too, another baker with forty years of baking experience showed how breads and rolls were made before machines had such a large part in the cutting and shaping of dough. And specialty bakers in Venice all showed me secrets of bread and pastry baking. A baker in Genoa made the true focaccia of the region crammed with the pungent tasty olives of Liguria and the fresh herbs of the hillsides.
Truckloads of breads from Altamura fan out across the countryside to Milan and Turin in the north and to tiny villages deep on the heel of the boot. I have shaped and dimpled pizza dough in Naples, watched bakers in Palermo making calzones and cassatas, and eaten their brioches filled with ice cream, as all the Palermitani do for breakfast. In Palermo, I learned about mafalda and sfinciuni, the bread and pizza specialties of the city, and wouldn't leave without tasting everything in the "Spinato" bakery. These and many more are the sources of the recipes and folklore of Italian bread, and they are the bakers who day after day make the breads and sweets that bring these tastes to the fortunate Italians who eat them at breakfast and dinner, over coffee and aperitifs in the trattorie and restaurants, coffee bars and piazze, where the people of Italy live out their lives.
The revival of bread and a new pride in its myriad forms has led real aficionados to wonder why different breads aren't served with each course, in the same spirit as wine.
If wine is made by transforming grapes, yeast, and water, and bread is made by the alchemical fusion of flour, water, yeast, and salt, why not confirm its regional authenticity with some special highly respected authority such as a D.O.C. classification. D.O.C. means "determination of origin controlled," as is done with wines.
Seeing really good bakers at work can be eye opening. When they roll out the dough, their touch can be as delicate as a lover's caress, and when they knead, their authority can almost command the dough to respond. They can take an inert and colorless piece of dough and with their fingers give it form, elasticity, and vitality. The pale white dust that sifts over everything, and the sounds of the slapping and banging of the dough as it hits the table right out of the mixer, the thunk of the canvas carrier being snapped into the oven and then retracted—the smells, and the sights—all make the bakery a special world of its own.
Knowing the story and tastes of the regional breads that come out of these ovens is like taking a trip through the Italian countryside. Savoring and honoring them is like preserving the stone villages on the hillsides or their churches and frescoes, for saving the taste of the past keeps it alive in the present. The bakers who are committed to rediscovering the past and creating new ways of eating in the present do honor to the oldest of man's foods and to authentic Italian tradition, for bread is one of the most persuasive images of man's struggle to survive. No wonder baking is called l'arte bianco, the white art, for the mystical life-giving magic of yeast creates nourishment that sustains a people and keeps alive memories connecting the collective past to the world of today.
Bread is merely flour, water, yeast, and salt as the world is merely earth, water, fire, and air. These four elemental ingredients—grain from the fields, water from rivers and mountain streams, leavening from the wild yeasts of the air, and salt from the sea—have been combined since Roman days to make the breads of Italy. In a country where the family is the primary source of physical and emotional sustenance, bread celebrates the richest and simplest pleasures of daily living. It is the single inevitable presence at the table during all three meals of the day, for no Italian would contemplate a meal without bread.
Bread is such a basic part of life in Italy that every restaurant automatically sets it on the table and imposes a cover charge (coperto) to cover its cost. Almost every street in Italy's large and middle-sized cities seems to have at least one panificio (bakery) and pasticceria (pastry shop), and even tiny towns without bread ovens have a grocery store where bread is delivered warm in the mornings from nearby bakeries. It is calculated that Italians eat almost half a pound of bread a day, the highest consumption in all of Europe, a statistic that translates to 4.5 billion pounds of bread a year.
Even the academic body that serves to maintain the purity of the Italian language is called Academia della Crusca—the Academy of Bran—for it sees itself as sifting the wheat from the chaff. Its symbol is an agricultural flour sifter.
Walk past a bakery and you'll often see displays of grains set in the window so people can learn about what they are eating. Go inside and you'll notice that every bread is labeled not only with its name but also with every ingredient, as well as the price per kilo. Bread is so basic to a sense of well-being that local governments regulate the prices of the traditional breads of the commune, keeping it affordable for anyone with but a few euros in their pockets. The saltless bread of Tuscany, which is very cheap in Florence and Siena, can be sold for any price outside regional limits, though most of the people of, say, Milan and Rome have no cravings for or childhood ties to saltless bread. Anyone from the countryside around Chianti, however, or from the little hill towns that have sat in this landscape since the Etruscans first sited them, will tell you that saltless bread is part of a heritage that stretches back long before Dante.
A Tuscan would no more choose to eat a Roman pagnotta or a Milanese michetta than he would expect to find Wiener schnitzel on his dinner plate. So how could it come as a surprise that each region boasts variations on its breads and ingredients and makes its local tastes into breads that define a small geographical area?
How could it be otherwise in a country that has a dial-a-message service for regional recipes? Each day, the recording gives a new recipe for a dish from each of the regions of Italy. And how could it be otherwise in a country scarred in medieval times by cities that chose to fight ferociously with their closest neighbors to prove their supremacy, their dedication to local alliances finally leading them to stamp their own identity not only on the landscape but on the foods as well? This rich, complex, and combative heritage influences Italian baking and is embellished by the reality that everyone from the Saracens to the Austrians conquered different regions and left their culinary signature behind. The porous and crunchy-crusted Pugliese bread of the south is a legacy of the brown country loaf brought by the Ruks who long ago walked the streets of Apulia, and the famous michetta roll of Milan was born of the Kaiser Semmel of Vienna, which was brought to Milan by the Austrian cavalry in the late 1800s.
Copyright © 2007 by The Word Of God Fellowship, Inc. All rights reserved.
