suggests the importance to early peoples of dough’s malleability, its clay-like capacity to be shaped by the human hand (Cooks have long used both clay and dough to make containers for cooking other foods, especially birds, meats, and fish.) The word bread comes from a Germanic root, and originally meant a piece or bit of a loaf, with loaf meaning the leavened, baked substance itself Over time, loaf came to mean the intact baked mass, and bread took over loaf’ s original meaning Otherwise we would now ask for a bread of loaf! The Evolution of Bread Bread’s evolution has been influenced by all the elements that go into its making: the grains, the machines for milling them, the microbes and chemicals that leaven the dough, the ovens that bake the loaves, the people who make the bread and eat it One consistent theme from ancient times has been the prestige of refined and enriched versions of this basic sustenance Bread has become a product increasingly defined by the use of high-rising bread wheats, the milling of that wheat into a white flour with little of the grain’s bran or germ, leavening with ever purer cultures of mild-flavored yeasts, enrichment with ever greater quantities of fat and sugar In the 20th century we managed to take refinement and enrichment to the extreme, and now have industrial breads with little flavor or texture left in them, and cakes that contain more sugar than flour In the last couple of decades, bread lovers have led a rediscovery of the pleasures of simple, less refined breads freshly baked in old-fashioned brick ovens, and even supermarket breads are getting more flavorful Prehistoric Times ...dough, the ovens that bake the loaves, the people who make the bread and eat it One consistent theme from ancient times has been the prestige of refined and enriched versions of this basic sustenance... enrichment with ever greater quantities of fat and sugar In the 20th century we managed to take refinement and enrichment to the extreme, and now have industrial breads with little flavor or texture left in them, and cakes that contain more sugar than flour... product increasingly defined by the use of high-rising bread wheats, the milling of that wheat into a white flour with little of the grain’s bran or germ, leavening with ever purer cultures of mild-flavored yeasts,