Foreword

Einkorn, emmer, Ezekiel bread – the very words seem to conjure up ancient worlds and exotic, half-imagined flavours. Since biblical times, the fields and hillsides of the Levant and Northern Israel have yielded scores of wild grains and seed-bearing grasses. For millennia, they have been foraged, gleaned, milled, tamed and turned into pottages, breads and more. I picture Sarah, wife of Abraham and matriarch of the Jewish people, whipping up a batch of “hearth cakes” at the behest of her husband with “three seahs of fine flour”, in much the way my mother, legendary Jewish food writer, Evelyn Rose and I would make scones and griddle cakes five millennia later.