Cooking with wholegrains

About the middle of the 19th Century when the industrial age was reaching out for more production and a mass market, there was invented and developed (chiefly by Hungarians at first and later by other continental Europeans) the roller-mill. The first — complete automatic roller-mill was established in the United King- THE MYSTERY OF THE MILL 7 dom in 1878 at Dublin, although the principle had been introduced into Scotland as early as 1872. The roller-mill, ancestor of the contemporary milling apparatus in practically all civilized countries, consisted principally of a pair of fluted or grooved metal rollers. Unlike the single pair of cold stones turned slowly by waterpower, these rollers were arranged in a series, beginning with breakers to split the wheat, thus releasing the starch or endosperm so that it might be completely pulverized and ground by the smoother reduction rollers into the white flour we know today. Naturally speed was the main objective. Such a system produced flour just about Ioo times faster than the old slow-poke stone mills. Yet the very slowness of the stone mill constituted its chief value as a food producing tool. The rich germ of the grain kernel is volatile and susceptible to rancidity when heated in grinding, and if so heated clogs up the grinding surfaces. But the cold stone mills turned slowly, and could pulverize the germ into the flour or meal. But like many another tool of earlier days, character and quality soon became less important than speed, and so the stone mills gave way, about 1870, to another machine. II] Now we come to the “mystery of the mill.’’ What else did the new high-speed steel roller-mill do except to grind grain 100 times faster? Well, it was soon evident that the germ gummed up the high speed rollers. Therefore, by a series of graduated siftings it was possible to screen out this germ. This epoch-making discovery allowed the millers to expedite their operations, but more signifi- cant, they discovered soon enough that flour from which the live and perishable germ was screened out would keep indefinitely on store shelves. It is rather appalling to realize how easily the milling trade has succeeded these many years keeping these facts from the public, both in America and Great Britain. We only have to look to that famous authority, The Encyclopedia Britannica, to obtain bonafide evidence. The erudite and technical account of milling in that compendium was written by an English miller, and it is revealing 8 COOKING WITH WHOLEGRAINS to see how nonchalantly he treats of the process by which the germ was eliminated. He says, “. .. in roller milling the germ was easily separated from the rest of the berry and it was readily si from the stock. The germ contains a good deal of fatty matter which, if allowed to remain, would not increase the keeping qualities of the flour.” (The italics are mine.) That such a standard reference should allow truth to be so dis- torted is amazing enough, were it not for the more sinister fact that the milling trade has now reached the apotheosis of their craft when they believe their own lies and perpetuate them with no moral” guilt whatever. But it might be interesting to ask what this refined white flour that keeps better is doing to our stomachs. No one has summed it up more succinctly than Geoffrey Bowles in that delightful maga- zine the British Countryman, when he declared: “Much of our na- tional illness is caused by crazes for food that is (1) white, (2) re- fined, and (3) keepable. All three crazes are exemplified in white © flour. The best food chemists are the earth and the sun, which produce the wholewheat that the steel rollers of the white flour millers spoil. White flour makes white faces . . . food is stuff to be eaten fresh, not to be ‘kept’ as if it were an heirloom . . . whole- —