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Give us this day
Loaves of bread give rise to kernels of knowledge
By Hope Green
Thomas Glick munches on an apple in his Bay State Road office, where
books such as Cordano's Cosmos, The Measure of Reality, and Medieval Technology
and Social Change line the shelves. The rest of his lunch sits on a wooden
board, ready for the sharing: a warm and toothsome spelt-and-barley loaf,
fresh from a bread machine he keeps on a table next to his computer printer.
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| Thomas Glick serves a slice of history to students (left to right) Rhiannon Jones (CAS'02), Alexis Howe (CAS'02), Nick Schiermeyer (CAS'02), Kanani Kamm (CAS'03), and Joseph Carrigan (CAS'03). Photo by Fred Sway | |
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Baking bread in one's office might seem a homey touch, but to Glick's
students, the yeasty aroma that greets them at the door signals the ferment
of scholarly thought.
Glick, a CAS professor of history and the director of the Institute for
Medieval History, has been bringing a variety of breads to his Medieval
Science and Technology class this semester to convey an impromptu lesson
on life in feudal societies. His purpose: to illustrate the point that
peasant farmers, adapting to variations in their wheat crop from one growing
season to the next, had to diversify the grains they planted in their
fields.
He started with a basic whole-wheat recipe, and since then has tried replacing
part of the wheat flour with cereals such as spelt, oats, millet, barley,
or rye. He prepares the dough ahead, but brings it to campus to bake just
before class, drawing curious sniffs from his fifth-floor colleagues in
the CAS history department. His students get to taste the results.
"I tried baking the bread at home," he says. "But sometimes
it's so dense you can only get it down if it's warm, so I brought in a
bread machine."
The idea for the experiment sprang from Glick's interests, both as a culinary
hobbyist and a historian, in the science and technology of bread baking.
Passionate about saving New England's remaining water-powered gristmills,
where grain is pulverized into flour, he is the founder and president
of the Northeast Chapter of the Society for the Preservation of Old Mills.
Every year he takes his students to the gristmill at the historic Wayside
Inn in Sudbury to see the grinding process firsthand. Although the mill
was built by Henry Ford in the 1930s, he says, the mechanism is similar
to that used in the Middle Ages: grooved mill stones receive the grain
from a hopper, and the miller can control the space between the stones,
depending on whether he wants a finer or coarser flour.
Early in the semester, student Nicholas Schiermeyer (CAS'02) asked Glick
if the class could somehow produce breads like the ones feudal peasants
ate. Glick turned the idea into an object lesson in agrarian problem-solving.
"You can't replicate medieval bread because the grain varieties have
all been improved by hybridization," he says. "But you can design
an experiment that simulates what a medieval peasant had to deal with,
which is incomplete control over an environmental problem."
Peasant farmers, Glick says, never knew when the climate was going to
turn against them and reduce their wheat yields, but when it did they
were forced to improvise in their bread baking. If necessary they would
grind flour from barley, although it was mainly used as chicken feed and
its consumption by humans carried a social stigma.
Glick, who has successfully baked bread at home for years, has had some
flops using unfamiliar flours. Most of the loaves have had the dense,
gummy consistency of dried porridge; others turn out too dry. At least
one was a hit, however: a half-rye, half-spelt combination.
Yet apart from variations in texture, the class was surprised to discover
how similar all of the breads taste.
"One thing we learned in class is that from the peasant's point of
view, one grain is as good as the next and he could make bread out of
just about anything," Glick says. "We also learned that monoculture
is a bad idea, because all these grains are weather-sensitive in one way
or another. If you're growing only wheat in a cold, wet area, you're going
to starve, so you've got to have rye also."
Medieval Science and Technology is a wide-ranging course, covering such
topics as the history of astronomy, the transmission of knowledge between
the East and West, the popularity of pseudosciences (such as alchemy and
astrology), and technologies of measurement.
Glick devotes one day's lecture to the advent of water-powered gristmills
in the Middle Ages. This milling revolution, which began in the 9th and
10th centuries, meant that grains no longer had to be hand-crushed with
a mortar and pestle. Milling, however, became a feudal monopoly, where
peasant farmers were forced to grind their grain in their lord's mill
and pay a fee.
"It was considered an abuse of feudalism," Glick explains. "But
an unintended consequence of the abuse was that the peasants were probably
eating better. The flour was now finer and probably easier to use."
Schiermeyer says he's glad he presented Glick with the idea of a bread
experiment, as it has given him "a sense of the adaptability that
had to be assumed by premodern agriculture."
"You need a break during a three-hour lecture," he adds. "So
this is a good diversion -- and a little bit of a snack."
Click here for a recipe.
5
April 2002
Boston University
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