When and where did the idea of putting eggs in flour to bake originate?!
Answers: It boggles my mind every once in awhile. Was it an accident?
Sorry, this was the best I could find!!!
When did people start using eggs in baking and why?
Food historians tell us the practice was ancient but they do not venture an exact place, date, or reason. The domestication of fowl (esp. chicken) greatly increased the availabiltiy of eggs to ancient peoples. This is thought by some to have begun in China in 6,000BC.
Culinary evidence confirms breads and cakes using eggs were made by Ancient Egyptian and Roman peoples. The reason most often sited was the recognition that eggs worked as binding (thickening) agents. How did that begin? The food historians to not venture into this territory. Possibly it was a discovery based on trial and error. Many foods and cooking methods (leavened bread, roasted meats, yogurt) were "invented" this way.
New ideas are often accidents. Then it takes an especially bright person to notice, and have an 'AH-HA' moment to realize that an error was made, but that it was a Good Thing, then realize what exactly happened, then continue to experiment till the results can be repeated consistantly.
That said, the most common eggs in use today are chicken, then duck, then any of the others, such as quail, goose, or wild eggs, or reptile eggs.
So I assume you mean using chicken eggs. Waterfowl eggs can be used in cooking, but do not do so well in baking. This is because the albumin (white) is a slightly different protein than the one in Chicken eggs, and does not break down when beaten. I found this out the hard way when I tried to make Merangue with duck eggs. NEVER HAPPENED. I must have beat those egg whites in the mixer at high speed for 30 minutes and they never even got white, let alone fluffy. So if you happen to have duck eggs available, don't use them in a cake or anything else that uses eggs for leavening.
OK. So, to use a food item a lot, you have to have a lot of it. That means, usually, domestication. Humans didn't start making cheese, for example, until after the dairy animals (cow, sheep, goat, horse, camel to name the most common) were domesticated.
As far as we can tell by DNA research, chickens were domesticated about 8000 years ago in Southeast Asia, from a bird known as Red Jungle Fowl. Here is a link to see what they look like:
http://www.feathersite.com/Poultry/NDG/B...
They are still in the wild, still raised by breeders, and basically look like a small chicken. I have raised them, and they lay small, bantam-sized eggs. Hens will lay 15 to 25 then stop for a couple of months, and lay another clutch.
Domestication has done a couple of things to the chicken, in addition to making them really stupid: they will lay much larger eggs, they lay many more eggs (the white leghorn, which lays most of the eggs you get at the grocery store, will lay from 325 to 360 eggs per year. then is worn out in 2 years.) also the birds themselves are different in size (larger or smaller than the RJF).
But what that did was make eggs more available. The chicken was in what we now call the Middle East by 5000 or 6000 years ago. Romans then took them wherever they went, so the chicken (and the egg) was also known in Europe in the pre-Christian era.
(I am not of the Jewish faith, but I do know that before Passover, there is not supposed to be any leavened bread in the home. There is a game I was allowed to play with a friend, "Find the Leaven!" and we looked all over the house for risen bread or cakes. Grandma Hannah, my friends' grandmother, would give us little trinkets when we 'found' them.)( I don't know if all the leaven used was yeast, or if leavened cakes with egg white too).
If my thinking is that leavened cakes and breads using egg whites are not Kosher for Passover, then that means that the Hebrews were using egg white for leavening at the time of Moses/Pharoh Rameses the Great. At this time the Romans were the barbarians.
So in answer to your question,
"A REALLY LONG TIME AGO!"
What a great question. I got to use so many of my resources and contacts!