I wipe the table and sweep under the floor. The house is tidy. My cookies are done. The soup is simmering. Eartha Kitt purrs so hurry down the chimney tonight. Everything is perfect.

FLOUR

I take flour for granted. I don’t wonder about it; it’s always in my kitchen as it was in my mother’s kitchen, part of my day-to-day life.

When Sky and Tara were small, they drew pictures in the flour I sifted on the counter after we cut out cookies or rolled pie shells. The flour we use as the base of almost all of our cookies is ground wheat. Wheat, a cereal grain, can be turned into bread, cakes, pasta, cookies, noodles, juice, breakfast cereal, and couscous. It’s also fermented into beer, vodka, and alcohol.

I read somewhere that wheat was probably first cultivated in Turkey about ten thousand years ago. It was an ideal first crop because it self-pollinates, it’s grown from seed, can be harvested in a few months, and is easily stored. The domestication of wheat allowed hunters and gatherers to settle. Villages grew.

Once we humans were able to count on a stable food source, we didn’t need to travel to hunt and gather. As sufficient food became available, we traded with other groups and spread our knowledge and products around the world. Thus, wheat reached the Aegean about eighty five hundred years ago and India about six thousand years ago. Five thousand years ago it reached Great Britain, Ethiopia, and Spain, and a thousand years after that, China.

Three thousand years ago horse-drawn plows and seed drills increased grain production. Until recently, the 1800s, wheat was harvested as it had been in prehistoric times, with a sickle, then tied into bundles for threshing, where animals crushed the stalks or farmers beat out the grain. The grain was tossed into the air and the chaff blew away, leaving the important kernels. In 1834, Cyrus McCormick invented the reaping machine and industrialization changed food production, and our society.

The story of turning wheat into flour follows the history of machines. First, it was made by grinding with a pestle and mortar, which produced a gruel or pottage, not flour for bread. Saddle stones, which are two large stones, the top one of which is pushed by an operator, are seen in ancient Egypt. Water power was used to move the stones two thousand one hundred fifty years ago in Rome. Wind power was harnessed one thousand years ago. Then steam engines and electricity.