52 Loaves

by William Alexander

  I saw Modern Game bantams (birchen, black, black-breasted red, blue, self blue, brown red, golden duckwing, lemon blue, red pyle, silver duckwing, wheaten, white, and AOV) and Old English Game bantams (black, black-breasted red, blue, brassy back, brown red, crele, ginger red, mille fleur, and red pyle).

  I saw rabbits that weighed fifty pounds, rabbits with erect ears, and rabbits with huge floppy ears; ducks (a chocolate Muscovy, which sounded as if it were already cooked); chickens (rosecomb, Japanese, American, Cornish, silkie, bearded, Brahma, Andalusian, and a category called “Other”).

  My favorite barn was the one with the sheep. The competition was about to begin, and everywhere you looked, sheep were being groomed and shaved, washed, vacuumed, and combed, giving the barn the expectant air of backstage at the Miss America pageant.

  It was only eleven o’clock, but I was getting hungry (After all, I’d had breakfast at four thirty), so I headed for the food midway, hoping to find something interesting. I saw fried dough (more stands than I could count), fried curlicue fries, fried corn dogs, fried funnel cakes, fried onions, fried chicken, fried mushrooms, fried cauliflower, fried zucchini, and even fried pickles. Any food that wasn’t fried was frozen. I saw Sno-Cones, Sno-Kones, and snow cones, plus their haute cuisine cousin, shaved ice. I saw smoothies, ice cream, the Colossal Sundae Center (where their slogan, I imagine, is “Quantity, not quality”), and something called Dippin’ Dots (“ice cream of the future”). I hadn’t even covered a quarter of the food court yet. There were rows and rows of trailers selling food. It seemed that half the fairgrounds was given over to food. Yet not a sandwich to be found anywhere.

  After eventually succumbing to the siren call of the deep fryer and “authentic” Belgian frites (if only!), I headed back to the culinary arts building. It was almost high noon. The tables laid out to display the baked goods were empty. A sign greeted me: BREAD RESULTS WILL BE POSTED AT 3:00.

  Three o’clock! I had hoped to be on the road by one. The judges, all matronly-looking woman, were behind soundproof glass, tasting, drinking water, and scribbling notes. I went back to See the Fair.

  I saw a log cabin, a luthier, a weaver, two youth dance troupes, and a man I judged to be eighty-five making natural brooms by hand, his head bouncing like a bobble-head doll as he worked the foot-powered mechanism. I bought a hand broom from him and wondered who would be doing this five years from now. Of course, I couldn’t very well ask him.

  I’d always associated the word fairgrounds with ground, so I had been surprised to see that this fair was set in concrete, concentrating and reflecting the searing ninety-three-degree heat. With more time to kill, I went to the super-air-conditioned New York State dairy-production pavilion, where I learned that fudge is a dairy food (“butter in every bite”) and downed a refreshing cold milkshake while studying an impressive life-size sculpture, in butter, of two boys in overalls, leaning over a rail fence, looking at their cow.

  Three o’clock. Finally. A small group had gathered in the culinary arts building, but the judges were still compiling their results behind the soundproof glass. I had expected that all the entries would be displayed, with ribbons on the winners, as the geese and jams had been, but that wasn’t the case for the bread competition. Only the first-prize winners were on display, in a fogged refrigerated case, the kind where Greek diners keep their over-the-top-gorgeous but inedible deserts. My loaf was not in the case.

  A judge emerged and I handed in my receipt. She couldn’t even find my folder. This was getting humiliating. I was getting ready to leave when it turned up. “Here it is,” she said, pulling out a red ribbon. “You won second place.”

  Holy smokes! I studied my scorecard. I’d received 25 out of a possible 30 points for appearance (“One side dropped”). They awarded me 15 out of 20 points for creativity, but only 20 of 30 points for flavor. This puzzled me, as flavor was the one thing I thought I had going for me, my long, room-temperature fermentations drawing out plenty of yeasty flavor. Perhaps they didn’t care for the tangy taste of the levain, or like Katie they favored something lighter. Say, croissants.

  The score that really had me upset, however, was for texture. I’d earned a perfect score, with the added note, “It’s what it’s supposed to be.” No, it’s not! It’s too tight, too moist, even when I get some holes. How could they give me a perfect score on crumb! Several of the judges were still around, and I wanted to take issue with their verdict, but realizing the absurdity of such an argument, I took my red ribbon and drove home, having won second prize in the New York State Fair bread competition, Category 02, Yeast Breads.

  It had been a good day. I had won a prize and Seen the Fair, but the strangest sight still awaited me, as I left Syracuse at seventy miles an hour.

  I saw a pink high-heeled shoe flying across the road, bouncing crazily in the slipstream of the cars. I wanted to close my eyes and sleep. I’d seen enough for one day.

  V.

  None

  None is a time to pray for perseverance, to pray for the strength to continue bearing fruit as one reaches one’s prime and needs to keep going.

  WEEK

  32

  Don’t Fear the Reaper

  Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.

  — Deuteronomy 25:4

  Weight: 205 pounds

  Bread bookshelf weight: 44 pounds

  “Wheat-eater, wheat-eater, wheat-eater, wheat!”

  I glanced at the numbers on the clock radio, glowing dimly in the dawn—5:30—pulled the pillow over my head, and tried to go back to sleep.

  “Wheat-eater, wheat-eater, wheat-eater, wheat!”

  “Tell that damned bird to pipe down,” I moaned. Then I realized what its call—one I had never heard before—was saying.

  “Wheat-eater, wheat-eater, wheat-eater, wheat!”

  I bolted upright. Today was harvest day!

  The previous October, Anne and I had planted four beds of winter wheat. For nine long months I had waited for this day, watching over my crop like a nervous mother-to-be, rejoicing at its germination when the first sprouts cautiously peeked through the soil, missing it in its childhood when it disappeared under a blanket of snow, then celebrating its return in the spring. For nine long months I’d protected it against the neighbor’s cats, shooed away grasshoppers, and deterred greedy crows as it grew to maturity, turning from grassy green to bread-crust gold.

  Growing winter wheat is a horticultural act of faith, if there ever was one. You’d think one ought to be able to grow a grain of wheat in less time than it takes to make a human baby, yet the gestation period is almost precisely the same. As is, remarkably, the number of chromosomes. Wheat contains one of the most complex genomic structures in the plant world, with forty-two chromosomes, only four fewer than humans.

  The wheat had “died off” in the winter, going dormant. Then, in the first days of spring, despite looking deader than a bale of straw on a Halloween hayride, it had reawakened the very same week as its swanky suburban cousin ryegrass, and by late spring it had grown to a straight, strong, three-foot-high stalk.

  Of grass, not grain. Even in May there was nothing to suggest that this stalk of grass might turn into something remotely edible. The wait for it to form seed heads and change from green to golden seemed endless. But three weeks ago, startling in its suddenness, it had almost magically become recognizable wheat. A week after that, the proud wheat heads bowed to the earth, each stalk curling over in a graceful arc, a biological mechanism that protects it from rain, for as the wheat approaches ripeness, a good soaking could cause it to sprout uselessly on the stalk rather than fall to the ground and sprout in the earth.

  It was a touching gesture, the swollen, almost voluptuous seed head bending over to face the very earth it had sprung from, bowing as if offering its head in sacrifice to its master so that others might gain nourishment—and life.

  I was only too happy to oblige. First I had to be sure it was ripe. I brought a seed head
over to Erle Zuill, a local seventy-five-year-old farmer, for a look. The very first thing out of his mouth made my blood run cold.

  “Are you sure this is wheat?”

  He ran his fingers over the threads that were coming out of the seed head. “It looks more like barley. I’ve never seen threads like this on wheat.”

  Oh my God! What had I done? My mind started racing. I was sure the packet had said wheat—wasn’t I?—but the seed company could’ve made a packing error.

  “Of course, the last time I harvested wheat was fifty years ago,” Erle added. Erle or anyone else in the county, I thought. Later on, I would learn that some classes of wheat, including the soft red winter wheat that he might have planted back then, are “beardless,” lacking those long threads.

  I relaxed a bit as he rubbed his aged, coarse farmer’s hands together vigorously, opened them, and blew. The chaff drifted away with his breath, leaving a small palmful of wheat berries, a little smaller than popcorn kernels, behind.

  “It’s ripe for sure.”

  That’s what I was waiting to hear.

  Harvesting grain, the act that turned Homo sapiens from nomadic hunters and gatherers to village, then town, and finally city dwellers. Once our ancestors had learned to cultivate grain some ten thousand years ago, they could put down their own roots and stay in one place. And create pottery. And houses. And societies and schools and arts and writing and buildings. Thus in a sense the grain I was about to harvest was a direct and necessary antecedent to the magnificent Empire State Building, sixty miles to the south. As my knowledge of harvesting was based in whole on the same Flemish art that had filled my head when I planted the wheat, I had a similarly romantic vision of how the process would go. Stooped over, grabbing handfuls of wheat in my left hand, I’d swing the curved sickle in a graceful arc with my right, cleanly cutting the stalks off a few inches above the earth. The Good Wife would follow behind, gathering the wheat into sheaves, tying them, and laying them in the field, where the Happy Children, laughing and making a game of the work, would gather them up and bring them to the barn.

  In my memory I’ll always believe I succeeded in living that painting, despite three facts: I didn’t own a sickle, there seemed no reason beyond art to bind the wheat into sheaves, and the children were both at their summer jobs.

  One thing I got right: me stooped over. But with a tool no peasant in a Flemish woodcut would’ve been caught dead with. After taking a few useless swings with my old, rusty scythe (essentially a sickle on a long pole), I went into the basement and emerged with my not-quite-as-rusty hedge shears. For this small crop, they were ideal.

  For a larger crop, we would’ve wanted to use a mechanical reaper, and some of us may remember from school the story of the McCormick reaper. Picture a crude robot—or automaton, as it would have been called back then—that took the form of a human, bending at the waist, swinging a scythe. This fanciful machine, which McCormick abandoned after fifteen years, was, not surprisingly, an abject failure, taking more rolls in the hay than the proverbial farmer’s daughter.

  Huh? That’s not the story we learned in school. Cyrus McCormick a failure? His reaper an automaton? Of course not; I’m talking about his father, Robert McCormick. The kid said, “Pop, I think you’re taking the wrong approach to this,” and devised a horse-drawn device that looked nothing like a human but effectively cut and gathered the straw. Other reapers were appearing on the market at this time, just before the Civil War, but McCormick, with his business acumen and aggressive legal tactics (he once hired a small-town lawyer named Abe Lincoln), drove the competition out of business and went on to found International Harvester.

  Back to our little crop, Anne (playing the Good Wife) and I moved down each row with our hedge shears, Anne gathering handfuls of stalks, which I snipped off a few inches above the ground, very much aware that I was harvesting wheat more in the style of a twenty-first-century Mexican landscaper than a fifteenth-century Flemish peasant, but after all, it was the twenty-first century. The whole operation took less than half an hour, and when we were done, we’d filled two large garden carts with wheat. Of course, most of that was straw and would be discarded.

  The burning question the entire time was, how much edible wheat would this crop actually yield? I was hoping to get the equivalent of a five-pound bag of flour out of my 150-square-foot plot, but my minimum requirement was to get at least enough for one loaf of bread—that is, about a pound. Seeing how few wheat berries came out of the seed heads I’d sampled thus far, though, I was worried about getting even that much.

  With the wheat stalks all laid out in the same direction, it was time to thresh. The word is closely related to thrash for good reason. Threshing consists basically of beating the hell out of the wheat until the berries are battered loose from the seed heads that encase and protect them. With some ten thousand years between the first cultivation of grain and the 1834 invention of the combine, mankind has, as you might expect, come up with a number of ways to accomplish this. Pliny the Elder, writing around 77 AD, described three methods in favor at the time: beating with a flail; using a crushing stone or board; and spreading the wheat out on a floor to be trampled by a train of oxen.

  I had lent out my oxen for the weekend and didn’t own a flail—two heavy sticks connected by a short chain—which looks like something you’d find smacking the buttocks of a member of Parliament in a London S and M den, so I had to improvise, pulling out an old straw broom I’d been saving for the occasion. Anne and I laid a handful of wheat out on a new canvas tarp, and I threshed away.

  The result of all my frenetic flailing was a bushel of dented wheat. Not a single berry emerged.

  “Hit harder!” Anne urged, like a high school cheerleader rooting for her favorite (I hoped) linebacker. Cheered on by Pom-Pom Girl, I hit harder. A few strands of the broom flew off. The wheat bounced up and down on the tarp. I hit harder and still harder until, winded, I sat back on the tarp to catch my breath. A few lonely kernels of grain lay scattered among the debris. It was going to take something firmer than a broom to coax this stuff out.

  “How about the back of a shovel?” Anne suggested.

  That seemed a bit rough, but I didn’t have a better idea, so I flailed away at the wheat with a shovel for a few minutes. Sure enough, the canvas soon became littered with popcorn-size kernels of wheat. But an examination of the seed heads revealed that only about half the kernels were being released. We found that rubbing the battered seed heads in the palm of a hand or drawing them between thumb and forefinger released the remaining grains, but in a few minutes, our hands were raw from the coarse chaff, and we had to put on gardening gloves.

  After a bit of this, with progress pitifully slow, I concluded, “This doesn’t make sense. What’s the point of all this flailing if we have to strip each seed head by hand anyway?” I went down to the workshop and returned with the wooden mallet I use on my woodworking chisels. Then, a handful of wheat held to the tarp with my left hand, I beat it with the mallet in my right. That was the ticket! Some wheat remained behind, but not nearly as much, and many heads were totally clean.

  But after a half hour of beating the tarp-covered lawn with a mallet, the ground beneath had become soft and yielded to the blows, which in turn became less effective. I kept moving around to new, firmer spots, but even with a large tarp, they were becoming more and more difficult to find, and I was getting tired.

  “You beat for a while,” I said to Anne, handing her the mallet while I went over to the woodpile, returning a few minutes later with my chopping block, a small tree stump that I use for splitting firewood.

  Pounding on a firm surface caused the tough hull to release its grip on the berry with only a few blows—no additional stripping required. Now we were cooking. The job went much more efficiently if the seed heads were bundled together (guess there was a reason beyond art to gather the wheat into sheaves), so one of us bunched while the other pounded, and the tarp gradually filled with grai
n and chaff, along with broken pieces of straw.

  Occasionally we stopped to shovel the wheat and chaff into a large bucket over which I’d placed a homemade sieve originally made for screening compost. Running our hands in the wheat and chaff along the screen, we were rewarded by the musical sound of grain tickling into the bucket. Most of the chaff fell in, too, but the sieve screened out the large pieces of straw and revealed seed heads that hadn’t been fully threshed.

  After six hours, weary, sore, and sunburned, we had threshed our little crop of wheat, and I understood why the Latin word for the threshing board is tribulum, which has the same origin as tribulation. This was tribulation if I’d ever seen it. Thank goodness for the combine, which cuts, threshes, and cleans the wheat all at once, right in the field.

  Our bucket of wheat and chaff was mainly (by volume, at least) chaff, and we still faced the job of winnowing, that often-cited act of “separating the wheat from the chaff.” But that would have to wait for another day. It was evening, and I needed a hot shower and a cold drink. Anne had one request as she peeled off her gloves and fell back onto the grass, exhausted.

  “Promise me you won’t grow cotton next summer.”

  WEEK

  33

  Miller’s Crossing

  “You are dealing with forces, young man, when you speak of Wheat and the Railroads, not with men . . . Men have only little to do in the whole business.”

  —Frank Norris, The Octopus, 1901

  What a bizarre and comical sight. This was a commercial, state-of-the-art roller mill? It looked like something straight out of an old Disney cartoon. Mike Dooley and I were the only human presence on this large factory floor among the rows of large square machines, a couple of dozen in all, each a little smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle. These awkward steel contraptions were all shimmying — and I do mean shimmying—as if to a sound track only they could hear.