History of Baking

Baking has been many cultures' favorite technique for creating snacks,
desserts, and accompaniments to meals for many years. Now, it is very well-known
as the method for creating sweets and all sorts of wondrous mouthwatering
pastries. In ancient history, the first evidence of baking occurred when humans
took wild grass grains, soaked it in water, and mixed everything together,
mashing it into a kind of broth-like paste. Then, the paste was cooked by
pouring it onto a flat, hot rock, resulting in a bread-like substance. Later,
this paste was roasted on hot embers, which made bread-making easier, as it
could now be made anytime fire was created. Around 2500 B.C., records show that
the Egyptians already had bread, and may have actually learned the process from
the Babylonians. The Greek Aristophanes, around 400 B.C., also recorded
information that showed that tortes with patterns and honey flans existed in
Greek cuisine. Dispyrus was also created by the Greeks around that time and
widely popular; was a donut-like bread made from flour and honey and shaped in a
ring; soaked in wine, it was eaten when hot.



In the Roman Empire,
baking recipes flourished widely. In about 300 B.C., the pastry cook became
an occupation for Romans (known as the pastillarium). This became a very highly
respected profession because pastries were considered decadent, and Romans loved
festivity and celebration. Thus, pastries were often cooked especially for large
banquets, and any pastry cook who could invent new types of tasty treats, unseen
at any other banquet, was highly prized. Around 1 A.D., there were more than
three hundred pastry chefs in Rome alone, and Cato wrote about how they created
all sorts of diverse foods, and flourished because of those foods. Cato speaks
of an enormous amount of breads; included amongst these are the libum
(sacrificial cakes made with flour), placenta (groats and cress), spira (our
modern day flour pretzels), scibilata (tortes), savaillum (sweet cake), and
globus apherica (fritters). A great selection of these, with many different
variations, different ingredients, and varied patterns, were often found at
banquets and dining halls. To bake bread, the Romans used an oven with its own
chimney and had grain mills to grind grain into flour.