by Paul Graham
And yes, I could do that.
—
Around this time, another friend of mine tried to comfort me with assurances that I would come to extensively know the pleasures of Asian food. He had in mind more than the usual pad Thai: Indonesian, Laotian, Cambodian, and those regions of India not dependent upon wheat. Like my friend who reminded me that there was still an entire world of wine for me to drink, he was trying to be encouraging and kind, and, also like my oenophile friend, he turned out to be half right. Chinese cuisine is vast, but Chinese restaurants are dicey for celiacs—soy sauce is a ubiquitous base for many other sauces, to say nothing of the wheat-starch dumplings and noodles. I knew I would not likely return to Chinatown for dim sum anytime soon. Japanese restaurants seemed difficult too, especially if a sushi bar did not have gluten-free tamari; and what was sashimi, what were maki rolls, without the saltiness against the cool sweet fish, the pickled ginger, the wasabi? Many dishes from Korean cuisine looked likewise difficult to parse, once you stepped away from kimchi, barbecue, and rice.
Still. Not long before the start of spring, we finally figured it out when we followed a recommendation for a small, authentic Thai restaurant in Kanata, Ontario. When I looked at the menu, for the first time in months it was a challenge to order not because there was only one option and I wasn’t excited about it, but because almost everything on this menu was valid, safe. I did not have to give my speech. I did not have to start the meal by declaring myself. One question did the trick. Which dishes had soy sauce? Very few of them, it turned out.
Our immoderate love of spicy food served us well here. We ordered deep-fried tofu because Bec had eaten it at a Chinese restaurant only once before I was diagnosed, and had been looking for a safe version of it ever since (no breading, here; just dried and dropped into the fryer). Then we ordered shellfish and vegetables with roasted chiles, Thai basil, and lemongrass over rice. The flavors were more vibrant, more exciting, than anything I’d tasted in a long while. We rarely order dessert, but we went in for a round of mango and coconut ice cream simply because we wanted the meal to last a little longer. It had been a long time since we enjoyed a restaurant so thoroughly.
In the car, on the way back home, Bec said it before I could: “That was good.” It was freeing to look at a menu for once and know that we could have just about anything off it we wanted. It was not the same thing as gaining the whole world back, but it was a comfort, and a start.
* * *
* In time, the entire waitstaff at this bistro would give me the great gift of relieving me from ever having to say anything about gluten-free again, because they would remember me: no bread before the meal; no croutons on the salad; no sauces, garnishes, or sides with wheat flour. They also later updated their menu to identify those dishes that could be made GF. Once, at a business dinner there, without so much as a hint, a waitress brought me an amuse-bouche on rice crackers when everyone else got theirs on crostini. Such home-field advantage, as I came to think of it, was as wonderful there as it was difficult for any other place to follow—to nobody else’s fault, since other restaurants did not know me.
It happened one night in the early spring. It must have been April, because the winter CSA had run out but we were not into asparagus or wild leeks or fiddleheads yet. Eating and cooking locally had become a little challenging, a little lean. We were living out of the freezer and off of preserves, and supplementing it with the produce offerings at the co-op.
I was standing at the counter between the stove and the sink, prepping vegetables for a dish that now escapes me. What I remember instead, and clearly, is the music coming through the speakers as I guided the knife: the Miles Davis Quintet’s rendition of “Bye-Bye Blackbird.” It’s a simple song, ripe for jazz embroidery, a standard about fleeing a place where the speaker can’t be understood and everything is sad to a safer, kinder place. Not a love song so much as a good-bye.
This was the first time music—any music, whether jazz or classical or even the endless stream of feel-good pop songs churned out of recording studios like so many Chicken McNuggets—had sounded good to me in six months. And I knew, as I listened to the muted horn and brassy piano block-chords and really heard them, that something in my mind and in my body had cleared, recovered, been cleansed. I had punched through to the other side of the clouds. Finally.
The arrival of the warmer weather had worked some magic. It had also helped to receive my doctor’s clearance to start working out again. I was still anemic, but I’d eaten so much meat, shellfish, green vegetables, and nuts that I was no longer nearly as depleted as I had been (it takes a long time—several months—for the body to convert the iron in food to iron in the blood). I had stopped taking the iron supplements, multivitamins, and probiotics.*1 I was putting weight back on. My fingernails were growing again, and my barber said my hair had stopped looking like straw. All good signs, and all also indicators that celiac disease was not in fact something I’d made up, which on some days I still could almost believe to be true.
Bec designed a rehabilitation plan for me, a fringe benefit of being married to a personal trainer. Instead of plunging right into my old workouts and hurting myself, she showed me how to get moving again, how to figure out which muscle groups were weakest and most prone to injury—which turned out to be just about every group. I was surprised to find out how much strength I’d lost.
I had added interval training to my runs a few years back because they made me a better recreational softball player. The motivation was that simple, that pathetic: my playground ego got a lift. Quickly, however, I came to connect training to eating—not in the sense that a workout “earned” me a meal, but because a hard run sharpened my appetite. I loved that deeper kind of hunger, loved how it increased the anticipation of sitting down at the table and the pleasures of being there. While running, gutting it up a hill, far from comfortable but not dying, either, I’d think, Yes. Tonight I get to eat a steak. (Vegetarians, apologies. The effect is not the same when I substitute cauliflower.) No form of training, however, whether running or strength, had ever come easily to me. Even in college, I was always slower than I thought a lanky guy should have been. Now I wondered if celiac disease had been holding me back all those years, and whether, now that I had been diagnosed, I might see improvement.
—
One afternoon, I was standing in front of the coolers at the health-food store when I noticed, for the first time, bags of flour that I had never before cooked with: garbanzo bean, buckwheat, lentil, coconut. What did a cook do with these? Which cuisines did they belong to, and what was the history? I had no idea, but I suspected they contained additions to the GF diet that nobody had told me about. It occurred to me that if I truly believed that cooking and eating were among the most important things I did every day, then it wasn’t reasonable for me to expect that my repertoire would remain the same. I had already made some changes, but I needed to extend my reach.
The solution to my discontentment might be to go back in time, yes, but not to raid the tables and tombs of ancient kings for ancestral wheat. What I needed to do instead was visit times and places in history before wheat was ubiquitous, when those who could not afford it enjoyed foods made of other things. I began to root around in the history of flatbread, which has always been the leavened loaf’s poor brother. For many reasons, foremost among them convenience, economy, and versatility, mixing starches with water and salt, skipping the leaven, and rapid cooking have been at the heart of culinary traditions everywhere for thousands of years—to the degree that there’s a case for calling flatbread the quintessential human food. Even after the Egyptians and other cultures began baking yeasted bread, the flatbreads remained a firm fixture, to the degree that “bread” was most likely synonymous with a simple barley or bean-flour flatbread, not a risen loaf.
Why did it take so long for me to discover this eating history?
For one thing, there is not much of a flatbread culture or tradition in the United States outside of
pancakes and corn (or wheat) tortillas. The former is for breakfast, and usually made with wheat; the latter can be said to be important only in certain parts of the country. We eat tortillas, yes, but those of us who are not Latino tend to view them as an occasional ethnic food experience. It’s unfortunate, because the thinking obscures how a well-made tortilla could, in fact, answer the same bready needs that a wheaten loaf does.
The United States is a young nation compared to European countries, and this may also have kept flatbreads distant from mainstream American eating. The Native Americans depended upon corn and squash, and the Puritans survived their first winter in New England by learning to love corn and relearning to love the beans that had sustained their ancestors in Europe when the wheat crops failed. Yet their descendants reverted back to wheat as soon as they could, and that reversion happened quickly; westward expansion in the United States roughly corresponded to rapid technological advances in wheat cultivation, processing, and shipping, all of which combined to increase crop reliability, yield, and distribution, to the effect that Americans were catapulted into a stable wheat supply. We’ve had our shortages, like the Dustbowl Era, but large parts of the population have mostly escaped the need to subsist on grains of poverty such as buckwheat and—God help me—millet, which for millennia have been everyday fare for many people. In fact, highly refined white flour has become so cheap that one could make a case for naming it the “food of poverty” for our time, which is an ironic twist, considering that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European immigrants came to this country for everything white risen loaves signified, including class ascendancy and economic stability.
The result of these separate but related factors is that, over time, knowledge of wheatless breads—not simply how to make them, but their existence at all—disappeared from American eaters’ memories and imaginations. I never heard of them or ate them when I was growing up. I didn’t know of anyone who ate them. Uncovering recipes that used bean and buckwheat flours took a little sleuthing in encyclopedias like The Oxford Companion to Food. I scoured the entries for mention of flours I brought home, looking for clues as to how, and where, and when they were used. Then I tracked down recipes in cookbooks and on the internet. And when I ladled the batter into a hot pan, cooked it rapidly, and sampled it, I knew immediately that I was eating something real, and satisfying, and possessed of its own storied history—which was more than I could say for many of the items in the GF section at the grocery store.
Take, for example, socca.
You don’t see this flatbread in the United States very often. It is still made in the Provence region of France and also in northern Italy, though I suspect its tradition goes back much further, since all over the ancient world there are references not only to legumes, but also to bean breads and bean flours being used to stretch barley or wheat supplies in times of shortage. It’s not hard to imagine the earliest cultivators of chickpeas experimentally pounding the dried beans down into a flour, mixing it with water, and frying it. Much later, Provençal and Italian merchants and travelers carried pouches of chickpea flour and a little salt with them, knowing they could count on someone along the road to share a fire and water so they could make a quick meal. Socca is traditional in Nice, where it is still cooked by street vendors.
This flatbread is blissfully simple and delicious—especially when you bump the batter up a notch with some grated Parmesan cheese, olive oil, and herbs, as America’s Test Kitchen suggests in their book on gluten-free cookery. It’s the perfect canvas for high-end olive oil (especially harissa olive oil), tapenade, caponata, or pesto. In southern France, socca is typically prepared on a screaming-hot cast-iron skillet pushed inside a wood oven, resulting in a crust that is crisp and slightly smoky. This experience is achievable if you remember to whip up some batter when the charcoal grill is going. Almost any flatbread loves a charcoal fire and a cast-iron griddle; the smoke and the intensity of the heat impart flavors that an oven or range-top simply cannot. And when you stand outside in the late evening, grilling your flatbreads over the coals while the twilight slowly gives way to dusk, you feel that much closer to the long tradition of people cooking their simple flat cakes over open fires.*2
Chickpeas and other beans, most importantly lentils, are vital sources of protein all over the world, and other cultures have their versions of bean-flour flatbreads. In India, especially on the Malabar Coast, chickpea (or just as often, lentil) flour is the basis of papadum, which is more of a crisp bread than a flatbread, because it’s fried in oil like a fritter. The presence or absence of baking soda, as well as the thickness of the bread, determines whether the flatbreads belong more to the tradition of papadums or papads, the latter of which tend to be denser. But when I allowed myself to be nudged in the direction of southwestern Asia, and experimented with papadums one night as an accompaniment to spicy vegetarian fare, I found the linguistic distinction to be irrelevant. Although not part of my food culture, papadum provided an inspiring alternative to crackers.
Not long after discovering socca, I was eating breakfast on a patio overlooking Lake Champlain when I had my first buckwheat crêpe. In this country, we don’t seem to eat buckwheat unless we have to, and I immediately wondered why, especially given its affinity with maple syrup. Technically, buckwheat is an herb (both “grass” and “wheat” are misnomers) domesticated in China around 3,000 BC, and it now comes in several varieties, from the familiar slate-gray flour, with a strong taste, to an Acadian white blend that is an excellent substitute for wheat.*3 I’ve used both in crêpes and pancakes and, best of all, the blini for which Brittany is famous: made with beaten egg whites, and seltzer water or beer (or GF beer) added to the batter, the cakes rise rapidly in a skillet and are so delicious they have been immortalized in literature. In “Babette’s Feast,” it is the first course of Blinis Demidoff au Caviar that makes the general Lorens Löwenhielm sit up with notice, his impressive moustache bristling; one taste and he suspects that the cook in the kitchen of the austere Berlevaag home where he is dining is the same chef whose signature dish he enjoyed once in Paris. I haven’t yet had a chance to try authentic Blinis Demidoff, though I have made a poorer man’s version with smoked salmon, quick-pickled onions, sour cream, and clippings of tiny garden-lettuce leaves.
And if I was not already convinced of the hope and satisfaction that awaited me in flatbreads, an encounter with a taco trailer in Santa Barbara sealed the deal. Prior to this tortilla breakthrough, I had been a Northeasterner who viewed tortillas as little more than an edible wrapper for the meat and vegetables inside. But when they are prepared the right way, which is to say fresh, tortillas are as good as many wheaten breads, and even have the texture and chew of a chapati or naan. Through the window where I ordered, I watched the cook flatten ovals of dough with a press, applying the full weight of his body. He cooked them on the flat-top, waiting until each side was blistered before flipping them with a metal spatula. The result was flatbreads so puffed up and covered with caramelized pockmarks that I nearly suspected someone had slipped in a little wheat flour. Hours later, I felt fine, and I was hooked. I literally ate my way from one taco place to another before we left town.
Not all of the possibilities for real GF foods offered by the eating traditions from around the world are flatbreads, however. The constant thread is rendering starch of any kind into a food that is soft, chewy, and hot. Pão de queijo, or cheese rolls from Brazil—though there are variations scattered throughout Latin America—call for tapioca starch, which is the root of the cassava plant that is dried and ground into a fine powder. My discovery of this bread converted a kitchen enemy into a friend; I had hated using tapioca ever since I had added it to my first GF bread recipe, because it’s prone to forming a slurry anywhere and everywhere (and I still hate working with it, to be honest), but the texture of the tapioca-based batter becomes intriguing when baked: sweet and chewy, even meaty, with a nicely browned crust. Pão de queijo does not rise so much a
s it balloons. The glycemic load in these rolls—unlike that of socca and buckwheat blini, both of which are higher in fiber and protein—does not exactly make them suitable for nightly fare, but they’re great for some much-needed variation.
And where would we be without two notable Italian contributions that are not flatbreads but still indispensable: polenta and risotto? I won’t be caught eating gruel, whether it’s made of wheat or not, but I do love a bowl of polenta, especially on a winter evening, topped with a sauce of vegetables or meat, and accompanied by a glass of wine. Similarly, one night Bec looked up from a particularly successful bowl of risotto and declared that slow-cooked rice had become, for her, a viable replacement for mac-and-cheese. These staples, which I began cooking hopefully and then joyfully throughout the spring and into the summer, took me all over the world, and back in time. They helped to teach me how to cook again—or, how to relax into cooking again.
Some nights, I decided I would take my cues from near the coast of northern France, and I made simple buckwheat pancakes browned in bacon fat we reserve in a mason jar, and served them with some pickled vegetables and a salad of bitter greens to help cleave the fat. Or there were spring turnips, asparagus, or wild leeks. Fried eggs go nicely with these pancakes, as well. Together, these foods made for a satisfying if rather blunt eating experience: the buckwheat cakes were not as airy as blini and not as light as crêpes, but dense and filling. Afterward, I felt fortified for chores: I thought that I should go out and split some wood and haul it inside, or weed around the onions.
Other nights, I progressed up a social class or two, and adjusted the batter to be more elegant, making crêpes that I filled with some chèvre from my friend Sue’s goats, and chili-tomato jam. If there was no cheese available because the goats were nursing, I used homemade applesauce, fennel-onion preserve, or a rosemary onion confit, all of which Bec had put up in the fall. Sometimes I served them with chicken breasts from my friend Kassandra’s birds, which I poached or pounded flat and seared until just barely done—a chance I only take with meat from her chickens, because I know where and how they live.
