52 Loaves

by William Alexander

  Of course, the leavening of the bread at the Last Supper is the least of the bread debates between churches. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council decreed that when blessed bread is eaten during the Eucharist, it literally becomes, through transubstantiation, the flesh of Christ, a doctrine the Catholic Church holds firmly to today, and a belief that contributed to the Protestant separation from the Church of Rome.

  Ecumenical debates aside, it is traditional in many parts of the world to celebrate the end of Lent with a special, rich Easter bread, often made with eggs, butter, and sugar, and I had a sudden urge to do the same, to participate in this worldwide celebration of bread. (This was as close as I came to celebrating Easter these days, not having been to church for two years.) Maybe I was also looking for an excuse not to make peasant bread, after the previous week’s disappointment with the spring water, which had produced a loaf indistinguishable from the first three.

  The Easter bread I was making, from Carol Field’s The Italian Baker, was said to be adapted from “an old Roman recipe.” (Hmm. Pre- or post-Crucifixion Rome? I wondered.) Surprisingly, the ancient recipe started with a poolish (my guess is that the poolish was part of said adaptation) and was loaded with sugar, butter, eggs, orange zest, and vanilla. It was a nice change and a nice bread, if a bit blander than I expected.

  As for the lovely dinner rolls in The Last Supper, painted five centuries after the Catholic Church decreed that bread eaten at the Last Supper was unleavened, what was Leonardo up to there? While searching for an answer, I read some silly theory that if you view these dinner rolls as musical notes on a staff, they form a vaguely Gregorian-chant-like tune—or is it the Beatles’ “Yesterday”? In any event, that doesn’t explain why Leonardo chose to depict leavened bread. I think we can be fairly certain it wasn’t a blunder on the part of the genius scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician, and writer. Was it, then, a slap in the face to the pope? A nod to the Eastern Orthodox Church? I have no idea. I do have a great idea for a novel, however.

  WEEK

  6

  Steamed

  In the end we will listen to the voice of the machines. We will have to. There is no choice. We will not go back to tallow dips while the great shining wheels are there to bring us light.

  —Mary Heaton Vorse (1874 – 1966), U.S. journalist and labor activist

  Steam—it’s not just for irons! It’s the miracle vapor that’s indispensable in bread making from start to finish! Steam powers the locomotives that carry the wheat from the fields of South Dakota to the mills of Minneapolis, drives the rollers that crush the grain into flour, and lastly, in your own oven, provides the crispy-chewy crust that turns good bread into great bread!

  Clearly I missed my calling as a nineteenth-century ad man.

  The ad would be a little dated today, except for the last part: there is still no substitute for steam when it comes to the final stage of wheat processing, baking a loaf of bread. I was looking forward to spending a calm day in the kitchen after a second consecutive week fighting a bizarre series of mechanical breakdowns that I’d taken to calling the Revenge of the Machines. The initial skirmish with technology had come when, merging onto the highway on the way home from work, I’d seen a huge plume of black smoke in my rearview mirror. “Wow, where’s that coming from?” I said out loud before I realized it was coming from me. The smoke was so thick, so black, that the headlights of the car behind me vanished in the dusk.

  The exhaust end of my car looked like one of those Kuwaiti oil wells that were set on fire after the first (the “good”) Gulf War. I made it home, but the car ended up in the shop for several days with a blown gasket somewhere or other. Within a week our other car downshifted into second gear all by itself at 60 miles an hour while we were on a 150-mile highway trip. That car ended up in the shop for two weeks while the dealer installed the new transmission required by yet another blown gasket somewhere or other.

  All of this attention to cars apparently made the oil burner jealous, for it decided to spew a black, oily smoke remarkably similar to the car’s oily exhaust, making the house smell like a Kuwaiti oil well during . . . you know. The cause? Yep, a leaky gasket. Then the connections on the stovetop sparked and turned black and the dishwasher sent water cascading onto the kitchen floor (gasket again), and a week later (I swear, I’m not making this up) the washing machine sent water cascading onto the laundry room floor (also known, unfortunately, as the kitchen ceiling). The Revenge of the Machines was taking no prisoners, giving me, I was told, the perpetual, hollow-eyed look of a hunted man.

  At least, this morning, I could escape all that and immerse myself in the ancient tradition of bread baking, temporarily escaping the industrial age and all that it has wrought. All I had to worry about this week was getting some steam into my oven.

  Most bread books explain why steam is important. It keeps the crust pliable and soft so the bread can continue to rise in the oven as the intense heat fuels the yeast into one last breath of furious metabolism, a dramatic process called oven spring. Less known, however (I found this in Harold McGee’s technical book on food and cooking called On Food and Cooking), is the fact that steam also hastens heat transfer to the bread during those first few critical minutes in the oven. Steam is a great conductor of heat; that’s why you can sit in a 212-degree dry sauna but not a 212-degree steam bath.

  Commercial bread ovens have steam injectors built in, but the home baker has to improvise. I’d tried various systems over the years. First I put a rimmed baking sheet on the bottom shelf and poured in a cup of water just before loading the bread. This made steam, but it also made red-hot spittle and noises that scared the bejesus out of me as it buckled like a ’57 Chevy hitting a telephone pole. Still, I kept using it, for a while substituting ice cubes for water, which was less traumatic but also made less steam and no doubt lowered the oven temperature as well. After a while I grew weary of the sight of this rusty, warped pan and threw it out.

  Next I tried a technique recommended in some books: splashing water directly onto the oven floor. Anne caught me doing this and threatened to revoke my baking license if I didn’t cease immediately. “What, a little water is going to hurt the oven?” I’d said defensively, yet I stopped nevertheless, switching to one of those squeeze-operated plant misters you can buy for a couple of bucks. But using that required an anaerobic workout to get a decent amount of mist into the oven—squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, huff, huff, puff—while the oven door was wide open, allowing all that precious heat to flow out.

  Following the centuries-old tradition of bakers everywhere, I hopped onto the Internet, where I soon learned I wasn’t the only one trying to make steam. Some entrepreneur, taking advantage of desperate home bakers like myself, was offering a $250 device that consisted of a stainless steel chafing dish cover (the kind you see at buffet tables) with a hole drilled in the side, a baking stone, and a handheld clothes steamer.

  I’d almost given up hope of finding anything better than my squeeze bottle when, browsing in a garden shop, I happened upon a small pressurized sprayer intended for houseplants. After a few easy pumps to build pressure, this little device really sent out the mist, and much faster than my squeeze-trigger plant mister. The best feature was the sprayer’s long, narrow neck, which would allow me to mist deep into the oven by opening the oven door just a crack, keeping heat loss to a minimum.

  I slid my latest loaf onto the stone, stuck in the gooseneck, closed the oven door over it, and pressed the trigger. Psssssssssst! Steam poured out the oven door! This was fantastic, this was Old Faithful, this was the Union Pacific steaming into San Francisco! I sprayed some more. Pssssssssst! This was—crack, snapple, pop, shatter!

  “What was that?” Anne wondered out loud.

  I opened the oven door to investigate. “I don’t see anything unusual.”

  Anne peered over my shoulder. “I don’t see anything.”

  The oven was da
rk inside. The light had blown out. And then some. When I pulled the loaf out an hour later, shards of glass from the heavy protective lens that covers—make that covered—the lightbulb littered the baking stone and the oven floor. Nothing was left of the bulb itself but the metal base and two insect-antennae filaments that waved, taunting me, at the slightest vibration. Apparently I had misted a little too deep into the oven, scoring a direct hit on the bulb on the back wall.

  “Do you think any of the glass got into the bread?” Anne asked.

  Oh, yikes. I stared at my loaf; I stared at my oven, the latest casualty of the Revenge of the Machines. Was there no end? Although I have to confess, revenge was justified in this case, for I had abused the machine, forgetting that cold mist plus 450-degree glass equals shattering. Still, I was more than a little unsettled by the fact that even bread baking had not given me refuge from humankind’s fragile coexistence with the machines we depend upon so heavily. Bread baking is as homey, as removed from technology, factories, and engines, as you can get.

  Or is it? As I picked glass out of the oven, I realized that this seemingly simple, earthy, non-factory-made loaf of bread could not in fact have been made without dozens of complex, sophisticated machines, from the combines that reap the wheat, isolate the kernels, and strip off the chaff; the trucks and trains that transport it; the computer-controlled factories that make the yeast; the mills that grind the flour; and the car in which I drove to the store to buy the flour, all the way down to the stand mixer I used for kneading and the electric oven that baked the bread.

  What, then, is so basic, so supposedly back-to-nature, about baking bread? It seems it’s really anything but. My loaf of “rustic” bread is so far down the supply chain that I can’t see the beginning of it. Was the Revenge of the Machines simply an inevitable result of our being heavily dependent on machinery? Deep inside (I consider myself a man of science, not of mysticism; in my day job I’m the director of technology at a research institution), I knew it wasn’t a personal affront, yet I couldn’t help thinking that these breakdowns were sending me a message. It would take several months to fully reveal itself, but a new goal was fermenting, slowly forming in my mind: to actually bake a loaf of bread from scratch, out of reach of the Revenge of the Machines. Growing my own wheat was a start, but I wanted to do more. I wanted not just to say it, but to really, truly bake like an Egyptian.

  WEEK

  7

  Old Believer

  Isn’t an agnostic just an atheist without balls?

  —Stephen Colbert

  “Would you call yourself an atheist, Dad?”

  “Not as long as Grandma’s alive,” I’d told Katie one Sunday morning as I kneaded dough.

  Sunday bread making had progressed from an event to a habit to, within a surprisingly short time, a ritual. This of course meant that I wasn’t participating in that other ritual more commonly associated with Sunday mornings, going to church—perhaps bringing to an end a family tradition that began, in this country at least, with my great-grandfather, a Russian priest who immigrated to establish the very first Old Believers church in America.

  The Old Believers broke off from the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century after the Russian Orthodox Church introduced reforms, mainly related to ritual, intended to bring uniformity to practices in the Russian and Greek Orthodox churches. Some of these reforms, such as changing the direction of procession around the church (Orthodox services include a lot of circling around) from clockwise to counterclockwise, proved too radical for the faithful, who broke away and formed their own church, for which they were heavily and sometimes violently persecuted. Which is how great-grandpa ended up in America in 1908, founding the Old Believers church (still active to this day) in Marianna, Pennsylvania, where many Russian immigrants had settled to work in the coal mines.

  For years, Anne and I had dutifully dragged the kids to church and Sunday school, weathering protests and temper tantrums, because Christianity was an important part of both our families’ cultures—I was raised an Episcopalian, Anne a Roman Catholic—and we thought the kids should at the very least be exposed to that heritage. They could make their own choices later, as adults, as to whether they wanted Christianity to be a part of their own lives.

  I had already made my own decision, even as I continued going, week after week, becoming increasingly sympathetic to the childish behavior in the backseat. Once in a while I even begged off myself, professing urgent work in the garden or the workshop, guiltily letting Anne do the dirty work of lugging the kids to church. Finally I stopped going except for Christmas and Easter; then I stopped attending altogether. I blamed the endless potluck suppers and uninspiring sermons, but these petty complaints mainly made it easier to come to grips with the fact that I had simply lost my faith.

  This is not to say that I am antichurch or against organized religion in general. I am neither for nor against. I know a great many people whose faith brings them irreplaceable comfort and meaning—I suspect my great-grandfather found few atheists in the Pennsylvania coal mines—and the church has through the centuries provided a moral beacon and filled important social gaps left by secular society. For me, however, attendance at church felt like a charade, an increasingly uncomfortable one at that, once I had come to grips with the fact that I was no longer buying any of it. I was willing to leave open the possibility of some kind of higher being who created the universe (although that made me feel uneasily like the proverbial goldfish who is sure there is a God, because who else changes the water twice a week?), but surely not the God of the Old and New Testaments, an omnipresent, personal God who listens to our prayers and takes an interest in our lives. In truth, I wasn’t sure if I was an atheist, an agnostic, a deist, or something else. I know I didn’t believe in any kind of heavenly afterlife, although I found myself forced to reevaluate this certainty after my father (himself a religious man) died suddenly and prematurely over twenty-five years ago. Shortly afterward, he’d visited me in my sleep on a couple of occasions—his appearances more vivid than any dream, so real, in fact, that they could only be described as visions—to let me know he was still there if I needed him and, most importantly, to comfort me in my grief. I had just turned thirty, the age when I think adulthood really begins, when we are finally ready to leave the extended adolescence of college behind. These visitations by my father were disquieting because if I accepted that I had been visited by a spirit, I must therefore accept that spirits, and an afterlife, exist. After a while I concluded that these apparitions were more likely a cheap parlor trick of my mind than a proof of God’s existence, but then, sadly, Dad, as if in rebuke, stopped coming around. In retrospect I wish I’d suspended judgment a bit longer.

  In truth, the kids weren’t the only reason I had attended church. I liked the ritual and the tradition. I found repose in repetition, in reciting prayers and singing hymns that I’d known for nearly half a century, in sitting in the same pew each week. Fortunately I found that my new Sunday morning ritual—baking—took me out of myself in the same way.

  I had come to love my early mornings alone in the kitchen, the silence and the stillness broken only by the chirping of waking birds in summer and the hiss of the steam radiators in winter. All week I’d look forward to sliding across the wood floor, bowling-alley slippery from flour dust, in my socks, as I skidded around the kitchen. I’d come to cherish the feel of the dough in my hands at that magical point where it passes from sticky to smooth and elastic. In the same way that I used to take pride in not opening the prayer book to recite that one last prayer after Communion, I tried to bake without looking at the recipe: 2⅓ cups all-purpose flour, 1 cup bread flour, ⅓ cup each rye and whole wheat—I knew it, you might say, like I knew the Lord’s Prayer.

  This particular morning, as I watched the poolish gently bubble while upstairs everyone else slept, I couldn’t escape the fact that, having given up searching for God, I had started searching for perfection on earth. I wasn’t m
erely baking bread; I was on a pilgrimage for heavenly bread. What’s more, I was seeking perfection in the food most associated with Christianity.

  The symbol of Christ’s body. The staff of life. Why had I chosen bread? I didn’t know the answer, but suddenly I was troubled by the question. Might this quest be about more than crust and crumb after all? And if so, why should that be upsetting? There must be something else going on, I told myself, and just like that, this Sunday morning deflated on me like so many of my loaves, crushing me underneath a great sadness, a grief, a longing I hadn’t felt in many years.

  What was I trying to connect to with this ritual, this almost spiritual quest for perfection? Or should the question be, not what, but who? No, no, no; the notion seemed absurd, too pat, and way, way too Freudian. I wanted badly to dismiss it, but I was shaking now, overcome with loss. As I sat over my bowl of poolish, full of life, life that would be extinguished within hours for the benefit of my family, I inhaled deeply, filling my lungs with its yeasty aroma. I ached for the release of tears, but all I could coax from my hardened, nonbelieving soul was a single teardrop, which I let fall, unceremoniously, into my bread.

  WEEK

  8

  “The Rest of the World Will Be Dead”

  Ownership of a good milch cow is a valuable means of . . . preventing pellagra, and should be encouraged to the utmost.

  —Dr. Joseph Goldberger

  “You want me to fly to South Carolina to talk to a book club? Come on, Michael, I’m trying to bake bread here.” Not to mention hang on to my day job, from which I’d have to take two days off for this event. I had never turned down a request from my publicist, but this one seemed a little unreasonable (nearly as unreasonable as my excuse).

  Until he explained that it wasn’t just a book club. It was all of the book clubs in the Charleston area, some seven hundred readers, and the event was their annual luncheon, the literary/social event of the year. They needed a last-minute replacement for Khaled Hosseini, whose novel The Kite Runner had earned more than the gross national product of his native Afghanistan and was about to be released as a movie. Talk about a drop in marquee value!