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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the knead-to-know-information dept.

The discovery of flatbread remains from around 14,500 years ago in northeastern Jordan indicate that people began making bread, a vital staple food, millennia before they were thought to have developed agriculture. The charred bread residue was found in a stone fireplace at an archeological site there.

Reuters : World's oldest bread found at prehistoric site in Jordan
Haaretz : Archaeologists Find 14,400-year-old Pita in Jordan's Black Desert


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday July 17 2018, @10:33PM (1 child)

    by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @10:33PM (#708553)

    I wonder if it started from mothers "pre-chewing" grains to feed young, not fully toothed children. It does not seem to me it would be a large leap from that to realizing the larger quantities of grains could be smashed or ground with rocks and soaked in water to soften them, and from there it would only be another small leap to realizing the process could be hastened even more by cooking.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Tuesday July 17 2018, @10:47PM

    by Arik (4543) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @10:47PM (#708558) Journal
    You're all sort of right but I'm going to chime in cause I think you're all missing the same facet of this, an important facet.

    Cooking didn't originate in making food. Food was originally raw. Cooking began as a way to *preserve* foods we were already eating raw.

    Today the average person has to spend relatively little time thinking about food preservation, what with fridges, supermarkets, and all that, but back in the days we are talking about it was a HUGE deal. If you killed an animal you needed to use all that meat very quickly or it would spoil. Fruit and green produce spoils almost as quickly, and occur in short seasons. So without food preservation it's feast and famine, for short periods of time you have more than you can possibly eat, then it all turns to poop and smells too bad to stay near and you have to find something else to eat quickly.

    The word "pemmican' specifically refers to the historical north american concoction, but there's every reason to think the basic concept stretches back tens of millenium, and may consitute the beginning of cooking. And the purpose it served was primarily preservation, though we sometimes duplicate it today for taste. You take foodstuffs of various types - lean (trimmed) meat, dried berries and/or fruits, sometimes roots, sometimes seeds, depending on what's available. You grind it all up quite fine and cook it thoroughly so it's very dry and then you seal it in a package using rendered fat. It'll keep a long time that way, and it's very concentrated, so when you eat it, well, you *can* take a dry mouthfull and let your saliva soak in and chew and chew and chew and savor the flavor while you walk, sure. You can also settle down for a break, make a fire, boil a little water, and mix some of this into the water for a hearty soup.

    If you're already making this stuff, and you have a year where you're overwhelmed with seeds, it doesn't seem a stretch to try and go directly to a hot seed porridge, and if it tastes crap cause you have no meat and berries to flavor it with, it gets left out in the baking sun of a near eastern summer all day, you come home and you have some hard bread.

    And that bread, again, may not be gourmet but it will keep, if it's very well dried it will keep a long time, it can be chewed on while you walk, or you can crush it up and mix it in boiling water to make a porridge when you build your fire...

    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?