We Are Bread—How an ancient practice is baked into today’s society.

Two Seamuses with very similar last names discuss respecting an ancient method for baking bread, and how the practice is culturally relevant today.

Seamus Blackley: I’m really sorry for getting you involved with  this whole bread thing. It’s Like a weird brain infection.

Seamus Blackwell: I know, I’m obsessed actually. But that’s okay because I love it.
Well, that’s the thing you know—it’s the thing responsible for civilization so that’s a strong argument in its favor.

That’s what I’m all about. Exactly. It’s the cornerstone of civilization, it’s worth detailing. You’re a physicist, you invented the Xbox, you have a prolific background. What got you into bread making at this point?
Well, my mom. She was a bit of a baker. I just started baking for reasons I can’t even remember. I think it started when I wanted biscuits in the morning on Sundays, when I was an undergraduate in Cambridge, MA. Since then, I’ve been baking bread off and on.

What is your favorite type of flour to use?
That’s a weird question. Recently the thing that happened to me, kind of accidentally, I discovered the reason I was so interested in bread is because I wanted to be able to make the bread that our ancestors ate and share that experience with them. Egypt especially. I learned how to read hieroglyphs in the 80s, so I’m kind of an amateur Egyptologist. So, I can go to museums and read prayers and stuff. I love that, it’s interesting stuff. But if you read papyri you can read everyday thoughts of people living 5,000 years ago and that’s really special and incredible. As I started to get more into sourdough making, I started to realize, and I think other people are starting to realize with the whole pandemic going on, “Oh sourdough is how it used to be?” and it’s like yeah, of course, there wasn’t Fleischman’s Yeast in a jar in the 1700s, you fucking idiots. People collected natural yeast and made bread and the bread was better. And now sour- dough is kind of a hobby but it was really the only way of making bread for most of the history of the human race.

So, there’s a cool opportunity if you’re baking sourdough to collect wild yeast and to use primitive grains to make ancient bread that’s like a one-hundred percent accurate reproduction of the bread that people ate in antiquity. And that’s really compelling because you can experience something with them, you can break bread with your ancestors. That’s a compelling, human, emotional experience. And when I realized with Egypt that I could have part of the experience with the language and the writing it was irresistible.

Amazing. By recreating these methods and these ingredients, it’s predicated on the whole idea that here in the West today we’re out of touch with our food, our history, and by recreating these methods and ingredients of ancient cultures we can regain that sense of reverence through our food, our history, and our health more generally speaking.
Oh, yeah. What’s interesting is that if you go to the baking aisle in the grocery store today in the United States—and this isn’t true anywhere else, this is just in the United States—there’s more gluten free shit than wheat stuff in the baking aisle, which is insane because a tenth of a percent or so of human beings are actually gluten intolerant and everyone else is trying to find a cure and deciding that wheat must be it. Elsewhere in  the world that’s not the case, in fact a lot of people who feel sick when they eat products with wheat in them in America will go to Europe or Asia and eat bread and not have that problem, so there’s the question of “what the Hell is going on?” But really, as a scientist, the story of the human race and bread are intertwined—and beer too—in absolutely inseparable ways. They’re braided together so tight that they can never come apart. Human beings have been making and eating breads for so long that it is inescapably part of the evolutionary process of modern humans. We are bread. You can’t get away from that.

Yeah, that’s amazing, exciting. So when was the last time you bought bread from  the grocery store?
Well, pretty recently. I have three teen-aged boys. It’s interesting, we buy bagels but bread we don’t buy anymore. All three of the boys have got to the point where all they want is “real bread,” as they put it, which is interesting. I think that—and this is part of the point of the historical baking—is that there’s kind of an inflection point where you get whole wheat bread or whole wheat sourdough and it’s slab-like or brick-like and kind of horrible. It’s like in a health food store and it’s got quinoa or some shit like that in it and it’s got a very limited audience. But what I discovered is that in trying to recreate, with research, the bread that was fed to the guys who built the pyramids. I mean,think of the guys who built the pyramids. Think workmen—the Egyptian em pire was an incredible world civilization, greater than anything we have today. It lasted for longer than it’s been since it fell. Ramses II was the pharaoh in the Bible. When he was pharaoh the pyramids were already a thousand of years old. 

Yeah, I’ve heard similarly that the time between Cleopatra and now is shorter than the time between Cleopatra and the completion of the pyramids.
It’s less time from Cleopatra to Ramses even.

That’s outrageous.
The Egyptians had an empire that we can’t imagine. The pharaoh was the emperor of the world. There was no human being who did not have to do what the pharaoh said, full stop. It’s hard to imagine that. And they weren’t dicks. They had very sophisticated moral systems, As I researched this bread, the way the pyramids were built is that the pharaoh would offer to farmers in the off season when they weren’t making any money, would pay them to do projects. It’s how all the temples at Karnak were built and funerary temples and the Valley of the kings and all that stuff was built in this way. It was a very normal thing that everybody knew. So imagine 80,000 or 90,000 farmers showing up and they build whole towns.

There were dormitories, rules, police… We have records of all this: pay records, disputes with pay, you slept with my sister, and my sister is sleeping with the over-seer, and your crew was paid more than our crew, and the whole thing. So imagine these people as modern people–because that’s what they were–they were no different. They looked like us, they acted like us, everything, they just spoke a different language. They weren’t going to eat shit food.

A huge 19-year-old kid who was pulling around 2,000-pound blocks of limestone all day long would beat you to death if you gave him shit food and told him that was all he had. Think of a 19-year-old you know. So necessarily, we have to assume the food was good and if we follow the methods, we  end up with bread that is super good. Light, satisfying, chewy, and tasty and all that. And of course, it was because it was the primary food. You see these bakeries that were the size of football fields that they had at Giza.

——————> Blackley’s Twitter Bread Thread

That is what they primarily subsisted on, right? I read somewhere the workers who built the pyramids were given two loaves of bread and a pitcher of beer as their rations.
Bread, beer, and onions were the basic staples.

Onions, weird. I didn’t know that.
It sounds really basic but there’s actually pretty sophisticated dishes based around these things and different kinds of bread. There were 186 different words for bread, different types of bread. There was a fundamental commerce loaf. Through the 5,000 years of the Egyptian empire, they had no currency, there was no coin.

For 5,000 years?
Yeah. It was a rule-of-law society, so people traded in kind for things. But it was all measured and kept track of, there were numbers.

You knew how much you had of something and knew what it was worth. And so, these loaves of bread were a unit of currency. They were all the same size, they were cooked in these molds, because it was important that they were all the same size, and the same consistency, and the same value. Which seems weird to use but imagine a world where that seems normative and we would tell these people, “yes, we ex-change these small pieces of paper for services” and they would just think that we’re fucking insane. And they would be right, because what happens if someone gives you the paper but it’s false or someone agrees to give you the paper but then doesn’t. All those problems didn’t exist for them.

I had no idea that they had that kind of barter system. For whatever reason I assumed that they had some kind of currency, because they were sophisticated in so many ways, but I guess there’s nothing inherently sophisticated about currency.
No, there’s not.

You may have already answered my question. But, like you said, bread is the cornerstone of civilization. It’s so deeply embedded in our history and it spans across cultures not just Egypt obviously. If you had to make an educated case, which culture in history do you think made the best bread? Or is there a particular method that you find the most interesting?
I’m biased but I would definitely say the ancient Egyptians did. By the New Kingdom, the time of Cleopatra, they had almost 200 words for bread. There are fantastic things that we see in pictures of that we really have no idea of. Because one thing the Egyptians did was not write down instructions for anything, like making a fucking house, let alone instructions for making bread or the pyramids or anything. And we think the reason they didn’t is because they had a really sophisticated system of apprenticeship.  So the knowledge of how to make important things was in fact your power.

Even so, we see it depicted in tombs and in writing, and in anecdotal evidence, we see a fantastic variety of sophisticated—think of like Marie Antoinette, or like in the French revolution where you see all these cakes and stuff—shit like that but even better. We have pictures of the pharaoh being presented with huge cakes the size of hippopotamuses standing on each other’s backs, but all in the shapes of different hieroglyphs so that if you looked at it from afar it said his name. But it was a cake, made of individual cakes baked into a mold, shaped into a hippopotamus with frosting but it also said his name. Like that kind of shit, shit that nobody knows how to do. And that’s on a wall, you can see this and people had no idea how to process this when they first looked at it. It was only after a lot of study that they realized “holy shit this is like a confectionery thing. Jesus Christ.” And it like, yeah, when you rule the world for 5,000 years you can get weird and sophisticated and pretty fucked up.

You can make giant fucking cakes and spell out your name.
Yeah.

I read articles over the summer of how you extracted yeast from ancient Egyptian pottery, and how more recently you recreated the bread—you checked all the boxes—the grain, the method, and the yeast. I know it’s probably hard to describe, but how did that taste? And how does that compare? More generally, is this something that you think can realistically be recreated on a large scale so that people can enjoy this en masse?
Oh, yeah. For sure. We need to finish the DNA and RNA analysis to hopefully show that we’ve got ancient yeast. But either way we’re making this bread now that’s pretty damn close. And it’s delicious and it’s really cool. It’s conical shaped, it looks like the pyramids. It’s really cool. The steps from here are just to get a lot better at it. The first loaf was baked just  this past Sunday, so I just need to get better at it and bake a lot more.

I’m kind of a novice to the whole thing, I’ve only been baking sourdough for the past few months. I’m assuming there’s nothing special about how this yeast will reproduce. You can just feed it any flour and it can proliferate?
Well, it’s a little tricky in that it eats emmer, that’s what it was trained to eat. If you feed it other flours it can die.

That’s interesting.
Yeah, we discovered that when Dr. Love in Australia—who has been my partner in all this, she’s an Egyptologist—when she fed it super market flour it almost died but then she found someone who milled emmer in Australia and  fed it and it came back to life and she said we’ll bake with it.

That’s awesome, I didn’t know that. I just assumed that it would feed off any carbohydrate.
These are really special animals, yeast. There are hundreds of millions or billions of varieties of yeast and they all have specific metabolisms and work with specific enzymes of bacteria to process polysaccharides into simple sugars and then metabolize them to reproduce. It’s incredibly complicated. It seems simple because most people who make sourdough, they get flour and it has some organisms in it, or you get some from the air and you  cull it, keep feeding it and amplify whatever can feed off that flour and that’s great because that’s how humans survived. But if you have a specific organism that was trained somewhere for thousands of years to feed off a specific thing, and you don’t feed it what it likes, it will die.

This has been my new obsession so it’s been a real pleasure talking with you.  Maybe I’ll run into you at the local flour mill.
Maybe not anymore because I mill my own flour now.

Ha. Well, thank you again for your time. When I first saw the headline that ran something to the effect of “father of the Xbox recreates 4,500-year-old bread” I thought this is too ridiculous to believe.
It’s just a weird thing, full stop.