The importance of bread in society: the etymology of Lord

In listening to The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition by Seth Lerer (Lecture 8), I came across an interesting word etymology which foodies and particularly bread fans will appreciate.

Dr. Lerer was talking about the compression of syllables at the border of Old English and Middle English circa 1100 which occurred in such terms as hlaf weard, the warden (or guardian) of the loaf.

Who is the guardian of the loaf? The hlfaf weard << The hlaweard << the laweard << the lord. This is the etymology of the word 'lord'. Lord is the guardian of the bread, the mete-er out of bread in a cereal society.

An interesting linguistic change that tells us a lot about power, structure, religion, and society surrounding bread of the time. I suppose one could also look at Christian traditions of the time which looked at the transubstantiation of the symbolic bread of the Last Supper which is ritually turned into the body of Christ–Christ, our lord.

One can’t help noting the slang use of the word “bread” to mean “money”. Perhaps it’s time to go back and re-visit Jeremy Cherfas’ excellent podcast series Our Daily Bread?

Featured image: Bread flickr photo by adactio shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

🎧 Food waste is #Solvable | The Rockefeller Foundation

Listened to Food waste is #Solvable from The Rockefeller Foundation

Ahmed Ali Akbar talks to activist and author Tristram Stuart about using food scraps to eliminate waste.

Tristam Stuart is an international author, speaker, and campaigner on the environmental and social impacts of food. He is the founder of Feedback, an environmental campaigning organization that has worked in dozens of countries to change society’s attitude towards wasting food. His TED Talk on global food waste has reached over 1.5 million viewers.

Notes

Companion from the Latin con meaning “with” and pan meaning “bread”. I know I’ve contemplated this word before, but it does have a whole new warmth when framed in this way.

That is what beer originally was for. Preserving the calories in grains that might otherwise be wasted.

Toast Ale – a beer brand made from left over bread and grains. 

Recommendation: Jeremy Cherfas may appreciate this particular episode.

🎧 Barges and bread | Eat This Podcast

Listened to Barges and bread: A new book looks at London and the grain trade by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

Time was, not so long ago, when you could barely move on the Thames in London for ships and boats of all shapes and sizes. Goods flowed in from the Empire in tall-masted sailing ships and stocky steamers and were transferred to barges and lighters for moving on. The canals, too, were driven by, and served, the industrial revolution, bringing coal and other raw materials to factories and taking away the finished goods by water, the cheapest and quickest system for bulk transport. By the late 1960s, much of the waterborne traffic had gone. Ships unloaded in the docks and goods were transferred by road and rail. A bit of freight continued to move on the water, some of that in the hands of Tam and Di Murrell. Di Murrell’s new book, Barges & Bread: canals & grain to bread & baking traces the interwined development of the grain trade and bread as it played out in the Thames basin and beyond.

The importance of bread (and beer) to the people is encapsulated in the Assize of Bread and Ale, a statue of 1266 (though it appears to have codified earlier laws) and the first law in England to deal with food. Loaves were sold by size for a penny, a half-penny and, most commonly, a farthing (quarter of a penny). The finer the flour, the smaller the loaf you got at each price point. The price of grain naturally varied from year to year and from place to place, but the Assize fixed not the price but the weight of a penny loaf and also regulated in minute detail the baker’s profit and allowable expenses.

Very roughly, if the price of wheat was 12 pence a quarter (a quarter weighing 240 pounds) then the baker had to ensure that a farthing loaf of the best white bread, called Wastel bread, weighed 5.6 pounds. Wastel bread was not the most expensive. Simnel bread, “because it has been baked twice,” cost a bit more and so called French bread, enriched with milk and eggs, a bit more still. The coarsest “bread of common wheat” was less than half the cost of wastel bread.

From every quarter of wheat, the baker was permitted to sell 418 pounds of bread. Anything he could squeeze above that was called advantage bread, and was essentially pure profit. There was, naturally, every incentive for bakers and millers alike to add all sorts of things to increase the weight of flour and bread.

It is the connection between money and the weight of bread that is most intriguing. Weights, like money, were expressed as pounds. A pound in money was the pound-weight of silver, while the penny – the only coin in circulation – was a pennyweight of silver. But how much was a penny weight? 32 Wheat Corns in the midst of the Ear according to the Assize of Bread and Ale, which then explained that the 20 pence-weight made an ounce, and 12 ounces made one pound.

Notes

  1. Di Murrell’s book Barges & Bread: canals & grain to bread & baking, is available from Amazon and elsewhere, including direct from the publisher, Prospect Books.
  2. Di also has a website, Foodieafloat.
  3. If you really want to get to grips with the Assize of Bread, you need to read Alan S. C. Ross. “The Assize of Bread.” The Economic History Review, vol. 9, no. 2, 1956, pp. 332–342. JSTOR.
  4. Incidental music is the Impromptu from Zez Confrey’s Three Little Oddities, played by Rowan Belt
Sad that they managed to win their court case for shipping grain, but were still frozen out of the market.

Following KT Pickard

Followed K. Thomas “KT” Pickard by KT Pickard (GenomeDad Blog)
Big data: From medical imaging to genomics In 2006, a Scientific American article written by George Church, “Genomics for All,” rekindled my interest in genomics. I went back to school in 2009 to contemplate the business of genomic medicine, and celebrated my MBA by writing a Wikipedia entry for the word, “Exome.” I was hooked. We started our odyssey by genotyping our family using 23andMe, and later my wife and I had our whole genomes sequenced. Realizing that genomics were starting to yield clinically useful information, we crowdsourced the sequencing of our kid’s genomes to look for genetic clues in their autism. We found interesting results, gave talks and wrote papers. Along the way, I realized that medical imaging and genomics are highly complementary: genomics informs or identifies conditions, and radiology localizes them. Sarah-Jane Dawson pointed this out at a Future of Genomic Medicine conference in 2014.
Someone who’s also into some of my favorite topics: genomics, medical imaging, and bread? And bonus points for the blog name https://genomedad.com/.

How could I not follow him?

📖 Read pages 40-57 of The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart

📖 Read pages 40-57, Chapter 1. What is it About Bread: Classification of breads & beginning of 12 stages of bread, of The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread by Peter Reinhart (Ten Speed Press, , ISBN: 978-1-60774-865-6)

Lots of nice definitions and categorization, though I can already tell from other readings that some of the definitions, particularly for pre-ferments, aren’t always as solid as I’d like them to be. As if he were a mathematician, however, he seems to delineate a pretty tight set here that he indicates he’ll stick to throughout the book.

Four types of pre-fermented dough
Stiff/firm: pâte fermentée and biga (no salt)
Wet: poolish and sponge (or levain levure)

📖 Read pages i-39 of The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart

📖 Read pages i-39, Acknowledgements, Preface, Introduction, beginning of Chapter 1. What is it About Bread, of The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread by Peter Reinhart (Ten Speed Press, , ISBN: 978-1-60774-865-6)

The opening is perhaps overly romanticized, though still interesting. He does relatively quickly get into the good stuff though.

Happy Fornicalia

As we coast toward the nones of February whence we’ll commence the celebration of the Fornacalia, by all accounts an Ancient Roman religious festival celebrated in honor of the goddess Fornax, a divine personification of the oven (fornax), and was related to the proper baking of bread, I thought it only appropriate to call some attention to what should be an international holiday for bakers.

While shamefully few, if any(?), now celebrate the Fornacalia, I’ve always looked at the word as a portmanteau of a festival along the lines of a bacchanalia for bread with tinges of seeming Latin cognates fornicati, fornicatus, fornicata, and fornicatae or the Greek equivalent porneia (πορνεία). Knead these all together and you’ve got the makings of a modern day besotted festival of bread immorality. And really, who wouldn’t want to celebrate such a thing?!

I’ll celebrate myself by doing some baking, listening to the bread related episodes of Eat This Podcast, while reading and looking at bread porn on Fornacalia.com. Special thanks to curio maximus Jeremy Cherfas for providing entertainment for the festival!

How will you celebrate?

 

Featured photo Bread is a flickr photo by Jeremy Keith aka adactio shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license.

🎧 Bread as it ought to be: Seylou Bakery in Washington DC | EatThisPodcast

Listened to Bread as it ought to be: Seylou Bakery in Washington DC by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast
Jonathan Bethony is one of the leading artisanal bakers in America, but he goes further than most, milling his own flour and baking everything with a hundred percent of the whole grain. He’s also going beyond wheat, incorporating other cereals such as millet and sorghum in the goodies Seylou is producing. I happened to be in Washington DC just a couple of weeks after his new bakery had opened, and despite all the work that goes into getting a new bakery up and running, Jonathan graciously agreed to sit down and chat.

And almost as if to prove my point after writing about Modernist BreadCrumbs the other day, Jeremy’s latest episode is a stunning example of love and care in a podcast dedicated to food. I’m really so pleased that he can take a holiday, have so much fun with bread, and simultaneously turn it into something like this.

Even the title reads as if he were trying to out-do the entirety of eight episodes of Modernist BreadCrumbs in one short interview. I think he’s succeeded handily.

There’s so much great to unpack here, and simultaneously I wish there was more. I found myself wishing he’d had time to travel to some of the farms and done a whole series. With any luck he actually has–I wouldn’t put it past him–and we’ll be delighted in a week or two when they’re released.

Read Long-soak brown bread by Jeremy Cherfas (fornacalia.com)
50 percent long soak 1 Jonathan Bethony, who runs Seylou Bakery in Washington DC, mills his own wheat and uses 100% of the grain. Talking to him for Eat This Podcast I learned about the difference in bran between softer European wheats and harder North American wheats. My wholemeal, from softer whe...

🎧 Modernist BreadCrumbs | Episode 6: Balls & Sticks | Heritage Radio Network

Listened to Modernist BreadCrumbs | Episode 6: Balls & Sticks by Michael Harlan Turkell from Heritage Radio Network
This is Episode Six of Modernist BreadCrumbs: “Balls & Sticks,” on shapes, scoring, and semiotics.

Balls & sticks. You’ll hear this idiom over and over in this episode, as if we’re talking in circles. The two shapes’ repetitive figures have been a constant in bread’s identity over time, but why?

Modernist BreadCrumbs is a special collaborative podcast series with Heritage Radio Network and Modernist Cuisine, that takes a fresh look at one of the oldest staples of the human diet—bread. Although it may seem simple, bread is much more complex than you think.

From the microbes that power fermentation to the economics of growing grain, there’s a story behind every loaf. Each episode will reveal those stories and more, beginning with bread’s surprising and often complicated past, from the perspective of people who are passionate about bread, and shaping its future.

🎧 Modernist BreadCrumbs | Episode 5: Against the Grain | Heritage Radio Network

Listened to Modernist BreadCrumbs | Episode 5: Against the Grain by Michael Harlan Turkell from Heritage Radio Network
This is Episode Five of Modernist BreadCrumbs: “Against the Grain,” on politics.

How does bread play a part in politics you ask? Withholding grain has been part of party lines as well as a catalyst of war. Though the fight still continues to bring bread to those impoverished and underfed around the world, we urge you to chew on this: become as active as a sourdough starter, and be part of the bread revolution. Rise up!

Modernist BreadCrumbs is a special collaborative podcast series with Heritage Radio Network and Modernist Cuisine, that takes a fresh look at one of the oldest staples of the human diet—bread. Although it may seem simple, bread is much more complex than you think.

From the microbes that power fermentation to the economics of growing grain, there’s a story behind every loaf. Each episode will reveal those stories and more, beginning with bread’s surprising and often complicated past, from the perspective of people who are passionate about bread, and shaping its future.

🎧 Modernist BreadCrumbs | Episode 7: Thermal Mass | Heritage Radio Network

Listened to Modernist BreadCrumbs | Episode 7: Thermal Mass by Michael Harlan Turkell from Heritage Radio Network
This is Episode Seven of Modernist BreadCrumbs: “Thermal Mass,” on baking and ovens.

We’ll discuss “thermal mass,” or the ability to absorb and hold heat, in two-parts: within bread itself, and the ovens it’s baked in. It’s a complex physicochemical process… that’s more than just hot air.

Modernist BreadCrumbs is a special collaborative podcast series with Heritage Radio Network and Modernist Cuisine, that takes a fresh look at one of the oldest staples of the human diet—bread. Although it may seem simple, bread is much more complex than you think.

From the microbes that power fermentation to the economics of growing grain, there’s a story behind every loaf. Each episode will reveal those stories and more, beginning with bread’s surprising and often complicated past, from the perspective of people who are passionate about bread, and shaping its future.

🎧 Modernist BreadCrumbs | Episode 4: Milling About | Heritage Radio Network

Listened to Modernist BreadCrumbs | Episode 4: Milling About by Michael Harlan Turkell from Heritage Radio Network
This is Episode Four of Modernist BreadCrumbs: “Milling About,” History Part II, Pre-Industrialization.

When we look back on how modern baking came to be, it’s the same old story of craft informing art, and how the artisanal approach was replicated through the aid of mechanization. This episode picks up where Episode One left off, telling bread’s life story from All Purpose to Zopf.

Modernist BreadCrumbs is a special collaborative podcast series with Heritage Radio Network and Modernist Cuisine, that takes a fresh look at one of the oldest staples of the human diet—bread. Although it may seem simple, bread is much more complex than you think.

From the microbes that power fermentation to the economics of growing grain, there’s a story behind every loaf. Each episode will reveal those stories and more, beginning with bread’s surprising and often complicated past, from the perspective of people who are passionate about bread, and shaping its future.