imizing or removing the outer layer and at 

 making tlie inner starch packet available 

 for human consumption. 



Grain hai-vests ai^e generally the equiva- 

 lent of mass mowings. Then comes a 

 threshing stage, which separates the grain 

 from the chaff, the grassy part of the plant 

 that ends up, when dried, as straw. Of the 

 major cereal grains, three — rice, barley, 

 and oats — come wrapped in hard husks 

 formed from leaflike structures. Corn, 

 wheat, and rye' are, as Harold McGee re- 

 minds us, "naked," or huskless, fruits. But 

 even they are not ready to eat after harvest. 



At this point, the wheat farmer finds 

 himself with millions of grains covered 

 with a fibrous "skin" known as bran. 

 These so-called wheat berries can be eaten 

 as they emerge from the threshing floor. 

 Indeed, modern health food stores sell 

 them and some restaurants do an inventive 

 job of cooking them. But the brownish, 

 unpolished wheat beiry takes a long time 

 to cook and is an indelicate food, although 

 not without appeal as an occasional item 

 in a modem diet. 



The bran layer spoils easily, however. 

 And in the dawn of grain agriculture, stor- 

 age and convenience had to have been 

 paramount goals. We cannot prove it, but 

 it seems overwhelmingly plausible that a 

 desire to keep the haivest safe led early 

 men and women to exhaust themselves by 

 grinding their wheat or rice between two 

 stones. This loosened the bran and, inci- 

 dentally, turned the interior starch into an 

 appeahng powder we call flour or meal. 



Of course, it is possible, when milling, 

 to stop short of pulverization. White rice is 

 the leading example of that. After its bran 

 has been rubbed off, it can easily be 

 steamed or boiled to a wonderful tender- 

 ness. Rice can also be pulverized into 

 flour, and often is, with rice cakes and noo- 

 dles the result. 



Wheat is most often milled into flour, as 

 is rye. But oats and barley are usually not, 

 in our day, because their flours lack gluten 

 and can't compete with wheat in elasticity 

 for baking pastry, and, most important, 

 they don't rise. 



Corn is sui generis. Its kernels can be 

 eaten whole (steamed on the cob or gently 

 heated in almost any way). On the other 

 hand, the bran or hulls can be removed 

 when exposed to an alkali such as wood 

 ash, yielding a beneficially altered starch, 

 hominy, that needs no milling. (Alkaliza- 

 tion makes the corn's natural niacin avail- 

 able to human digestion and it also re- 

 aligns the corn's amino acids so that they 

 offer the human consumer a better balance 

 of useful nutriments.) Or untreated com 

 can be ground into meal. Early Americans 

 prepared com in all three ways. 



Hand-milling techniques have persisted 

 in isolated pockets of traditional American 

 culture right up to the present. Primitive 

 millers grind one rock, or quem, against 

 another One of these rocks tends to be 

 concave, the other convex. The mortar and 

 pestle are slightly more efficient tools de- 

 rived from these primordial hand mills. 

 Such laborious techniques eventually 



gave way in many places to a tme mill, a 

 fixed machine run by animal or water 

 power In industrial societies, electrical 

 power runs giant roller miUs, and stone 

 grinding has survived only sporadically. 

 But educated opinion has set its face 

 against roller-milled, pure white flour 



In her authoritative English Bread and 

 Yeast Cooker}' (1977), Elizabeth David 

 campaigned for the preservation of Eng- 

 land's historic stone mills. She rhap- 

 sodized about the hard emery stones with 

 their carefully cut grooves. She printed a 

 detailed schematic diagram of a working 

 mill, with its quants and shoes and 

 damsels all neatly labeled. In the end, like 

 proselytizers for stone-ground com and 

 rice meals, David was making a case for 

 imperfectly pulverized and sieved (the 

 technical term is bolted) flour. 



The big machines work so well, she ar- 

 gued, that they remove virtually all the 

 bran and germ — and with them the tradi- 

 tional flavor of bread flour. Gone, too, was 

 the appealing texture of less completely 

 milled wheat. 



The Chinese food expert Florence Lin 

 does not say whether the advent of ma- 

 chine grinding of fresh water-ground rice 

 flour yields an inferior product. And even 

 though the hand grinding and stone 

 wheels of her childhood are gone, modem 

 methods (themselves now obsolescent) as 

 she describes them in her Complete Book 

 of Chinese Noodles, Dumplings and 

 Breads (1986) offer an eloquent testimo- 

 nial to the importance of specific milling 



Nian Gao 



(Plain Rice Cake) 



As Florence Lin explains in her Com- 

 plete Book of Chinese Noodles, Dump- 

 lings and Breads (1986), this apparently 

 simple, pure dish, eaten at Chinese New 

 Year as a symbol of prosperity, has quite 

 special flour requirements. The two 

 kinds of rice flour should ideally be 

 water-ground shortly before use (the 

 moist flours spoil easily even under re- 

 frigeration, and the ratio of long-grain 

 flour to sticky-rice flour determines the 

 ultimate consistency. For a softer cake, 

 use slightly more long-grain. For a 

 harder one, more sticky-rice. For a 

 chewier cake, use Japanese rice, as Ko- 

 reans do. Since most U. S. cities now 

 have thriving Asian markets, there is no 

 need for most of us to grind whole rice 

 grains with water in a blender and then 

 press out the moisture. Commercial, 



dried, water-ground rice flour is, there- 

 fore, the ingredient anticipated in this 

 recipe. If you want to start from scratch, 

 presoak whole rice for four hours, then 

 blend, water and all, to a fine wet powder. 

 Tie up in a muslin bag and press out mois- 

 ture by weighting with a heavy object, a 

 big iron skillet or a large pot of water, for 

 several hours, until the water stops com- 

 ing out of the bag. The flour will have the 

 consistency of a damp dough. 



2 cups long-grain rice flour 

 1 cup sticky- rice flour 



1 . Put rice in a processor fitted with the 

 steel blade. Turn on the motor and 

 pour M cup cold water through the feed 

 tube. The flour will soon look like 

 granulated sugar. If it gathers into a 

 dough, there is too much water Add a 

 little flour so it separates again. 



2. Line the basket of a steamer with alu- 

 minum foil. Shake the flour loosely 



and evenly into the steamer. Steam over 

 high heat for 20 minutes. 



3. Rinse but do not dry the processor bowl 

 and the steel blade. Reattach the bowl 

 and replace the steel blade in it. 



4. When the flour has been steamed, return 

 it immediately to the processor and 

 process for 30 seconds or just long 

 enough to produce a smooth dough that 

 does not stick to the bowl. Oil fingers 

 and remove the dough to an oiled sur- 

 face. Knead while still hot. until very 

 smooth. This takes about a minute. 



5. Roll the dough into a sausage shape 

 about an inch in diameter Cut the tube 

 into four equal lengths. Flatten them to a 

 thickness of M inch. Cover and let cool 

 to room temperature. Then they are 

 ready to eat. They wiD keep for a week 

 submerged in water in the refrigerator or 



. frozen in small pieces (IM inches long 

 by !4 inch thick) sealed in right plastic. 



Yield: 4 cakes 



74 Natural History 2/94 



