The Bread of Antiquity

Fermentation:
The original method of bread making and the method employed by savage tribes of to-day is to mix crushed grain and water until a paste is formed, and then to bake this over a camp fire. The result is a hard compact substance known as unleavened bread. A considerable improvement over this tasteless mass is self-raised bread. If dough is left standing in a warm place a number of hours, it swells up with gas and becomes porous, and when baked, is less compact and hard than the savage bread. Exposure to air and warmth brings about changes in dough as well as in fruit juices, and alters the character of the dough and the bread made from it. Bread made in this way would not seem palatable to civilized man of the present day, accustomed, as he is, to delicious bread made light and porous by yeast; but to the ancients, the least softening and lightening was welcome, and self-fermented bread, therefore, supplanted the original unleavened bread.

Soon it was discovered that a pinch of this fermented dough acted as a starter on a fresh batch of dough. Hence, a little of the fermented dough was carefully saved from a batch, and when the next bread was made, the fermented dough, or leaven, was worked into the fresh dough and served to raise the mass more quickly and effectively than mere exposure to air and warmth could do in the same length of time. This use of leaven for raising bread has been practiced for ages.

Grape juice mixed with millet ferments quickly and strongly, and the Romans learned to use this mixture for bread raising, kneading a very small amount of it through the dough.