Post History

> Was their breadmaking process different from what I understand and they would have needed to do something to cause it to be leavened, a step that they missed because they were fleeing?

I'm not aware of any ancient text which explicitly tells us their understanding of the leavening process (and I've checked a couple of sources, including Harold McGee's *On Food and Cooking* which is normally quite good on the historical angle), so I think that some speculation is necessary.

You mentioned using a sourdough starter: you wouldn't expect your bread to rise without it. Before baking you probably also set aside a portion of the dough to use as the starter on the next batch. So the first question which arises is whether this was standard practice at the time, or whether each batch of bread was expected to accumulate its own yeast culture (although it certainly wouldn't have been understood in those terms).

If we hypothesise that a starter was intentionally kept, then it's worth noting that you've not mentioned v8, which may be an oversight. The evening meal on the previous day was to have been with unleavened bread, which would surely have thrown off the usual breadmaking routine.

However, although it's not definitive, the idea that there were bowls dedicated to kneading bread (v34) is suggestive that maybe the yeast culture was transmitted from batch to batch by yeast which survived in the ceramic of the bowl rather than by intentional preservation of a starter from the previous batch. (Note that yeast have been recovered from ancient Egyptian ceramics and cultured by various labs). In that case it would have been starting from a very small population each time. I think it's reasonable to suppose that the dough would have needed kneading at least twice: once when you make the dough, following which yeast would have grown on the surface; and then a second kneading would have distributed them throughout the dough and allowed them to reproduce much faster and properly leaven the dough. Then v39 would be saying that they hadn't done the second kneading before leaving, and when they stopped to eat they were too impatient to knead the dough and wait.