Secale cereale L., a diploid grass descended from the wild and weedy ryes of eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus. The cultivated crop is a single species. Winter rye, sown in autumn, and spring rye, sown after the thaw, are sowing habits of that one species rather than different plants, and the grain in every bread, pudding, and whiskey in this entry is the same S. cereale.
Origin: Lake Van & Eastern Anatolia
Rye became a crop without anybody setting out to grow it. Its wild relatives grow in eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus, and north-western Iran, and grains of rye turn up amongst the plant remains of Neolithic villages in Anatolia; but there they belonged to a weed of the wheat and barley fields, or to a plant gathered from the wild, not to a crop that anyone chose to sow.
The Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov explained what happened next, and his account is still the accepted one. Rye travelled with wheat and barley as a weed, its seed mixed with theirs at every sowing, and as farming moved north and uphill into colder winters, poorer soils, and shorter summers, the weed began to outperform the crop. In a bad year on sandy, acid ground, the rye in a wheat field survived where the wheat did not, and farmers who kept the seed that came through were, without intending it, selecting rye. Vavilov called crops that began in this way secondary crops, and he placed the oat in the same category.
That unintended selection shaped the plant. Wild rye shatters, dropping its ripe grain to the ground, whereas rye harvested and resown alongside wheat was pulled towards an ear that held on to its grain, because only the grain that stayed on the plant was gathered. Rye has never been entirely tamed, even so. Weedy forms still grow as a pest in wheat fields in parts of western Asia and North America, and the boundaries between wild, weedy, and domesticated are less sharp in rye than in any other major cereal.
One early claim for deliberate cultivation deserves mention because it is so often repeated. In 2001 Gordon Hillman and his colleagues reported plump rye grains from Abu Hureyra on the Euphrates, in Syria, dated to around 13,000 years ago, and read them as evidence of cultivation long before the Neolithic. Sue Colledge and James Conolly re-examined the evidence in 2010 and argued that the changes in the plant remains are better explained by foragers broadening their diet during a cold, dry period than by early farming. The question remains open, and the atlas treats the Abu Hureyra grains as a possibility rather than a beginning.
Rye as a crop in its own right belongs to Europe. Karl-Ernst Behre, reviewing the European archaeobotanical record in 1992, found rye present as a weed in the Bronze Age and cultivated deliberately from the Iron Age onwards, and it was in the Roman period and above all in the early Middle Ages that it became the principal bread grain of northern, central, and eastern Europe.
Rye has a single origin on the map because it has a single origin in the field. Winter rye and spring rye are sowing habits of one species, and the regional ryes of the Valais, Westphalia, Finland, and Russia are landraces of it rather than separate domestications. Triticale, the wheat and rye hybrid developed by plant breeders from the late nineteenth century, is a separate man-made genus and is not part of this entry.
Rome thought little of rye. Pliny the Elder, writing in the 70s CE, recorded that the Taurini at the foot of the Alps called it asia, judged it the worst of all cereals and fit only to avert famine, and noted that it was mixed with emmer to soften its bitterness. The Latin name he used, secale, survives in Italian segale and French seigle, but the Mediterranean never took the grain to heart.
North of the Alps it was another matter. On the sandy plains of northern Germany and Poland, in the forest clearings of Russia and Finland, and in cold uplands from the Valais to Galicia, rye grew where wheat would not, and by the high Middle Ages it was the bread grain of most of northern, central, and eastern Europe. In north-western Germany farmers grew rye on the same fields year after year, sometimes for centuries, keeping them fertile with sods of turf and manure, and in eastern Finland they sowed it into the ash of burned forest. The bread of these regions was dark, sour, dense, and long-keeping, and the whole northern European craft of sourdough baking grew up around the peculiar chemistry of the grain.
In England rye was grown widely in the Middle Ages and often sown and milled together with wheat as maslin, the everyday bread of most households. Over the eighteenth century the English turned decisively towards white wheaten bread and rye all but vanished from the English table, and a similar shift, later and slower, took place across much of western Europe. In the north and east it did not happen, and the map of rye bread in Europe today is, broadly, the map of where it did not.
The Scandinavian countries made rye their own in different ways. Denmark bakes a wet, seeded tin loaf and built the open sandwich on it; Sweden baked holed rounds dried on poles and industrialised them as crispbread; and Denmark's trade monopoly over Iceland, from 1602 to 1787, made imported rye meal a staple of a country that could not grow the grain at all. Finland received rye from the Baltic, from Sweden, and from Novgorod, and has kept all three traditions.
Rye crossed the Atlantic with English settlers in the 1630s. In New England, where wheat failed, it was baked with Indigenous maize as rye 'n' Injun; in Pennsylvania and Maryland it was distilled into the whiskey that became the spirit of the eastern seaboard; and in New York in the 1880s it produced both the Manhattan and, with the arrival of Jewish bakers from Eastern Europe, the rye bread of the delicatessen.
Rye also carried a danger. The fungus Claviceps purpurea, ergot, infects rye more readily than any other cereal, and bread made from contaminated grain caused ergotism, a poisoning that produced gangrene or convulsions. The Annales Xantenses record an outbreak in the Rhineland in 857, and the Order of Saint Anthony was founded near Vienne around 1095 to care for sufferers, which is why the disease was known as Saint Anthony's fire. In 1976 the psychologist Linnda Caporael proposed in Science that ergot poisoning lay behind the Salem witch accusations of 1692; Nicholas Spanos and Jack Gottlieb replied in the same journal that year that the symptoms did not fit, and most historians have sided with them. The same fungus had a stranger modern sequel. At Sandoz in Basel in 1938 the chemist Albert Hofmann synthesised a compound from ergot alkaloids that he called LSD-25, and in 1943 he discovered what it did.
Germany grows more rye than any other country, followed by Poland, Russia, Belarus, and Denmark, and the crop remains overwhelmingly northern and eastern European. World production is well below its twentieth-century peak, as wheat and maize have displaced rye even in some of its old heartlands, but in the countries where rye bread is daily bread it holds its place, and it is widely sown elsewhere as a winter cover crop and for fodder.
Rye bakes by rules of its own. It contains proteins related to wheat gluten, but they do not form the elastic network that traps gas in a wheat dough; what holds a rye dough together instead are pentosans, gums in the grain that bind large amounts of water. Rye flour is also rich in amylase, an enzyme that attacks starch, and in a neutral dough it goes on digesting the starch during baking until the crumb turns gummy. Acidity stops it. That is the scientific reason why rye bread across northern Europe is sourdough bread, why bakers scald rye with boiling water, and why a rye loaf needs a long rest after baking before it can be cut. The sourness of rye bread is not a regional taste that happened to spread; it is what makes the loaf possible.
Rye is also a drink. American rye whiskey must by federal rule be distilled from a mash of at least 51 per cent rye, and its revival since the early twenty-first century has returned it to the bars it left at Prohibition; in Canada, by long habit, rye means Canadian whisky in general. A good deal of Polish vodka is distilled from rye, and across Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states, kvass is brewed from rye bread. Malted rye colours and flavours the black breads of Russia and Latvia, and the mashing of rye malt makes the Finnish Easter pudding, mämmi.
The journey in this atlas therefore has two living ends: the rye bread belt that runs from the Valais and Westphalia through Denmark, Poland, and the Baltic to Finland and Russia, and the North American inheritance of brown bread, rye whiskey, and the New York delicatessen.
Historical Journey of Rye
Lake Van & Eastern Anatolia — c. 7000 BCE
Wild rye grows in the mountains around Lake Van, across eastern Anatolia and on into the Caucasus and north-western Iran, and the cultivated plant descends from the wild and weedy ryes of this region. Rye grain appears in the remains of Neolithic villages in Anatolia, but as a weed amongst the wheat and barley or as a plant gathered from the wild, not as a crop that anybody chose to sow.
That is why this origin carries no dish. Rye did not become a food in its own right here; it became a stowaway. Its seed was mixed with the wheat and barley that farmers carried west and north, and only far from this point, in colder and poorer country, would the weed outgrow the crops it had travelled with. A separate claim, for deliberate rye cultivation at Abu Hureyra on the Euphrates some 13,000 years ago, remains contested and is discussed in the entry rather than placed on the map.
The Danube & the Carpathian Basin — c. 1500 BCE
Rye came into Europe as it had left Anatolia, hidden in other farmers' seed corn. Its grains turn up amongst the Bronze Age crops of the Carpathian Basin and central Europe, still as a weed of wheat and barley fields, and it moved up the Danube corridor with the communities that sowed them.
This is where rye's fortunes began to turn. North and west of the Danube lay colder winters, shorter summers, and sandy, acid soils, and on that ground the weed survived years in which the crop failed. The Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov called rye a secondary crop for exactly this reason: nobody set out to domesticate it, and farmers simply kept the seed of what came through. From the basin the grain went on westward into the Alps and northward onto the great European plain, whilst the basin itself, whose bread is wheaten, passed it on rather than keeping it.
Sion, the Valais & the Western Alps — 77 CE
The oldest written notice of rye comes from the western Alps. Pliny the Elder, completing his Natural History in 77 CE, recorded that the Taurini, who lived at the foot of the Alps around what is now Turin, grew a grain they called asia, which he identified as secale. He thought poorly of it: it was the worst of cereals, he wrote, eaten only to stave off famine, and mixed with emmer to soften its bitterness.
The high valleys on the far side of the range found it indispensable all the same. In the Valais, the dry upper valley of the Rhône, rye was sown on terraces well above a thousand metres where no other cereal would ripen, and it remained the bread grain of the mountain villages into the twentieth century. Walliser Roggenbrot, the wholemeal sourdough rye of the canton, has been a Swiss protected designation of origin since 2004 and is the only bread in Switzerland to hold one. From the western Alps, rye also crossed Gaul towards the cold uplands of north-western Iberia.
Rye became a crop in its own right on the sandy plain of northern Europe. The archaeobotanist Karl-Ernst Behre, surveying the whole European record, found it cultivated deliberately in the north by the Roman Iron Age, and during the Middle Ages it became the dominant grain of north-western Germany. Farmers there grew rye on the same fields year after year, sometimes for centuries, keeping poor soil productive by spreading it with sods of heath and turf mixed with manure. The practice, known in German as ewiger Roggenbau, perpetual rye cultivation, built up deep man-made soils that can still be traced in the Westphalian landscape.
The bread of that landscape is dark, wholegrain, and slow. Westphalian pumpernickel is made almost entirely of rye and steam-baked in sealed tins for at least sixteen hours, the minimum set by German food law, until the grain's own sugars have turned it nearly black. Germany is now the largest rye producer in the world, and from the northern plain rye crossed the North Sea to England, went north into Denmark, and travelled with German settlers to Pennsylvania.
Rye was grown in the Polish lands by the Roman period, and over the early Middle Ages, as Slavic settlement spread across central and eastern Europe, it became the leading bread grain of the whole region. Polish calls it żyto, from a Slavic word that meant simply grain, and the choice of word is itself a record of how completely rye was the grain that mattered.
Poland is now the second-largest rye producer in the world, and its kitchen uses the grain in a way that goes beyond bread. Żurek, the soured rye soup of Kraków and Lesser Poland, is built on zakwas, rye flour and water left to ferment for days: the same lactic culture that leavens a rye sourdough, served as a soup instead of baked. From the Vistula lands rye went north to the Baltic and east into Rus, and from the 1880s Jewish bakers from Poland and the western provinces of the Russian Empire carried its sour breads to New York.
Old English had its own word for the grain, ryge, and rye was grown widely in Anglo-Saxon and medieval England, above all on the lighter, sandier soils of the east. Much of it never reached the table on its own. It was sown and harvested together with wheat as maslin, and the mixed flour made the brown everyday bread of most English households for centuries.
That tradition did not survive. Over the eighteenth century the English turned decisively towards white wheaten bread, and rye all but disappeared from the English diet, so that England today has no rye dish of its own and this point records a passage rather than a destination. What passed through it mattered. The settlers of Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s came from a country in which rye and maslin bread were still ordinary, and English, Scots-Irish, and German farmers alike would later grow rye across British North America.
Riga & the Eastern Baltic — c. 800 CE
Rye became the bread grain of the eastern Baltic in the later Iron Age and has held that place for well over a thousand years. The languages record how early it arrived. Latvian rudzi and Lithuanian rugiai share an ancestor with English rye and German Roggen, a word the Baltic and Germanic languages have in common, and Finnish ruis and Estonian rukis were in turn borrowed from Baltic.
The breads of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Belarus are one family: coarse rye, scalded with boiling water, soured, often flavoured with caraway, baked long, and treated with a reverence that attaches to few other foods. Rye bread is listed in the Latvian Cultural Canon, and Latvia's rupjmaize is its everyday form. Lithuania fries its black bread, juoda duona, into kepta duona, rubbed with raw garlic and eaten with beer. From these shores the Baltic word for rye, and very probably the grain with it, crossed the Gulf of Finland.
Rye reached Denmark from the northern German plain and was an established crop by the Viking Age, and it has been the country's everyday bread grain ever since. Danish rugbrød is a wet, sour, kernel-studded loaf baked in a tin, and Denmark remains one of the three largest rye growers in the European Union.
The Danish loaf is a foundation in the literal sense. Smørrebrød, the open sandwich on thin buttered rye, grew from the farm worker's slice of bread and fat into the elaborate lunch of late nineteenth-century Copenhagen, eaten with a knife and fork. Danish rye went further than Denmark's own borders: across the Øresund into Sweden, and, under the crown's monopoly of Icelandic trade, to Iceland, which could not grow the grain at all.
The first written notice of rye's most famous drink comes from Kyiv. The Russian Primary Chronicle, compiled in the early twelfth century, records under the year 996 that Prince Vladimir had carts sent through the city carrying bread, meat, fish, vegetables, mead, and kvass for the sick and the poor. Rye's real territory in Rus, however, lay to the north, in the forest belt around Novgorod, Vladimir, and later Moscow, where the soils were poor and the summers short and where rye, rozh', was the grain on which people lived.
Russian divides bread into black and white, and for most of its history black bread, meaning rye, was the bread of most of the population. Borodinsky, sweet with rye malt and crusted with coriander, is the best known Russian loaf today, although the legend tying it to the battle of Borodino finds no support in the record. Kvass is still drunk across the East Slavic and Baltic world, and it is the liquid in which okroshka is served. Russia is the world's third-largest rye producer, and from Novgorod's sphere the rye bread culture of Rus reached Karelia.
Rye was grown in southern and central Sweden by the end of the Viking Age, and in the colder interior it became the bread grain. Households in central Sweden traditionally baked it only a few times a year into large, hard rounds with a hole in the middle, and hung the rounds on poles under the roof until the next baking. That is the ancestor of knäckebröd, crispbread, whose dry, holed rounds still carry the mark of the storage method.
Sweden also industrialised it. Karl Edvard Lundström began baking crispbread at Skellefteå in 1915, and the company he founded took the name Wasa in 1934 and carried Swedish rye crispbread around the world. From Sweden, rye bread culture crossed the Gulf of Bothnia into western Finland, which was part of the Swedish realm for some six centuries.
Rye reached the Iberian peninsula from beyond the Pyrenees and settled where it always did, on the ground other grains refused: the cold granite uplands of the north-west. By the Middle Ages it was the bread grain of Trás-os-Montes, the interior of the Minho, and inland Galicia. Portuguese centeio and Spanish centeno are usually derived from a Late Latin centenum, a hundredfold, supposedly for the size of its yield.
The breads of this corner of Iberia are mixed-grain breads, and rye is the constant in them. Before maize arrived from the Americas in the sixteenth century, the dark bread of the region was made mostly from rye, often with millet; maize took the millet's place, and the rye stayed. Portuguese broa de milho and the Galician pan de maíz are both leavened loaves of maize and rye together, and it is the rye that gives them a structure that maize flour cannot provide on its own.
Rye reached Finland from three directions, and the country's bread still shows all three. The word ruis was borrowed from a Baltic language across the Gulf of Finland; western Finland, part of the Swedish realm from the Middle Ages, shared Sweden's holed, hard-dried loaves; and eastern Finland and Karelia looked towards Novgorod and the Orthodox east. In the east, rye was sown in huuhta, freshly burned conifer forest, where the ash gave enormous first-year yields. Timo Myllyntaus, Minna Hares, and Jan Kunnas have shown that slash-and-burn fields still supplied more than a quarter of the rye of eastern and central Finland until the 1830s, and more than half in some parishes.
In a public vote held in 2017 for the centenary of independence, Finns chose ruisleipä, rye bread, as their national food. The rye crust runs through the Finnish kitchen. Karjalanpiirakka, the Karelian pasty, spread across the whole country when more than 400,000 Karelians were resettled during the Second World War; kalakukko seals fish and pork inside rye for hours in Savonia; mämmi, the malted rye pudding of Easter, has a written description from 1751; and mustikkapiirakka, the blueberry pie, is baked on a rye crust.
Iceland is a rye bread country that has never grown rye. Barley was sown in the medieval period, but grain growing was never extensive and had all but ceased by the end of the Middle Ages, and from 1602 until 1787 all Icelandic trade was a monopoly of the Danish crown. Rye meal shipped from Denmark was among the staple imports on which the island depended.
Icelanders made the imported grain their own. Rúgbrauð uses no sourdough at all: it is a sweet, dense, dark bread of rye and buttermilk, raised with bicarbonate of soda and baked for many hours in a sealed tin at a very low heat. At Laugarvatn and other geothermal sites it is still made as hverabrauð, hot-spring bread, sealed in pots and buried in the hot sand beside the springs for about a day.
Boston, Philadelphia & British North America — c. 1640 CE
English settlers brought rye to Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s, and it proved more dependable than the wheat they had hoped to grow. When the disease the colonists called the blast devastated New England wheat in the 1660s, rye and the maize they had learned to grow from Indigenous farmers became the everyday bread grains of the colony, baked together as rye 'n' Injun, or with wheat as thirded bread. Steamed in a can and sweetened with molasses, that loaf survives as Boston brown bread.
Further south, rye took another form. The farmers of Pennsylvania and Maryland, English, Scots-Irish, and German alike, distilled their rye into whiskey, which was far easier to carry to market than grain. The federal excise on that whiskey provoked the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania in 1794, and by 1799 George Washington, whose government had put the rebellion down, was running one of the largest distilleries in America at Mount Vernon, on a mash of about 60 per cent rye. Rye whiskey was the spirit of the eastern seaboard, and it carried rye to the bars of New York.
New York took rye in two directions within a single decade. Rye whiskey from Pennsylvania and Maryland was the standard spirit of the city's bars, and stirred with Italian sweet vermouth it produced the Manhattan, in print by 1882. The often-told story that Jennie Jerome, Winston Churchill's mother, devised it at a banquet at the Manhattan Club is false: the banquet was held on 29 December 1874, two days after her son's christening at Blenheim Palace.
In the same years, the great Jewish migration from Eastern Europe began in 1881, and bakers from Poland and the western provinces of the Russian Empire brought their sour rye breads to the Lower East Side. Jewish rye, lightened with wheat flour, seeded with caraway, and glazed with cornstarch, became the bread of the New York delicatessen and of the pastrami sandwich. Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, all but ended American rye whiskey, which returned only with the revival of classic cocktails in the early twenty-first century.
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