World War II machines became increasingly efficient and eventually evolved to replace human labor. Today, one person, driving an enormous combine that cuts and processes the grain at once, covers fifteen hundred acres in two to three days. Older farmers remember the hoedown dances and community celebrations with fondness, but very few of them miss the much harder, grueling fieldwork.
Bread brings us together—to break bread is to commune—and ties us to centuries of ritual. One summer, when our boys were toddlers, a neighbor and intrepid baker stopped by with a jar of five-year-old sourdough starter. While I’d been reading about how to make sourdough for years, I’d been too chicken-livered to try it on my own. After all, I just squeaked by with a C–in high-school chemistry.
I packed the starter in the coolest spot in our car the afternoon we headed to a rental cottage on Madeline Island for a week’s vacation. The broad expanse of Lake Superior, with its dunes and grass, was the closest thing in Minnesota to the Atlantic beaches where both Kevin and I had spent childhood summers. I wanted a place within driving distance where our children could build sandy memories of their own.
In the cottage’s narrow, dim galley kitchen, while the boys napped, I followed our neighbor’s copious instructions, typed out double spaced. I patiently fed the starter for three days and then created the dough. The loaf it yielded was not the most perfect, with one side heavy and a little too moist, but it was good enough to slice and toast, with a distinct sour tang and toothy tug. And I saved a little of the starter, feeding it at the same time every morning through the week, in a ritual that followed breakfast. Indeed the starter seemed alive, and I named it Maddy. On the kitchen’s cracked linoleum counters I kneaded dough, as the late-afternoon sun glanced off the lake and waves lapped the dock in rhythm with the boys’ easy breathing, and realized moments of stunning grace.
The word focaccia, the Italian flatbread, is derived from the Latin word focus, meaning hearth or fireside, the focus of the family and home. That summer my bread-making brought a focus to our week, during which I also breathed, and rose, and felt myself come more alive. A simple mixture of water and flour fed the bacteria, which became the agent for leavening bread, which then tasted better every time I baked. I reveled in the ancient practice, and was humbled by the realization that we need so little to eat well. Even when fields lie fallow and the snow knee deep, with the larder plundered and just flour and water left, anyone can still make good bread.
That summer, our oldest son, Matt, learned to jump off the dock into Kevin’s arms and relax into a dead man’s float. We caught enough fireflies to light a full mason jar, and dug to China on the beach. But once we’d come back home, in a mad flurry of reentry, I neglected to feed the starter. Within two days it flattened out, and I grieved the end of the season and another of our boys’ summers crossed off the calendar.
My generous neighbor shared another batch of her starter, and so I tried to make bread once more. But those loaves were not nearly as successful, missing the summer sourdough’s distinctly tart taste and chewy crust. Perhaps they needed the sun-kissed magic of the cottage kitchen, the cold and flinty lake, those pink streaks of sunset, the music of the loons, and the nearby sailboat’s clanging halyards that sent us to sleep each starry night.
In our region’s first cookbook, Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, published in Minneapolis in 1877, author Estelle Woods Wilcox advised her readers to be choosy when selecting flour. “The quality of the flour will determine the quality of your bread,” she wrote. Back then flour was sold in bulk or directly from the mill in large sacks. Wilcox instructed home cooks to beware of weevils and “be sure it has a fresh ‘wheaten scent,’ before purchasing.”
In those days, flour was ground with enormous grindstones in the town’s community mill. These heavy stones shattered the “middlings,” the tough part of the kernel’s coverings, leaving the flour full of bran and hard bits. It took the baker a great deal of hand sifting to create the treasured white flour. The world’s best flour came from Hungary and was produced with a steel roller that cracked open the wheat kernel without crushing the middlings so they were easier to remove. Because the roller process was slow and inefficient, the flour was limited to small batches, extremely expensive, and enjoyed only by European royalty. Back then, a family’s status was judged by the color of its bread.
In the US, the flour-milling industry was founded by Cadwallader Washburn, the son of a lumber baron in Maine, who recognized the power of the Mississippi River’s falls on a visit following his service in the Civil War. He built his first mill on St. Anthony Falls in present-day Minneapolis, for the Minneapolis Milling Company. It sported the new “Middlings Purifier”—a vibrating sieve that processed whiter flour at record speed and produced a wildly popular product. But success came at a cost; the purifier created hazardous amounts of combustible flour dust that would explode when ignited by a spark from machinery. On May 2, 1878, a thunderous detonation leveled Washburn’s building as well as six neighboring mills, which covered a total of five city blocks.
It turned out the disaster was only a minor setback. The ruins provided Washburn with a blank slate to build a new roller mill using state-of-the-art Hungarian technology. To this end, he dispatched his engineer, an Austrian immigrant, to Budapest. William de la Barre secured a job on the night shift of the city’s newest mill and secretly sketched its machinery. On his return to Minneapolis, he designed the nation’s first roller mill for Washburn-Crosby, which later became General Mills. Washburn’s chief rival, Charles Pillsbury, quickly followed suit with his own roller mills and Minneapolis became home to “The World’s Best Flour—Gold Medal.”
Not everyone was eager to embrace this new “pure” white flour, however. Just as Washburn was building his “monster mill,” Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister from Philadelphia, was denouncing the roller millers for “putting asunder what God has joined together.” Graham hit his soapbox lecturing against the practice of removing the wheat germ from the flour. To him, wheat was “a natural food that the Creator has designed for man in such a condition as is best adapted to the anatomical structure and physiological powers of the human system.” Graham’s legacy, a small legion of supporters who promoted whole-grain “Graham flour,” gave voice to the idea that traditional American food, homemade and eaten on farms, was the “natural,” best choice.
The minister created the Graham cracker as a health food, fundamental to his Graham diet. The original cracker was a mix of unbleached wheat flour and coarsely ground wheat bran and germ, mildly sweetened with a touch of honey. No doubt Graham would have been appalled by today’s commercial crackers, made of refined, bleached white flour and plenty of refined white sugar.
By the late 1930s scientists had confirmed whole-grain flour’s benefits, supporting Graham’s claims. In response, consumers pressured companies to refortify white flour with niacin, iron, and vitamins B1 and B2. When wheat is milled by grindstone, the vitamins contained in the hard wheat germ along with the fiber remain intact. Whole-wheat flour, unlike white flour, is not bleached or aged with chemicals that also affect vitamin content. And yet, until this point the greatest technological advances made were in the milling and processing of commercial flour. The biggest change in bread was still to come—through a fundamental change in the wheat itself.
Shortly after World War II, Orville Vogel, a USDA scientist at Washington State University, created hybrid wheat by crossing American kernels from Turkey red and other tall varieties of wheat with low, shrubby Japanese wheat kernels provided to him by a US serviceman stationed in that country. This work inspired Dr. Norman Borlaug, a University of Minnesota geneticist with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement
