People were baking flatbread thousands of years before they learned to farm, and bread has been shaping history ever since. These stories visit the bakeries that fed the pyramid builders, a Roman baker's tomb and the London shop where the Great Fire began. You will meet a jeweler who sliced America's bread, a chemist whose wife could not eat yeast, a sea captain who claimed the doughnut hole and astronauts who swapped bread for tortillas, plus a library whose books are sourdough starters.
Every tile in a Bread and Baking game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Breads
nine stories
1The French loaf with its own law
On the tile: Baguette1993
France takes its daily bread seriously enough to write it into law. A 1993 decree says a loaf sold as pain de tradition française must come from a dough of wheat flour, water and salt, raised with baker's yeast or sourdough, with no additives and no freezing along the way. In 2022 UNESCO added the artisanal know-how and culture of baguette bread to its list of intangible cultural heritage. It noted that the shallow cuts across the top are the baker's signature, and that baguettes are baked in small batches all day long.
A favorite tale says a Frenchman, often Napoleon, was served dark German rye bread and sniffed that it was fit only for his horse, Nicol: pain pour Nicol. It cannot be true. Pumpernickel was a German word by 1663, first as an insult for a stupid person, and English had borrowed it for the bread by about 1740, both before Napoleon was born. The real roots are earthier. Pumpern meant to break wind and Nickel meant a goblin or rascal, a jab at what heavy rye bread does to the digestion.
San Francisco's famous sourdough has a microbe named after the city. In 1971 researchers Kline and Sugihara described the bacterium that sours it, isolated from doughs that had been kept going in San Francisco for more than 100 years, and named it for the city. Hometown bragging rights have faded since. In 2021 scientists who studied 500 sourdough starters, mostly from home bakers in the United States and Europe, found that where a baker lives is not an important factor in the microbes growing in the jar.
4Japan's sweet bean bun raised with a sake starter
On the tile: Anpan1875
When Western bread reached Japan after the Meiji Restoration, many people found it hard and sour. Kimura Yasubei, who founded the bakery now called Kimuraya Sohonten in 1869, and his son Eizaburo borrowed an idea from traditional sweets. They raised a soft dough with sakadane, a starter of rice, koji and water that is also used in making sake, and wrapped it around sweet red bean paste. Anpan was presented to Emperor Meiji in 1875 and is said to have spread rapidly after that. One version wears a salted cherry blossom.
The English muffin found fame in Manhattan. Samuel Bath Thomas emigrated from England to New York in 1874 with a recipe for a muffin baked on hot griddles. He worked in a local bakery, and by 1880 he had opened his own shop, at 163 Ninth Avenue. Alongside ordinary white and rye loaves he sold round, coarse-grained, yeast-raised muffins meant to be split, not sliced, and toasted. Demand grew until his bakeries were delivering by horse and wagon into Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens.
Armenian lavash bakes faster than you can read about it. A simple dough of wheat flour and water is rolled thin, stretched over a special oval cushion and slapped against the inside wall of a conical clay oven. Thirty seconds to a minute later, the bread is pulled off the wall. A small group of women usually shares the work. Lavash can be kept for up to six months, and at weddings it is laid on the shoulders of the newlyweds to bring fertility and prosperity. UNESCO recognized the tradition in 2014.
Bread and spaceflight do not mix, because crumbs float. In 1965 astronaut John Young hid a corned beef sandwich in his spacesuit for Gemini 3. When Gus Grissom tried it, the rye crumbled, and he stuffed it in a pocket to keep crumbs from drifting around the cabin; a congressman later warned crumbs could have fouled the instruments. The answer arrived in November 1985, when Mexican payload specialist Rodolfo Neri Vela asked for tortillas aboard the shuttle Atlantis. His crewmates noticed they made no crumbs, and tortillas are now standard fare in orbit.
In Iceland some bakers skip the oven and let the Earth do the work. At Laugarvatn, rye dough goes into a pot that is buried in hot black sand and left for 24 hours in the heat of a geyser, then dug up and eaten warm with butter. The loaf comes out dense, chewy and a little sweet. Icelanders call it hverabrauð, hot spring bread, though another nickname, thunder bread, hints at what all that fiber can do to the digestion. Most Icelanders now bake their rye bread in ordinary ovens.
Passover matzah recalls the Israelites, who left Egypt in such a hurry that their dough had no time to rise, and it is still made against the clock. The Talmud's sages taught that dough left alone can begin to rise in the time it takes to walk a mil, an old unit of distance, and bakers generally follow the strictest reckoning: 18 minutes. In 1838 Isaac Singer in France invented the first machine for baking matzah. By 1859 rabbis were arguing about it, and some insisted machine matzah was even more kosher than handmade.
The croissant is a French icon with an Austrian passport. Its ancestor is the kipfel, a crescent-shaped Austrian roll, and the evidence points to an Austrian entrepreneur named August Zang, who opened a Viennese bakery at 92 Rue Richelieu in Paris in 1838. Parisians flocked to his Vienna bread and kipfel, and imitators soon followed. No references to the croissant appear in France before about 1850. Zang later sold the bakery, returned to Austria, founded a newspaper and grew rich in banking and mining. His ornate tomb in Vienna never mentions baking.
Portugal's famous custard tarts have monastic roots. In the early 1800s a sugar cane refinery with a small general store stood next to the Jerónimos Monastery in Belém, then considered far from Lisbon. After the liberal revolution of 1820, Portugal shut down all its convents and monasteries in 1834 and expelled the clergy. In an attempt at survival, someone from the monastery began selling sweet pastries in the shop. From 1837 they were baked in buildings attached to the refinery, following the monastery's secret recipe, which is still known only to the master confectioners.
The Linzer torte has a paper trail stretching back more than 370 years. In 1653 Countess Anna Margarita Sagramosa of Verona compiled a cookbook that contains four recipes with Linz in their titles. The manuscript, now cataloged as Codex 35/31, belongs to the Benedictine Abbey of Admont in Austria, home to the largest monastery library in the world. The abbey says that makes the Linzer torte the oldest known cake recipe in the world.
In 1832 Prince von Metternich wanted a dessert for his discerning guests, and the task fell to a 16-year-old apprentice named Franz Sacher. His creation of chocolate and apricot jam became the Sachertorte. Franz's son Eduard later opened the Hotel Sacher in Vienna, and after Eduard died his widow, Anna, ran it, famous for her cigars and for breeding French bulldogs. The hotel says the recipe is still the foundation of every Original Sacher-Torte, and that it ships about 360,000 handmade cakes around the world each year.
The Paris-Brest owes its shape to a bicycle race. In 1891 the newspaper Le Petit Journal staged a race from Paris to Brest and back, about 1,200 kilometers, created by Pierre Giffard; Charles Terront finished first in just under 72 hours. In 1910 pastry chef Louis Durand created a dessert to commemorate the race: a ring of choux pastry, its circular shape a nod to the bicycles' wheels, filled with hazelnut praline cream. The ride lives on too, held every four years since 1971 as a long-distance event for cyclists.
In May 2013 pastry chef Dominique Ansel launched a croissant-doughnut hybrid he called the Cronut at his bakery in New York's SoHo. Within weeks, lines were forming as early as 5 a.m. The pastries sold for $5 each at the bakery, but an unaffiliated delivery service charged $100 to bring a single one to your door, and Ansel lowered the limit to two per customer to discourage resellers. TIME magazine named the Cronut one of the best inventions of the year. Its flavor still changes every month and never repeats.
In Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, a madeleine dipped in tea sets off a flood of childhood memories, one of literature's most celebrated scenes. It almost starred toasted bread and honey. Manuscript drafts published in France in 2015 show the memory trigger began as humble bread and toast, then became a hard biscuit, all by about 1908. Only in a later draft did Proust settle on the soft little madeleine. As the publisher put it, the notebooks trace the literary family tree of the most famous moment in Proust's world.
The story goes that the hole in the doughnut was a sailor's idea. Hanson Gregory of Rockport, Maine, went to sea at 16 and rose to captain. In 1916 he told the Washington Post that the old fried cakes soaked up grease and were tough on the digestion, so as a young sailor he cut out the soggy center. Tellings differ on his tool: a fork, the lid of the ship's pepper tin, or a spoke of the ship's wheel. A plaque at his birthplace honors him, but no one can prove the tale.
9The volunteers who fried doughnuts for the troops
On the tile: Donut Lassies1917
In 1917, months after the United States entered World War I, twelve young Salvation Army volunteers traveled to France to serve American troops. One of them, 28-year-old Helen Purviance, remembered frying the first doughnuts seven at a time in a small frypan. The crews used wine bottles and shell casings as rolling pins and the top of a coffee percolator to cut the holes. They made about 150 doughnuts the first day and later thousands a day. The first National Donut Day, honoring these Donut Lassies, was held in Chicago in 1938.
1The chemist who finally explained the golden crust
On the tile: Maillard1912
The brown crust on bread, like the color of soy sauce and barbecued meat, comes from a reaction between sugars and amino acids that French chemist Louis-Camille Maillard described in 1912. It produced so many products that researchers largely ignored it until around World War II, when the military wanted tasty food that kept for a long time. Then in 1953 John E. Hodge, an African American chemist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Peoria, Illinois, published its mechanism. As food chemist Vincenzo Fogliano put it, “Maillard discovered the reaction, but Hodge understood it.”
Salt rising bread has a misleading name: it contains little or no salt and no yeast. The best guess is that it dates to Appalachia in the late 1700s, when women without access to yeast found another way. The rise comes from bacteria in the potatoes or cornmeal and flour of the starter, among them Clostridium perfringens, cultured with steady heat. The loaf is dense and white with a cheese-like flavor. The name may come from pioneers keeping the starter warm in a salt barrel, or on a bed of rock salt by the hearth.
Matsushita, the Japanese company now called Panasonic, had a problem with its home bread maker: none of the prototypes could turn out dough with the right texture. So members of the team, including computer engineer Ikuko Tanaka, went to learn from the renowned bakers at the Osaka International Hotel. Watching closely, they noticed that the master baker worked the dough with a special twisting motion. That motion was built into the machine's kneading, and the bread maker became a major success. The episode is a key example in the business book The Knowledge-Creating Company.
The little plastic tab on a bread bag comes with a tidy origin story. As the company tells it, Floyd Paxton was on a flight in 1952, eating a package of complimentary nuts, when he realized he had no way to close the bag. He took out a pen knife and carved the first clip from a credit card. Whatever the details, the business is real. Paxton founded Kwik Lok in 1954 and popularized the tabs on bags of apples. Based in Yakima, Washington, the company says it sells them in the billions each year.
In 1961 scientists at the British Baking Industries Research Association in Chorleywood found a shortcut. Instead of letting dough develop over hours of fermentation, they worked it hard in a high-speed mixer, typically for about three minutes, delivering a set amount of energy. The Chorleywood Bread Process typically takes a loaf from flour to sliced bread in under four hours, and it let bakers use more homegrown wheat. About 80 percent of the wheat used for bread in the UK is now grown there, compared with 30 percent before the process.
In the 1950s and '60s, French bakers adopted two-speed electric mixers and began kneading far more aggressively. Professor Raymond Calvel was dismayed by the very white, high-volume bread that resulted. In 1974 he developed the autolyse: gently mix just the flour and water, let them rest for 20 to 60 minutes, then add the other ingredients and knead. During the pause the flour fully hydrates and gluten starts forming on its own, so kneading time drops and the flour keeps more of its color and flavor. Calvel called the resulting bread more seductive.
For thousands of years, cooks in Mesoamerica soaked dried corn in limewater before grinding it for tortillas. The softened corn, called nixtamal, was easier to grind, and the alkaline soak did something no one then understood: it released niacin bound up inside the kernels. The earliest equipment linked to the process dates to about 3,200 years ago. When corn spread to Europe and later the American South without this step, people who lived mostly on corn suffered from pellagra, a disease of niacin deficiency, while in Mexico it was reported less commonly.
In 2006 New York Times columnist Mark Bittman shared a method from Jim Lahey, owner of Sullivan Street Bakery in New York, that skips kneading entirely. A wet, shaggy dough of flour, water, salt and less than half a teaspoon of yeast rests for about 18 hours, and slow fermentation does the work that kneading usually does. The loaf then bakes in a preheated covered pot, which traps steam like an oven within an oven. Bittman says thousands of people have made it, and for many it was their first try at baking bread.
Pillsbury held its first Bake-Off in 1949, then called the Grand National Recipe and Baking Contest, to mark the company's 80th birthday and promote its flour. Electricians installed 100 oven stations in a ballroom of New York's Waldorf-Astoria, and Pillsbury says the hotel had to tap the subway's electrical supply to power them. Eleanor Roosevelt helped award the prizes. The winner, Theodora Smafield, took home $50,000 for No-Knead Water-Rising Twists, whose dough rose while wrapped in a tea towel and submerged in warm water.
Bread came before farming. At Shubayqa 1, a hunter-gatherer site in the Black Desert of northeastern Jordan, archaeologists found hundreds of charred food remains in stone fireplaces. Analysis published in 2018 showed that people there had ground, sieved and kneaded the wild ancestors of barley, einkorn and oats, then cooked them into flatbread about 14,400 years ago. It is the oldest direct evidence of bread found so far, at least 4,000 years before agriculture. The researchers suggest that making bread from wild cereals may even have encouraged people to start growing them.
Ancient Egyptian texts say bread and beer were handed out as rations on royal building projects. In 1991 archaeologists in the town of the Giza pyramid builders found two bakeries, at the time the oldest known in Egypt. The bakers used heavy, bell-shaped clay pots called bedja, the largest weighing up to 12 kilograms, and fragments of them litter the site by the hundreds of thousands. Mixing vats were sunk so low in the floor that the excavators think someone may have stood in them and kneaded the dough with their feet.
3A Roman baker's tomb built to look like his trade
On the tile: Baker's Tomb1st century BC
Just outside Rome's Porta Maggiore stands the tomb of Eurysaces, a freed slave of Greek origin who grew wealthy as a baker and public supply contractor. Built between about 30 and 20 BC, it turns his trade into architecture. Its rounded elements recall the kneading equipment of a bakery, a frieze shows the stages of making bread, and an inscription repeated on the three surviving sides names him as baker and contractor. The tomb was unearthed in 1838, when the area around the gate was being developed.
Bread is hidden inside some very grand English words. Lord comes from Old English hlaford, a contraction of hlafweard, literally one who guards the loaves. Lady comes from hlæfdige, apparently one who kneads bread. A household servant was a hlafæta, literally a loaf-eater. Latin has a similar case. A companion is etymologically a bread fellow, from com, meaning with, and panis, meaning bread. So anyone who shares a sandwich with a friend is keeping very old company.
Why is a baker's dozen thirteen? The usual explanation points to medieval English laws, the Assizes of Bread and Ale, which strictly regulated the weight and price of bread and punished bakers who shortchanged customers. The most famous was issued under Henry III in 1266. A free loaf with every dozen protected a baker from selling underweight bread, and it gave the hucksters who resold loaves a profit. It is a reasonable guess, but no record ties the phrase to those laws, and its first known use, in 1596, has nothing to do with baking.
Brothers Charles and Maximilian Fleischmann came to America from Austria-Hungary and built a yeast plant in Cincinnati, making compressed yeast cakes. At Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition in 1876 they introduced freshly baked Viennese breads, and their yeast soon became a household name. The family then ran a Vienna bakery on Broadway at 10th Street in New York, which began handing out unsold loaves to people in need at midnight. As the giveaway became routine, lines formed before the appointed hour, and according to local historians, the popular term breadline was born.
Otto Rohwedder ran three jewelry stores in Missouri until 1916, when he sold them to chase an idea: a machine that sliced bread. In late 1917 a fire at an Illinois factory that had agreed to build it destroyed his blueprints. He kept going, and to keep sliced loaves from going stale, he designed a machine that also wrapped them. The Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri bought one, and on July 7, 1928, it sold its first loaf of sliced bread, the first commercial sale. One of his early machines is now at the Smithsonian.
On January 18, 1943, in the middle of World War II, a federal order took effect that barred bakeries from selling sliced bread. It was meant to keep rising flour costs from reaching shoppers, and officials hoped to save wax paper, since sliced loaves needed more wrapping to stay fresh. Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard was sure housewives would not mind slicing at home. They did; one newspaper reported shoppers who stalked out of stores. On March 8, less than two months later, sliced bread went back on sale.
Marie-Antoinette is famous for supposedly saying “Let them eat cake” when told the poor had no bread. There is no historical evidence that she said it. The French line, “Qu'ils mangent de la brioche,” really means let them eat brioche, a rich bread made with eggs and butter. The first to put it into print may have been Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Confessions, written about 1767, where he credits it to “a great princess” at a time when Marie-Antoinette was still a child. Folklorists have found similar tales elsewhere, including one from 16th-century Germany.