Two questions

[ewx]

1) What is the best thing since sliced bread (which apparently dates back to 1928)?

2) What was the best thing before sliced bread?

Comments

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Best thing before sliced bread?

Obviously, unsliced bread: one of the advantages of moving to a town (and, later, of improving roads so that villages could support a shop) was that you could buy bread from a baker instead of having to make it yourself.

Before that? Pre-ground flour. Wages (and rations) were paid in Roman times in grain, which you then had to pay to get milled. Or grind it yourself in a quern - a task so onerous that mediaeval peasants would tolerate the landowner's monopoly position as owner of the mill and pay a significant proportion of their earnings (or rather, their labour and barterable produce) to have their grain ground by a miller.

Before that, we can look to the domestication and systematic cultivation of wheat: the neolithic revolution. You had lots of grain to grind, rather than foraged handfuls from wild stands of grass - enough to store, and to form a reliable year-round diet.

...And right back to paleolithic times, we have the invention of the quern, a crude stone tool for hand-grinding grain - at this point, foraged from the wild - so that the flour can be eaten: probably as gruel, though we may also be looking at primitive unleavened bread, somewhat similar to Naan, made by drying and baking gruel on a hot stone.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

pay a significant proportion of their earnings (or rather, their labour and barterable produce) to have their grain ground by a miller.

One option was for the miller to take a proportion of the flour in return for his work and equipment. (a.k.a 'multure', which appears to have been somewhere about a sixteenth part of the grain (http://books.google.com/books?id=MQNfrRFmvw4C&pg=PA133&lpg=PA133&dq=%22a+sixteenth+part%22+multure&source=bl&ots=S-ffTN15AH&sig=hX2GLWrT-6CQgXJ0dNPbXk9FjWc&hl=en&ei=qu_2Sbu_GtSw-AbJ3MCdDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1).)

(As it happens, my parents bought a water mill in the mid 1960s, but converted it to living accommodation. The building was last a commercial enterprise under the previous owners. I mention this purely for colour, and not as any indication of expertise on my part.)

[ptc24.livejournal.com]

so onerous that mediaeval peasants would tolerate the landowner's monopoly position as owner of the mill

Hmmm, I thought - and the source bellinghman cites - that this was tolerated not because hand-milling was onerous, but because it was forbidden, and mediaeval peasants would gladly hand-mill if they thought they could get away with it.