I drifted back to my grandmother’s kitchen, where as a child I would stand on a step stool to reach her speckled Formica countertop and help roll out a thin slab of her holiday bread dough. We’d cut it into small circles with a juice glass to make the “elf rolls” that we baked to a golden brown and slathered with sticky white icing.
That night, as flour dusted my counter, table, and chairs, I made my first loaf of bread in our new kitchen and so laid claim to our home. Since then, on dark, weary, wintry evenings, I seek refuge in this work, conjuring images of my grandmother: her long, knobby fingers and faded purple-flower apron; her yellow kitchen on Claremont Avenue in Maplewood, New Jersey. All of this links me to the generations of women who have baked bread through the ages and I come face to face with the moment when bread meant life.
For many of our region’s early settlers, bread was salvation, sometimes the only food on the table after the root cellar had been emptied and spring was months away. Back then, amber waves of wheat shimmering with prosperity drew immigrants to our fertile plains. Even our currency’s bright pennies were minted with the image of sheaves of wheat until 1959.
This iconic crop is a strange little grass. “One of the most complex plants in existence,” said Dr. Abdullah Jaradat, a research agronomist with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) at University of Minnesota–Morris. Both scientist and wheat historian, Jaradat is on a mission to revive the early varieties of wheat that made the Upper Midwest the “breadbasket of the world.”
This slight, well-tailored scholar in his late fifties moved to Minnesota from Jordan nearly thirty years ago to research sustainable grain crops so they might grow again across our plains. He’s a passionate cook and accomplished baker, and he told me he has a personal interest in heritage wheat because he has trouble digesting food made with commercial flours. On a tour of the research facility, Jaradat relayed the story of how wheat evolved nearly twelve thousand years ago into the industrially farmed commodity crop, bred for easy harvesting and storage, that’s traded on the grain exchanges of Kansas City, Chicago, and Minneapolis today.
Wheat, derived from wild species, consists of three different subgenomes joined in two events of natural hybridization. Emmer, the progenitor of our modern grain, was first grown in the Fertile Crescent on the southeastern coast of the Caspian Sea, in what is now Iran. Around the same time, einkorn wheat grew near the mountainous area of southeastern Turkey.
Amid the expansive fields of commodity corn and soy, Jaradat is growing out trials of the earliest strains of wheat—einkorn, farro, and emmer. He’s also propagating Turkey red and red fife wheat, the varieties first grown here in the 1800s. “I can enjoy baked goods made from heritage grains,” he told me.
“I come from the birthplace of wheat. Ever since wheat’s domestication ten thousand years ago, farmers have developed and improved wheat’s genetic diversity as a ‘landrace,’ the term we use to describe plants that have adapted through natural selection to a region’s particular environment. Wheat does this especially well. It’s a very smart, highly versatile plant,” he said, and continued with the story.
Through harvesting and sowing, farmers helped guide the natural breeding process to produce wheat crops with desirable traits. These early strains of wheat grew in the Karadag Mountains of Turkey around 9600 BC and spread through Greece, Cyprus, India, Egypt, and eventually into Germany and Spain by 5000 BC, finally reaching England and Scandinavia by 3000 BC.
“The best farmers always planted several varieties of wheat so as not to rely on one particular crop should it fail and leave the family without sustenance. It’s something we need to remember and to practice,” Jaradat said. “Relying on one variety of any plant is dangerous. It leaves the farmer vulnerable if the crop is struck with a blight, or pests, or foul weather.” He related how, in the US, a few early colonists tried to grow wheat on the East Coast. But it wasn’t until the mid-1800s that European settlers really planted wheat crops. The German Mennonites brought the best variety, Turkey red, to Kansas. It’s a high-gluten grain that makes beautiful flour and wonderful bread.
These German Mennonites were conscientious objectors, and they’d sought refuge from serving in their country’s army. Russia’s Catherine the Great had offered them asylum in return for growing wheat for her own soldiers. She provided them with large tracts of fertile land. But by the mid-1800s, the Russian government had begun meddling in the Mennonites’ affairs and pressuring them to turn their fertile parcels over to the rebellious, landless peasants.
A close-knit society, the Mennonites decided collectively to leave Russia to create a settlement in America. They were enticed by homesteading opportunities in the Midwest and encouraged by railroad companies seeking farmers to grow wheat for transport to the markets back east. To avoid having their precious wheat seeds confiscated at the Russian border, the women sewed them into their undergarments and planted them as soon as the immigrants had settled.
Within the next fifty years, Turkey red displaced corn as the Midwest’s primary crop, changing the region’s farm economy and landscape. Turkey red was well suited to its new home. Planted in the fall, it became dormant through the harsh winters and so was resistant to disease and fungus. When the weather warmed in the spring the wheat sprouted and grew into lush crops to harvest before the freeze.
Farm journals of that era detail the beauty of Turkey red’s burnished brown stalks, shimmering in the sun, rippling in the winds, and growing so tall a man could hide deep in the wheat fields. But the wheat’s majestic height, as well as its bounty, presented a challenge at harvest. Until the 1840s, crews of men used long-handled sickles to cut down the wheat, and with their neighbors, bundled and brought in the harvest. Then the mechanical combine or harvester, invented in Scotland, made its way across the ocean to Midwest farms. Though clunky and slow-moving, this machine helped to ease physical labor and expedite the harvest. These machines were expensive to buy and difficult to maintain, so neighboring farmers shared the combines and worked together to bring in everyone’s harvest as a yearly community event.
“Bringing in the sheaves” was sweaty, backbreaking work. Harvesters toiled in the hot, dusty fields as their combine’s loud, grinding gears screeched in their ears. To incent workers through their arduous, twelve- to fifteen-hour shifts, women cooked and presented the men with huge, bountiful meals and snacks.
“We often competed to serve the best spreads,” wrote prairie-life authors Carrie and Felicia Adele Young of their childhoods in North Dakota. The sisters cooked all day for three or four dozen men—breakfast, forenoon or mid-morning lunch, dinner at noon, afternoon lunch, and supper at the end of the workday. Roasts, stews, breads, pies, cookies, cakes: the list of food seemed endless. Girls stayed home from school to help. Usually it took a week to complete. “We knew that a well-fed worker was a hard worker, and the better the food, the more quickly the crew would finish the job.”
Feeding so many helpful neighbors and hired hands was the cost of bringing in the crops. Soon as every farm’s crop was in, the whole community danced. “Not a simple, Saturday-night dance, but a big hoedown where the whole community joined in and danced to the fiddlers late into the night under the huge harvest moon.”
It took those crews several days to cover about 160 acres of wheat, which yielded fifty bushels. As they went from farm to farm, the men worked together and reaped, threshed, and winnowed the grain. By the 1920s, as the fields expanded and demand for wheat continued to grow, migrant workers traveled by train from Oklahoma, through the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Canada. Newspapers from that era reported boxcars packed so tightly men stood shoulder to shoulder en route to the wheat fields. By the early 1930s, American radicalism, in the form of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), spread rapidly so that it became unsafe to ride the freights without a “red card.” Soon laborers began striking for better wages and living conditions. But the farmers responded with vigilante mobs that drove the agitators from the fields at gunpoint.
