Bread and Butter

Fair warning that I feel that this one is a bit of a stretch. The prompt was "bread and butter."

Occasionally when I'm eating something, anything, I stop to wonder, "how did anybody think of eating this?" Sure, that's an easy question to apply to oddities like tripe or pasta died black with squid ink. My immediately reaction is that things like that came out of desperation to some degree, the need to use up every bit of a food source. But the same question can be equitably posed about some foods I, and the majority of Western culture, consider most basic.

Take bread and butter, for instance. First of all, how on Earth did people even figure out how to make flour, never mind combine it with a leavening agent, and if the luxury of salt was available, some flavoring, to bake bread? It seems most improbable. I've got a goddamn Kitchen Aid professional mixer on my counter top, and most of the time I completely fail at baking bread, so really, how did humans in general, far in advance of reliable calibrated appliances like gas ovens and stand mixers, bake so much bread? My bread is lopsided. It's chewy and tough, or a bit like packing peanuts in texture.

Anyway, never mind about my failings as a gen. Y Julia Child. The point is, bread is actually as much a mystery as figuring out how to make tripe palatable, or squid ink pasta the basis for a mouth-watering dish of Italian seafood ecstasy. It's complicated as hell, and then you bring in the butter! Who was the person who sat there churning, and churning, and churning ad nauseum, until the frothy separated creamy watery cow milk solidified into the lovely melting semi-solid we know as butter? And beyond that, what crazy person decided it was a good idea to walk up to a two thousand pound beast and yank on its teats, spewing forth this warm, and frankly, in its raw form not terribly appetizing, liquid, to process it into that delicious mustache-forming dairy product the freckled strawberry-haired American public knows and loves?

Comments

[Gordon]

That is quite a mystery, isn't it? Food that our ancestors probably discovered by watching other creatures eat it -- milk, eggs, meat, fruit -- and so on is easy to figure out. But things that require a lot of processing or technique are pretty amazing. Another one that puzzles me is beer. It's quite a process, yet I believe even the ancient egyptians had it figured out.

[scott]

don't forget coffee, too. you gotta get that bean out of the middle of some fruit, ferment it, roast it, grind it, then figure out how to get water hot enough so that when it's poured over the ground beans so that the stuff in the beans are released into the water. baffling.

and then, there's the whole process to make tequila....