by Paul Graham
I decided to take control of the situation. I fired him back. I didn’t call the next day. I didn’t say, “Oh, please read my blood panels.” I didn’t say, “I’ll change!” I knew that’s what I was supposed to do, though I didn’t think he was worrying, particularly, over anything specific having to do with my recovery. Rather, I was on the receiving end of standard practice: the old warning shot across the bow to make the other boat change course.
My decision felt validating. I told myself that he needed a certain number of ailing asses and stomachs coming through the door to keep the lights burning, the jar of thermometer condoms stocked, that sort of thing. But I’m sure my silence was also an empty gesture. Someone had no doubt already taken my place. It is a sad fact of the medical field, and no small discouragement, I would imagine, that whenever one person heals, two new sick ones walk in to take his place.
None of my doctors had any proof that my wife and I were cooking our own food and rigorously maintaining the gluten-free lifestyle. They had no proof that I had not deliberately cheated on the diet since the month after my diagnosis, more than a year ago. There had been no furtive rendezvous with Reubens in desultory hotel parking lots, wrappers hurriedly shed in the car. I hadn’t tooted a sip of someone’s porter or pale ale when they weren’t looking since New Year’s Eve of 2012. The worst I had done was to lower my nose to the rim of many a friend’s pint glass and sniff deeply, inhaling the malt and the hops while the glass’s owner looked on with awkwardness and concern.
So if I had nothing to hide, then why not have the endoscopy and be done with it? That was Bec’s question to me. Other people with celiac disease asked me the same thing. Why not wow the guy with my splendid intestinal mucosa, my complete recovery?
It wasn’t about the procedure, which isn’t too bad when you consider the nature of the intrusion. They start an IV, knock you out, spelunk their way down your esophagus, nose around the neighborhood of your small bowel, collect their data, depart, and wake you up. The first time I bailed, I had some New York strips thawed and I refused to fast beforehand. The next time, I realized that softball season started the same day as the procedure and I was scheduled to pitch. Both of these were, admittedly, minor events and major dodges. The last time I canceled, I just didn’t want to be bothered.
No, I had avoided the endoscopy because I was afraid. Not of the experience, not that I’d fail to resurface on the other end of the anesthesia. If I hadn’t croaked when my body was fragile two years ago, I didn’t expect a surgical team to kill me when I was healthy.
I was afraid that, the good signals from my body to the contrary, my GI would still find something amiss in my gut, and then we’d have to act on it. I would have to make further changes—to my diet, to my life, to more of the things I lived for. I had no reason to believe this in fact would happen to me, but I had heard enough stories from people who continued, for apparently no good reason, their free-fall into the dietary wasteland of fruits, nuts, and occasional scraps of meat. I read about such unfortunate souls all the time, and I had met and talked to some as well. A man I spoke with from the Celiac Support Association described how he had been fine for a long while—decades—and then, boom: new intolerances left and right. No one could explain it. All anyone in a situation like that could do was keep eliminating foods. Sometimes you didn’t even feel awful; your body just wasn’t healing as well as it should, and the tests showed it.
And so it seemed that I was entering, far earlier in my life than I’d expected to, the long history of suspicion and antipathy between lovers of food—good food, real food, not processed garbage that kills you, which is the root of a specific evil and should never get a pass—and their physicians. I could not help but be reminded of the immortal gourmand A. J. Liebling’s writings about his friend, Yves Mirande, “a small, merry author of farces and musical comedy books” who would “dazzle his juniors,” including Liebling himself, by
dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and a turbot…
Well, now. That is a meal. It occurs to me that while almost everything on Mirande’s table is gluten-free (well, except for that sauce, which, according to Larousse, has a base of béchamel, so no spindles of filleted pike for me), the spread is not, as those who have been doubly cursed with gluten intolerance and editorial deficiencies sometimes write, glutton-free. I leave it up to the reader to decide whether the report of Mirande’s appetite, which verges on gargantuan in the classical sense, is an accurate portrayal, or merely Liebling’s attempt to marry two beloved pastimes, food and sports, by painting his friend as a table-gladiator.
The point is that Yves Mirande apparently made it to eighty eating like this, and Liebling seems to think he might have become a centenarian, had his physician not severely restricted his diet after he fell ill one day in Liebling’s company as the two sat in a favorite restaurant, dispatching a couple dozen escargots en pots (served with crusty bread to sop the butter) as a first course. Thereafter, Mirande’s family strictly enforced the physician’s prescribed dietary changes. Liebling does not disclose the exact physiological source of his comrade’s end, but he makes it clear that Mirande’s real downward slide began when the doctor, whom Liebling calls a fool, killed the man’s spirit by putting him on such dismal fare as kidney-and-mushroom mince served in a giant popover, paired with third-rate wines.
Put simply, the guy died of a broken heart.
Perhaps Mirande was a miracle of genetics from top to toe. Certainly his gut was. I have never aspired to equal his voracity at the table, but I was learning a thing or two about his aversion to physicians, and Liebling’s, too.
I would happily remain glutton-free, but I did not want to suffer my own version of this gastronomical exile. Why go looking for trouble? There was a small chance that the endoscopy could reveal that my intestinal microvilli were not healing as quickly as they should be, and what would happen then? I would have to start eliminating other “inflammatory” foods from my diet. Wine. Cheese. Maybe even rice. And to be sure, the first thing I would have to toss onto the fire would be Omission, my beer brewed with the God Enzyme.
I knew that technically I was not 100-percent gluten-free, and I worried about being found out. Or I was GF, inasmuch as under 20 PPM once a week or so still qualified me, and the scholarship said that it did. What was I, then? Gluten-minuscule? Gluten-safe?
Good enough, is what I said.
I had come to feel toward my beer and every other food, from fish to yogurt, rice to almonds, like some of my North Country neighbors apparently feel about their assault rifles, if the stickers on their trucks and the signs in front of their houses were any indication: Just try and take it away from me. I dare you.
If cheese or eggs or quinoa or beans or coffee or anything at all was hurting me, I didn’t want to know. I could imagine my gastroenterologist’s response: Was this thinking mature? Was it rational? Of course it wasn’t. Many of those who develop allergies and intolerances to foods they love say the same thing, though. I feared more intolerances coming over me like a pestilence coming down out of the sky or up out of the ground, like insects or fungi ravaging the garden before we had the chance to savor what grew in it.
At the same time, I knew that I was all bravado.
Knowing that something else was hurting me would mean that, logically speaking, for my own good and also for my wife’s—who would have to deal with the consequences and complications both short- and long-term—I’d have to compromise once again. And so I would.
For the time being, though, wheat was enough. It wasn’t possible for me to be a protégé of Yves Mirande, or A. J. L
iebling, but nobody eats like that anymore, anyway (nor should they). Celiac disease had cleared many things from my table, but one thing it had given me was the ability to listen to my body closer than ever before. I would involve the professionals when it seemed like something was up. Until then, I would continue to pound the pavement, and keep listening.
I didn’t know it at the time, but even as I had been searching for real bread and crying foul almost everywhere I looked, about three hundred miles away in Boston, the staff at America’s Test Kitchen were throwing themselves into a similar project to restore joy to gluten-free eating. And because they’re the Test Kitchen, they were doing it with a hell of a lot more scientific and culinary firepower than I was able to bring to bear in my own kitchen. More than many people, it would seem.
In the last half decade or so, lots of cooks, from both amateur and professional kitchens, in print and online, have been exploring gluten-free cooking and sharing recipes. In the same way that social media has helped build businesses like gluten-free bakeries, those interested in GF cookery have been able to trade ideas and processes via blogs and comment threads. It’s a good thing. There’s a real community out there, and the result is that a careful and discerning cook can pick up a few good recipes and some new techniques in an afternoon. By the end of my first year on the GF diet, I’d had plenty of occasions to think that if I had to get celiac disease, the diagnosis came at a pretty good time. My experience had never been as isolating as it once was for people I had met, and GF eating and cooking were getting better, and easier, all the time.
Nonetheless, they had a long way to go. Few of the cookbooks I read seemed to approach the challenges of GF cookery with any true scientific backing. The same could be said of many of the GF options I had encountered on menus at restaurants. Generally speaking, they tended toward safe, rice-based recipes, plenty of xanthan gum, and raiding the cooking traditions of non-wheat-based food cultures for inspiration. And the most innovative recipes could get a little strange, like a popular online recipe for a gluten-free bread that called for no starch of any kind—it was a brick of nuts and seeds. My friend Sarah forwarded me the recipe with the subject line, This is not bread. I never made it.
America’s Test Kitchen (ATK), however, has always attracted a nerdy type of cook, one with an appreciation of history and science to accompany his keen palate. The ATK keeps a chemist on staff to clear up any debates about what’s happening on the molecular level of, say, a pan of scrambled eggs or boiling corn kernels. I can’t remember the first Test Kitchen television show I ever saw, or when I began watching Cook’s Country, or when I first subscribed to Cook’s Illustrated, but like many home cooks, I instantly became a fan. Our public TV station featured their program, complete with bucolic New England location, on an evening lineup of cooking shows. Because I had read Hervé This’s Molecular Gastronomy and Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking without the looming threat of a final exam—and so did not read them—Cook’s Country always seemed to be more instructive than other food TV. I even enjoyed the philosophical conflicts I sometimes felt with the Test Kitchen, who seemed unworried about locality or even seasonality. Their emphasis fell on one question: What works best?
In 2014, they brought their scientific methodology to The How Can It Be Gluten Free Cookbook (HCIBGF). It was an approach to gluten-free cooking—and, more important, gluten-free baking—like none other I had encountered, though other groundbreaking GF projects were in progress elsewhere at the same time, and would appear shortly after.*1 Some of the recipes in HCIBGF were grounded in the flatbreads and flours historically eaten by the poorer classes, and thus represented the trip back in time that I had already taken. Some borrowed from Asian cuisines. Their substitutions for wheat, and changes in approach when baking pastas and breads, however, struck me as innovative, even cutting-edge.
I had met HCIBGF’s lead editor, Jack Bishop, before—sort of. In my early twenties, I received as a gift his Complete Italian Vegetarian Cookbook. It was one of the first real cookbooks I ever owned. For some reason, in those days I approached cookbooks like I did every other book I picked up, working my way from beginning to end, and so over one summer he taught me how to make risotto and a real pizza, and how to mix up a granita. I learned, from his sidebars, how to contrast and pair flavors in different courses. It was a good follow-up to the very first cookbook I ever bought for myself, a stained copy of The Frugal Gourmet, from the Books in General used bookstore in Ann Arbor; the title seemed to promise just the experience a broke graduate student needed, and the simplicity allowed me to experience both instructive successes (broiled salmon in a half-sauce/half-marinade of orange juice, soy sauce, and cloves) and dismal failures (shirred eggs) quickly and for cheap. Bishop’s book amounted to higher costs, but the payoff was also greater.
So, that spring, I did what writers do. I wrote to him. I thanked him for his hard work. I asked him to talk with me about this “quantum leap forward.” Then I set to cooking my way through HCIBGF while I waited to hear back.
—
I found myself in conflict almost immediately.
I knew before I even opened the cookbook that this was going to happen. The ATK and I are like two badly paired zodiac signs, like cat people and dog people. I love learning about the science of cooking, but I’m not a scientist in the kitchen. Most of the time, to be completely honest, I don’t do precision. I will carefully follow recipes the first few times I cook something new, but I’m always after a template or a set of techniques more than an exact recipe. Unless I’m making sauces or baking, I work off of recipes like a jazz musician embroiders and leaps around a standard. This necessitated labor-division in the kitchen. Bec usually handled the baking, because baking requires weights, measurements, exactitude. For the same reason, I would hesitate to eat in January anything I had canned by myself in July, so she put up the preserves. It’s nice to have orderly rows in the garden instead of a wild, gnarled patch of onions or greens, so she planted the seeds. Most of the time my approach worked quite well (for me, anyway), and it was well suited to the flexibility required when a person cooks mostly local food that the farmer picks out for him, because you don’t always have exactly what a given recipe calls for. But every time I delude myself with the thought that I could have gone to cooking school, I remember this character trait of mine and know beyond a doubt that I would have been expelled.
Why, then, was I baking at all?
Losing wheat had changed things for me. I was baking because I wanted to know my enemies: tapioca starch, millet, sorghum flour. I was on a quest. I wanted to beat the game.
The trouble with HCIBGF started with the ATK’s signature flour blend: a mix of white rice, brown rice, tapioca starch, potato starch, and nonfat milk powder. It turned out to be the best GF blend I had encountered, and the milk powder in particular was a stroke of genius for giving body to those flatter, grittier flours. It was expensive to assemble, though: buying all of those bags amounted to a startup cost of nearly twenty-five dollars at my store, a little less than ten times the price of a five-pound sack of King Arthur all-purpose flour. I was uncomfortable with paying that much; it felt like a privilege just to be able to rail at the cost. Mixing my own flour blend also reminded me that I still resented being a different type of eater, one who had traded a recipe of four ingredients for a recipe of ten or more. The ATK recommended King Arthur Flour’s GF all-purpose blend if I didn’t want to make my own, but the King Arthur GF was expensive as well (more than six bucks for a twenty-four-ounce box, which works out to $21.63 for a five-pound bag), and the milk powder clearly made a difference when I tested the Test Kitchen by making loaves with each. Those nerdy cooks had me. I didn’t like it.
Blending starches was fussy and not my idea of fun. I had to weigh out each of the flours, combine them, and then mix (sift, preferably) them for uniformity. I also needed to purchase and incorporate additional flours and meals to make many of the bread recipes in the cookbook: oat flour,*2
almond meal, flaxseed meal, and hot cereal mix. So now we were up to about forty dollars, and our fridge looked like the GF section at the health-food store, because some of these flours—the nut and seed meals especially—are prone to going rancid and have to be kept cool.
We didn’t have enough of those brilliant OXO vacuum-seal containers for all of them. The flours made a mess. I got pissed off about the slurries of spilled tapioca starch all over the counter, all over me. My own damn fault, obviously, but it was not my fault that none of the ingredients came in the right proportions, so that as time passed I always found myself out of something: usually the white rice flour, though also the brown, and less frequently but no less annoyingly the tapioca or potato starches. And then, on the day when I praised myself for finally being prepared in the flour department, I would reach for the box of nonfat milk powder, which comes in a package the size of a cereal box (and costs ten bucks), only to discover that now I didn’t have enough of that. Or I was out of the psyllium. Why did I keep forgetting to restock my supplies of these things? Because none of them normally goes into bread, that’s why, and my internal ledger apparently had not taken the quantum evolutionary leap forward along with the Test Kitchen.
And what the hell is psyllium?
At first it sounded unpromising to me—not an ingredient but a bacterial infection that commonly afflicts careless travelers to equatorial regions. Someone goes to Costa Rica, say, tries to find a waterfall in the jungle, and comes home with a rash: You have psyllium. Technically an herb, psyllium grows knee-high in India and Pakistan,*3 and produces small white flowers. The husks of these flowers get harvested, dried, and ground into a high-fiber powder that you can stir into a glass of water where it easily dilutes, which is how it came to be the basis of supplements like Metamucil. Like sorghum, psyllium appears to have been of marginal value to Western bakers until our guts started exploding and we needed to cut back on the wheat.
