We have a family story about a barrel of flour falling off the wagon as it was brought home from the miller. In 1863? The barrel broke. Since it was the family’s winter supply of flour, it had to be scooped up from the ground and used anyway. 

In the course of looking up other questions about mills I discovered such barrels usually held 196 pounds of flour. (When millers changed over to using sacks there were choices. Sacks came in 100, 50, and 25 pound sizes.)

One hundred ninety-six pounds of flour, used at a rate of about ten pounds a week is 19 weeks worth. If you left ten pounds behind on the ground, as you madly scooped it up, that’s 5% of the total. One week’s worth of bread. Probably another six or eight weeks involved some dirt in the flour… 

I think ten pounds of flour per week because that’s what my mother did. A ten pound sack of Ceresota flour went straight into the bread bucket and a bent hook stirred up the flour with milk, sugar, salt, water, and butter. And yeast. Yeast of the kind she used seems to have been an English innovation around 1650. 

One of the reasons I was thinking about this is the sudden realization that even when people were doing almost everything else on their own, they still seemed to use flour mills. Sometimes they were taking their own flour to a mill and then bringing it back, but I think that wasn’t the norm. I think people mostly bought it. I think Laura Ingalls Wilder only ground her wheat during the Long Winter. 

Maybe in England in 1066 it was the norm to have a miller grind your personal wheat. The record called the Domesday book, which basically described what William of Normandy had just won, at the Battle of Hastings, claimed there were 6,000 mills in England. 

But mills seem to consolidate quickly. 

Next…

I did not know that hard red winter wheat was too hard to crush with millstones. Soft white spring wheat works just fine. 

The mill at Saint Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe Pennsylvania was build in the 1850’s, when monks first came to this part of Pennsylvania from Germany. Father Boniface Wimmer was responsible for the initial missionary impulse from Germany, and once he was settled in Pennsylvania, he sent out Benedictine monks to found Belmont Abbey in North Carolina as well as monasteries in Kansas and Minnesota, whose names I’ve forgotten. The mill in Latrobe only ground soft white wheat then, and continues today to grind soft wheat with a millstone made from the best French “buhr” stone.

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This French stone seems to be a hard quartzite which means, quartz sand that’s been metamorphosed, glued together with heat and pressure. The French stone was considered the best for millstones in the 1800’s, but some people used a stone from Ohio that seemed to be almost as good. (And probably cost less in shipping charges…) A few years ago questions arose as to which place a particular mill wheel in Cleveland, Ohio came from. It was settled by studying the fossils within the matrix. That was a surprise to me. Fossils are far more common in limestone. BUT none of these stones could grind hard red winter wheat. And for the record red wheat has a bit more protein. 

Using hard wheat instead of soft wheat required the invention of mills with metal rollers rather than stones. The Hungarians were responsible for inventing roller mills around 1865. They grew hard wheat and needed better ways to mill it. According to some modern day nutritionists, this has caused only problems because it made white flour easy and cheap. All nutrition was removed when the bran was sifted out of the flour. There’s something wrong with this argument. Both stone grinding and  roller milling produce flour that needs to be sifted to remove the bran and germ and possibly husk. It isn’t quite explained why hard red wheat ends up being aggressively sifted so much more often. Thus it ends as white flour with ‘all the nutrition removed…’

However, the entire city of Minneapolis owed its prosperity to the adoption of these rollers. Mills were set up along both banks of the Mississippi River, in the town of Minneapolis, in the early 1900’s. These mills could grind the hard red wheat that was the area standard. Shortly thereafter Minneapolis became an important city. 

I realized the other day that I had only vague ideas of how milling wheat for flour worked, in “earlier” times. In 2023 you can mill your own flour easily, in your own kitchen, with electricity. You can probably mill it fairly easily with a hand crank but I didn’t find too much about that. I was looking up other things. And my best source of information for years, is not around to share. But you can buy wheat berries easily — I think — and take your pick of eight or ten electric mills. 

On the other hand, wheat berries are interesting in their own right. They are wheat with the hull/husk removed. That is the part of processing we are familiar with, in terms of wheat and chaff, for example. This outer covering must somehow be removed (threshing and winnowing) before continuing. And threshing and winnowing are very labor intensive, if done by hand. 

That takes me back to the beginning. There’s something about wheat processing that was a communal operation for thousands of years.