Flour is a powder made by grinding raw grains, roots, beans, nuts, or seeds. Flours are used to make many different foods. Cereal flour, particularly wheat flour, is the main ingredient of bread, which is a staple food for many cultures. Corn flour has been important in Mesoamerican cuisine since ancient times and remains a staple in the Americas. Rye flour is a constituent of bread in both Central Europe and Northern Europe.
Cereal flour consists either of the endosperm, germ, and bran together (whole-grain flour) or of the endosperm alone (refined flour). Meal is either differentiable from flour as having slightly coarser particle size (degree of comminution) or is synonymous with flour; the word is used both ways. For example, the word cornmeal often connotes a grittier texture whereas corn flour connotes fine powder, although there is no codified dividing line.
The CDC has cautioned not to eat raw flour doughs or batters. Raw flour can contain bacteria like E. coli and needs to be cooked like other foods.
The English word flour is originally a variant of the word flower, and both words derive from the Old French fleur or flour, which had the literal meaning "blossom", and a figurative meaning "the finest". The phrase fleur de farine meant "the finest part of the meal", since flour resulted from the elimination of coarse and unwanted matter from the grain during milling.
Wheat
Corn flour has been important in Mesoamerican cuisine since ancient times and remains a staple in the Americas. Rye flour is a constituent of bread in central and northern Europe. Archaeological evidence for making flour (wheat seeds crushed between simple millstones) dates to at least 6000 BC. In 2018, archaeologists reported finding evidence of bread making at Shubayqa 1, a Natufian hunter-gatherer site more than 14,000 years old in northwest Jordan. The Romans were the first to grind seeds on cone mills. In 1786, at the beginning of the Industrial Era, the first steam-powered flour mill, Albion Mills, Southwark, was completed in London.