Bread is the head of everything - says popular wisdom. It is one of the staple foods and is always present in the human diet. So what is bread? Each nation has its own concept of this product, but it is impossible to imagine a table and meal without it. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a fragrant French croissant, hot tandoor flatbread or the finest Armenian lavash. Or maybe a lush loaf or a fresh roll... For people of different cultures, the word “bread” can mean quite different things. For some peoples, this is the baking of loaves or long loaves from rye or wheat flour, for others - yeast or unleavened flatbreads made from flour of a variety of cereals: rice, oats, corn, barley, buckwheat, quinoa, sorghum, millet, dagussa, mogara, paisa, chumiza , amaranth, cassava... Absolutely all the peoples of the Earth have their own version of bread, without which they cannot imagine a satisfying meal. Read this small but very fascinating book, and you will find out that in Rus' they really baked koloboks, and that the name “loaf” originated from the French word baton, which translates as “staff”, the oldest known find of bread, made by archaeologists in Northern Jordan, is about 14,000 years old and many, many more interesting things.