Honey

Honey is a food, used as a medicine and is an expression used to describe someone you love and care about.  Most people would imagine honey as a food rather than some of the other proposed uses.  However, honey for a brief period, lost its popularity and was simply used in medicine or only among the poor.  It is interesting how honey now is seen as the new super sweetener, health food and also good for the environment.  Honey is super at all its uses.

Honey itself begins with the bees.  Worker bees go out and suck nectar from different flowers and bring it back to the hive.  Once back at the hive, other worker bees will suck the nectar out of these gathering worker bees and chew it breaking down the complex sugar in the nectar into two simple sugars.  These two simple sugars are fructose and glucose.  The bees then expel the honey they have just chewed into wax combs that more worker bees have built.  Then more worker bees come and fan the honey that is now in the wax comb and this, along with the heat from the hive, evaporates most of the moisture from the honey.  The bees then cap this off with more wax and now it is ready for the beekeeper.

Here is a link to 18th century manuals on beekeeping. 

http://larsdatter.com/18c/beekeeping.html

The history of honey gathering goes back millennia.  The first honey gathering would have been done by locating a beehive.  The next step would be to simply reach in and pull out the honey comb.  People then began developing other ways of keeping bees so they could get honey in a way that didn’t involve getting stung so many times.  The first breakthrough with bee keeping was the realization that smoke relaxes the bees and keeps them from stinging the person trying to get the honey. From this discovery forward, it is only the design of the manmade beehive that distinguishes them through the centuries.  The first manmade beehives known were made in Egypt.  They were clay cylinders open on both ends.  When the bee keeper wanted honey, he would smoke the bees at one end.   They would then fly to the other end of the cylinder, leaving their honey unguarded and easily removed.  The next method was to use baskets to keep the bees.  These baskets were called bee skeps.  Initially these baskets were made of wicker, were covered with mud, open at one end and tapered upward.  Then the baskets started to be made only with grass in the same design as the wicker ones.  One of the final methods of gathering honey is similar to the earliest method.  Hives would have been located in a tree.  A piece of wood surrounding the hive would have been cut out and some of the honey comb would have been removed.  You would then cover the hive back up with that same piece of wood and come back whenever you wanted for more honey. 

German print showing gathering honey from the trees.

If you look close enough you can see one of the men is smoking a pipe to relax the bees.

 

Bee Skep Basket at Colonial Williamsburg

 

                In medieval Europe, honey was the primary sweetener because sugar was so expensive.  It was used to sweeten baked goods, to candy fruits like orange and lemon peel and used to brew a beverage called mead.  (Mead is an alcoholic drink made by fermenting a mixture of honey and water with yeast.)  Using honey in this way continued for centuries.  With the discovery of the Caribbean and with the drastic drop in price of sugar, honey became obsolete among most in the 18^th century.   It was then that honey was used more for medicinal purposes than for food like treatments for hooping cough and for tooth aches.  Today honey is still a good option for medicinal uses.  Honey is naturally antiseptic and can kill bacteria if applied to a wound.  It has also been learned that if you eat locally produced honey, it can help improve your allergies.

In the New World, the Aztecs were keeping a species of bee that is different from the bee of today’s North America.  They kept a stingless bee that was native to South and Central America.  The first honey bees that were brought over from Europe and released in the Americas were at City Point, Virginia in 1622.  By 1820, they had populated all the way from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.

 The dates we can record honey bees in these different states.

 

In the end, honey is a very universally versatile product.  The bees are so proficient that there is no need for people to change anything for it to be used.  It is an original farm-to-table (in this case, the hive-to-table) product.  So support your local farmer and enjoy the honey!       

Yeast

                Please go and see these sites for more information:

http://www.sourdough.co.uk/the-complete-baker/ 

http://savoringthepast.net/2012/06/27/making-yeast-as-practised-at-edinburgh/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vTa6M8QyrU&feature=youtu.be

 

                Bread can be an ingredient in other foods, a vessel to hold foods or eaten on its own.  With its diversity, it has remained a culinary staple for thousands of years.  Being such a staple, we don’t often think about the living component that is in most bread.  Yeast is this amazing unicellular, microorganism that is capable of making dough rise and turning sugar from grain into alcohol.  This is the story of yeast and our pursuit of keeping it. 

A look at yeast from under a microscope.

This is Saccharomyces cerevisiae the most common yeast available.

 

               The circumstances surrounding the discovery of yeast are unclear, but there is a consensus by most that it was an accident.  There are some theories; however, that might explain the discovery of yeast.  The most probable is that a type of dough was left out for enough time that natural yeast from the air and in the grain combined with the nutrients from the grain to create noticeably lighter dough than before.  It was then cooked and the result was eaten and enjoyed.  So the process was replicated.  From this process they learned that yeast could be collected from around us and kept by providing the needed nutrients and moisture.  The knowledge of how to keep yeast was the one thing our predecessors understood.  Other than this, they really didn’t know much about it.  People began very early trying to figure out what it was.  Some believed it to be a third earth, third water and a third fire.  Others simply considered it God’s gift to humanity.  So there became a cycle of using yeast and trying to preserve it.

                There were several methods used to preserve yeast.  One was when people took leftover dough made with yeast and mixed it with water and with flour to create a batter.  This batter was then painted on the inside of a pail or tub and allowed to dry.  Once dry, another layer would be painted on until 4 to 5 layers had accumulated.  This would have been stored in a dry place.  When you wanted some yeast you simply took a small piece and ground it using some warm water and possibly sugar.  Another process for preserving yeast was to make yeast cakes.  To make these, they would have taken barm, which is leftover yeast that has settled to the bottom of a batch of beer, mixed this with water and flour to create a thick dough.  This would have been allowed to dry and reconstituted for use the same way as the previous method.  Finally, if a baker didn’t have yeast, they could have always gone to the local beer brewer and get fresh barm to use in their baked good. 

 

"The Virginia Housewife"

Mary Randolph

1838

 

 

"The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy"

Hannah Glasse

1758

 

                For thousands of years there has been a relationship between the brewers and the bakers.  These professions were essential to life well into the early 19^th century.  This relationship is comically portrayed in “The Complete Baker; or a Method of Effectually raising a Bushel of Flour, with a Tea-Spoonful of Barm” which shows how one trade could always depend on the other for the crucial ingredient of their livelihood.

 

An Egyptian Model

A model of a Bakery and Brewery side by side

showing their importance as a group.

2009-1998 B.C.

 

 

"The Complete Baker; or, a Method of Effectually Raising a Bushel of Flour with a Tea-Spoonful of Barm"

By: James Stone

1770

 



                Through the ages yeast and the items made with it have been treated with a certain mystique.  Even with today’s modern science and all we know about yeast you can’t help but look at a bowl of rising dough with a certain level of awe.  So next time you have your PB&J sandwich, remember the little magic called yeast that helped make it enjoyable.