BREAD (AS. bread, Icel. brou)f. Ger. Perot, akin to AS. brcolcan, Eng. brew, broth). Cereals of some kind or other have always made an im portant item of human food, and of all the forms in which they have been usad bread has proved the most satisfactory. Wheat, rye, corn (maize), and oats are commonly used for bread-making; less commonly, barley. buckwheat, rice. etc. To prepare the grain for bread-making it is usually cleaned, crushed, and bolted to obtain a fine, soft powder called flour or meal. The flour is made into a dough with water, and baked. Sometimes the dough is made with milk, or milk and water. Salt is usually added, and often a little sugar and lard or butter. If the dough is ferinented or leavened in any way before baking, the re sulting product is called leavened bread. if no leavening agent is used, unleavened bread re sults. The common leavening agents are yeasts, both wild and cultivated, leaven, i.e. dough saved from a previous baking, and chemical mixtures or baking-powders. The bread most commonly eaten in the United States, and often called white bread, is made, whether at home or at a bakery. from some one of the high grades of wheat flour or from a mixture of two or more grades. It is usually leavened with yeast.
The primitive way of making bread was to soak the grain in water, subject it to pressure, and then dry it by natural or artificial heat. An improvement was to pound or bray the grain in a mortar, or between two flat stones, before mois tening and heating. A rather more elaborate bruising or grinding leads to such simple forms of bread as the oat ca•cs of Seotland, which are prepared by moistening oatmeal with water con taining common salt, kneading with the hands upon a baking-board, rolling the mass into a thin sheet, and then heating before a good fire or on an iron plate called a girdle, which is suspended above the fire. In a similar manner the barley meal pease-meal bannocks of Scotland are prepared. In Eastern countries, as well as in Scotland, wheat flour is kneaded with water and rolled into thin sheets called scones. The most
interesting of the unleavened breads is, perhaps, the Passover bread, which has been used during Passover week by orthodox Jews from the time of Moses until now. It is simply a mixture of flour and water baked in small round cakes until it is dry and hard, and is not unlike plain water crackers, l'ilot bread, or ship's biscuit, is another simple preparation of flour and water so cooked that it can be kept for almost any length of time. Crackers, or biscuits, as they are often called, especially in England, are va rieties of unleavened bread. Milk, butter, lard, spices, dried fruits—anything or everything de sired to give them particular consistency, color, or flavor—is mixed with the flour and water, and the dough is then passed through very ingenious cutting machines and quickly baked in a hot oven. Such crackers are a concentrated form of nourishment, as they contain little water in pro portion to their bulk, and are fairly solid in con sistency.
Leavened or fermented hr•ad is rendered light and porous V the formation within it of car bonic-acid gas, which distends it. This process is brought fibula. either ( 1 ) by the use of leaven or of yeast. which causes the carbonic acid to form by the action of fermentation; or (2) by the use of baking-powders, which supply the neces sary carbon dioxide to the dough by chemical reaction. Leaven is simply dough, or a mixture of flour, which is in a state of fermenta tion. The knowledge of its action may have been accidentally discovered by attempting to combine with a fresh mixture dough which had been left over from a previous baking. It is probable that the use of leaven was first known to the Egyptians. that the Greeks as well as the Jews learned it from them, and that the Romans learned it from the Greeks. Through the Ro mans this knowledge was spread far and wide through the subject nations which came under their influence. This method of bread-making is still extensively employed in certain parts of Europe.