Cooking with grains [antikvár]

z^nce upon a time there lived a i y poor woman and her son, who v^ kept a heard of pigs. One day, the king made an announcement: he would give the hand of his daughter to any man who was able to hide himself so well that she couldn't find him. When the pig driver heard the news, he said to his mother, 'Mother dear, please make me a bag of ash-baked savoury scones. I want to try my luck.'This is the storybut did this type of food really exist.The Dishes of Our Ancestors says:'When the ears of rye are ripe but the seeds can still be easily crushed between the fingers, the Palots housewife reaps the necessary amount of ears with her scythe. She brings them home on her back, then she makes a fire in her fireplace out of dry twigs. She binds the ears into a sheaf, and bakes them on the flames of the fire until the ears burn down and the grain becomes swollen. She crushes the grain in a trough or in earthenware dish with her hands, separates it from the chaff, crushes them in a wooden mortar, salts them and kneads the dough she has prepared. Then she prepares balls each as big as a fist and bakes them like potatoes.' This is the way savoury scones baked under ashes are prepared.The origins of the characteristic movement of the hand of a man sowing seeds or harvesting with a scythe comes from the distant past. An Assyrian stone sculpture shows Gilgamesh, king of the Sumerian town of Uruk (Mesopotamia), with a scythe in his hands. As the epic poem of Gilgamesh, written on clay tablets at the beginning of the third millennium B.C. and explaining the very roots of the history of mankind says, 'He is two-thirds god and one-third man.'When the Mesopotamian clay tablets were deciphered in the 19*^ Century