Authors: William Alexander
In my memory I’ll always believe I succeeded in living that painting, despite three facts: I didn’t own a sickle, there seemed no reason beyond art to bind the wheat into sheaves, and the children were both at their summer jobs.
One thing I got right: me stooped over. But with a tool no peasant in a Flemish woodcut would’ve been caught dead with. After taking a few useless swings with my old, rusty scythe (essentially a sickle on a long pole), I went into the basement and emerged with my not-quite-as-rusty hedge shears. For this small crop, they were ideal.
For a larger crop, we would’ve wanted to use a mechanical reaper, and some of us may remember from school the story of the McCormick reaper. Picture a crude robot—or automaton, as it would have been called back then—that took the form of a human, bending at the waist, swinging a scythe. This fanciful machine, which McCormick abandoned after fift een years, was, not surprisingly, an abject failure, taking more rolls in the hay than the proverbial farmer’s daughter.
Huh? That’s not the story we learned in school. Cyrus McCormick a failure? His reaper an automaton? Of course not; I’m talking about his father, Robert McCormick. The kid said, “Pop, I think you’re taking the wrong approach to this,” and devised a horse-drawn device that looked nothing like a human but effectively cut and gathered the straw. Other reapers were appearing on the market at this time, just before the Civil War, but McCormick, with his business acumen and aggressive legal tactics (he once hired a small-town lawyer named Abe Lincoln),
drove the competition out of business and went on to found International Harvester.
Back to our little crop, Anne (playing the Good Wife) and I moved down each row with our hedge shears, Anne gathering handfuls of stalks, which I snipped off a few inches above the ground, very much aware that I was harvesting wheat more in the style of a twenty-first-century Mexican landscaper than a fift eenth-century Flemish peasant, but after all, it
was
the twenty-first century. The whole operation took less than half an hour, and when we were done, we’d filled two large garden carts with wheat. Of course, most of that was straw and would be discarded.
The burning question the entire time was, how much edible wheat would this crop actually yield? I was hoping to get the equivalent of a five-pound bag of flour out of my 150-square-foot plot, but my minimum requirement was to get at least enough for one loaf of bread—that is, about a pound. Seeing how few wheat berries came out of the seed heads I’d sampled thus far, though, I was worried about getting even that much.
With the wheat stalks all laid out in the same direction, it was time to thresh. The word is closely related to
thrash
for good reason. Threshing consists basically of beating the hell out of the wheat until the berries are battered loose from the seed heads that encase and protect them. With some ten thousand years between the first cultivation of grain and the 1834 invention of the combine, mankind has, as you might expect, come up with a number of ways to accomplish this. Pliny the Elder, writing around 77 AD, described three methods in favor at the time: beating with a flail; using a crushing stone or board; and spreading the wheat out on a floor to be trampled by a train of oxen.
I had lent out my oxen for the weekend and didn’t own a flail—two heavy sticks connected by a short chain—which looks like
something you’d find smacking the buttocks of a member of Parliament in a London S and M den, so I had to improvise, pulling out an old straw broom I’d been saving for the occasion. Anne and I laid a handful of wheat out on a new canvas tarp, and I threshed away.
The result of all my frenetic flailing was a bushel of dented wheat. Not a single berry emerged.
“Hit harder!” Anne urged, like a high school cheerleader rooting for her favorite (I hoped) linebacker. Cheered on by Pom-Pom Girl, I hit harder. A few strands of the broom flew off. The wheat bounced up and down on the tarp. I hit harder and still harder until, winded, I sat back on the tarp to catch my breath. A few lonely kernels of grain lay scattered among the debris. It was going to take something firmer than a broom to coax this stuff out.
“How about the back of a shovel?” Anne suggested.
That seemed a bit rough, but I didn’t have a better idea, so I flailed away at the wheat with a shovel for a few minutes. Sure enough, the canvas soon became littered with popcorn-size kernels of wheat. But an examination of the seed heads revealed that only about half the kernels were being released. We found that rubbing the battered seed heads in the palm of a hand or drawing them between thumb and forefinger released the remaining grains, but in a few minutes, our hands were raw from the coarse chaff, and we had to put on gardening gloves.
After a bit of this, with progress pitifully slow, I concluded, “This doesn’t make sense. What’s the point of all this flailing if we have to strip each seed head by hand anyway?” I went down to the workshop and returned with the wooden mallet I use on my woodworking chisels. Then, a handful of wheat held to the tarp with my left hand, I beat it with the mallet in my right. That was the ticket! Some wheat remained behind, but not nearly as much, and many heads were totally clean.
But after a half hour of beating the tarp-covered lawn with a mallet, the ground beneath had become soft and yielded to the blows, which in turn became less effective. I kept moving around to new, firmer spots, but even with a large tarp, they were becoming more and more difficult to find, and I was getting tired.
“You beat for a while,” I said to Anne, handing her the mallet while I went over to the woodpile, returning a few minutes later with my chopping block, a small tree stump that I use for splitting firewood.
Pounding on a firm surface caused the tough hull to release its grip on the berry with only a few blows—no additional stripping required. Now we were cooking. The job went much more effi-ciently if the seed heads were bundled together (guess there
was
a reason beyond art to gather the wheat into sheaves), so one of us bunched while the other pounded, and the tarp gradually filled with grain and chaff, along with broken pieces of straw.
Occasionally we stopped to shovel the wheat and chaff into a large bucket over which I’d placed a homemade sieve originally made for screening compost. Running our hands in the wheat and chaff along the screen, we were rewarded by the musical sound of grain tickling into the bucket. Most of the chaff fell in, too, but the sieve screened out the large pieces of straw and revealed seed heads that hadn’t been fully threshed.
After six hours, weary, sore, and sunburned, we had threshed our little crop of wheat, and I understood why the Latin word for the threshing board is
tribulum,
which has the same origin as
tribulation.
This was tribulation if I’d ever seen it. Thank goodness for the combine, which cuts, threshes, and cleans the wheat all at once, right in the field.
Our bucket of wheat and chaff was mainly (by volume, at least) chaff, and we still faced the job of winnowing, that oft en-cited
act of “separating the wheat from the chaff.” But that would have to wait for another day. It was evening, and I needed a hot shower and a cold drink. Anne had one request as she peeled off her gloves and fell back onto the grass, exhausted.
“Promise me you won’t grow cotton next summer.”
“You are dealing with forces, young man, when you speak of Wheat and the Railroads, not with men . . . Men have only little to do in the whole business.”
—Frank Norris,
The Octopus,
1901
What a bizarre and comical sight. This was a commercial, state-of-the-art roller mill? It looked like something straight out of an old Disney cartoon. Mike Dooley and I were the only human presence on this large factory floor among the rows of large square machines, a couple of dozen in all, each a little smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle. These awkward steel contraptions were all shimmying
—
and I do mean
shimmying
—as if to a sound track only they could hear.
Standing on four robotic-looking legs that literally flexed at rubberized knees, they were swaying their metallic hips suggestively, bouncing up and down exuberantly, and just generally
looking silly and weirdly animalistic. I could picture them late at night, when the mill was dark and empty,
*
switching on the lights and holding a surreptitious hoedown, then scurrying back into place the instant before the night watchman (with droopy mustache, of course) flipped on the light.
“What are they doing?” I yelled to Mike over the din.
“Look inside.” Bits of bran, flour, and grain were vibrating atop a wire screen, the smaller particles falling through. These were sift ers, and their gyrations seemed to do quite an effective job.
I’d found my way to this Clift on, New Jersey, mill, one of several owned by the Bay State Milling Company, by once again looking for the silos (shades of my trip to Bobolink Dairy). “They’re the only ones in Clift on,” Mike had told me. This old industrial city seemed an unlikely place to see twin silos rising above the factories and Office buildings.
Which goes to show how little I know about mills. The other landmark Mike had mentioned were railroad tracks, and as I pulled into the parking lot, it occurred to me that “near the silos and the railroad tracks” could probably suffice as directions to pretty much every wheat mill in the nation. Wheat, as it has for a century or more, still comes from the Midwest in railroad cars, is stored in silos until milled, and goes out in trucks as sacks of flour. The story of wheat is largely the story of transportation, whether the grain is floating down the Nile or riding the rails of the Southern Pacific.
On the verge of milling my backyard wheat, I thought an understanding of the process might be useful. This is partly how I’d ended up at this Bay State mill, which also happens to be one of the plants that produces the King Arthur flour I’d been baking
with every week. I had another reason for being here as well. During the past nine months, I’d learned that every bag of flour sold in the United States since World War II was enriched, replacing the vitamins and minerals that milling removed. I’d found out why niacin was among those vitamins, and I’d learned the saga of the heroic New York doctor who risked his life and reputation to find the cause of pellagra. One thing continued to bother me, however. I still wasn’t swallowing the conventional wisdom that corn was responsible for the pellagra epidemic. Certain facts didn’t add up, particularly the evidence that the American diet was moving from corn to wheat at the epidemic’s peak. What better place to understand what might have happened to wheat than at a roller mill?
The steel-roller mill represented a radical departure from the way wheat had been milled into flour for millennia. Even before there was bread, wheat had been crushed with stone, first by hand, then, from about Roman times, with rotating stone wheels. In the mid-nineteenth century, a Hungarian inventor devised a milling process that ground the wheat between pairs of chilled-steel rollers, producing the whitest flour the world had ever seen. Much of this flour went to the royal court in Vienna, where it was prized for use in the delicate pastries we still call Viennoiserie, as well as in another Viennese invention, croissants. Americans who were treated to their first taste of these delicacies at the 1873 Vienna International Exhibition brought home a sweet tooth and a demand for European-style white flour.
As it so happened, the American gristmill was reaching its limits at about the same time. Soft er southern wheat was being replaced by hardier, high-yielding varieties of hard spring wheat grown in the northern plains, a wheat so hard that it resisted grinding, oft en becoming scorched from the heat of the millstone
before it yielded to the pressure. And unlike winter wheat, whose bran tended to flake off in chunks through grinding and could easily be sift ed out, this hard spring wheat had a more brittle bran husk, which shattered into fine particles that inevitably ended up in the flour, which was white in name only. Thus in 1878, when a large gristmill in Minneapolis, the milling center of the nation, was destroyed by a “flour bomb”—highly explosive flour dust suspended in air—killing eighteen people and leveling not only the mill but two adjacent mills and the surrounding business district as well, rather than rebuild the stone mill, the owner brought over some Hungarian engineers and built America’s first steel-roller mill.
Within a few decades, the roller mill was well on its way to displacing the stone mill. Standing on the milling floor at Bay State, I could easily see why. Grain was flying through these machines at an incredible rate. These rollers ran virtually unattended, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and, unlike a stone mill, a roller mill didn’t need to be shut down every couple of weeks for dressing of the millstones.
Given their reputation, the size of the rollers surprised me. I’d fully expected to see massive rollers on the order of a steamroller, but these were only about a foot in diameter and four feet long, individually enclosed in metal and glass boxes. There were dozens of them, but they weren’t all doing exactly the same thing.
Mike had brought me to the first set of rollers the tempered grain passes through, the grooved break rollers. These gleaming steel rollers were rolling inward toward each other, but at different speeds, allowing the slower roller to grip the kernel while the teeth on the other one broke it open. The rollers were not crushing the grain at all but opening it up.
“Think about the problem,” Mike explained. “You have to
shave off the inside of a spherical object. How do you do that?” I was stumped. “Well, how do you get cantaloupe off the rind?”
Suddenly it was clear. You start by breaking the kernel open so that subsequent steps can shave off the endosperm—the starchy part of the kernel that becomes white flour—from the bran. There would be eighteen passes through rollers in all, with further separation of bran and endosperm occurring at each stage. So, I asked, do rollers simply do this faster than stone wheels?