[Sca-cooks] Grains

[Terry Decker]

Pardon me, but your view is too simplistic.  If you are talking about 
leavened bread, you are talking wheat and rye.  They are the only grains 
with enough gluten to work with a leaven.  Both grains were ubiquitous 
across much of Europe well before period.

They can be mixed with other grains and each other to produce various 
maslins (mixed grain).  Rye and the maslins are generally considered brown 
breads.  Wheat is white bread.  These are the province of brown bakers and 
white bakers respectively (at least in late Medieval London).  The five or 
six period bread recipes available are for wheat breads.  IIRC, there is a 
brown bread recipe in Markham from just out of period.

If you are going to write about the full selection of breads and grains, you 
will need to broaden your thinking and look into such things as the Hymn to 
Ninkasi (description of barley flat bread uwsed to make beer), Abu Harrara 
(sic?) and the earliest evidence of rye cultivation, Egyptian wheat bread 
(3500-3000 BCE), wheat cakes from the Tain, horizontal turbine mills in 7th 
Century Ireland, Pliny's description of leavened bread ala Vandal, etc.

Since I'm in Joplin at the minute, I don't have any of my sources to hand 
and it will be a week before I'm back with them.  I"m quite willing to help 
you with possible references at that time.  Until then, let me suggest 
rooting through the Florilegium.

Bear



> I am looking for good documentation for various grains during our  period.
> My A&S paper is  going to be about bread, the  fermentation process and 
> the
> grains used. What I am really hoping to find  is something along the lines 
> of
> bread from x was made with x flour.   Because x grain grew there.
>
> The books I have about bread do not shed any light on it.
>
> World Sourdoughs by Ed Wood, English Bread and Yeast Cookery  by 
> Elizabeth
> David, The History of Bread by Berbard Dupaigne and A Treatise on  Baking 
> by
> Wihlfart (Fleischmann Company).
>
> Aldyth