Henry David Thoreau: Hazelnut Raisin Bread

On January 6, 2014January 12, 2014 By paperandsaltIn 19th century, Breads and Pastries11 Comments

With every new year, I find myself going back to bread. It’s the opposite of what we’re “supposed” to do in January; I should be telling you about a new energizing juice cleanse. But if we diet to restore the body, we bake to restore the spirit, cultivating the qualities we wish to embody throughout the year: the determination to begin, the self-assuredness to knead the dough, the resourcefulness to change course if it goes awry, the patience as it rises, the patience as it cooks, the patience as it cools.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” Henry David Thoreau wrote about his two years on Walden Pond. He wasn’t referring to bread specifically, but baking requires a calmness, a deliberateness of the mind. No wonder it was one of the writer’s preferred ways to spend a day. As he wrote in Walden, “I like best the bread which I have baked, the garment which I have made, the shelter which I have constructed, the fuel which I have gathered.”

Thoreau’s tiny cabin was an early version of America’s Test Kitchen: The writer ran hundreds of little experiments on his bread recipe, borrowing local Native American techniques and even going back to Roman times for tips. Hoping to save on the cost of yeast, he dug up Cato the Elder’s unleavened recipe: “Put the meal into the trough, add water gradually, and knead it thoroughly. When you have kneaded it well, mould it, and bake it under a cover.” Bread hasn’t changed much since (although our instructions are decidedly longer).

Although Thoreau baked year-round, it was in the dark New England winters when he gave it special care. “In cold weather it was no little amusement to bake several small loaves … tending and turning them.” Baking helped counteract the mental freeze that came with the cold. “Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolution of the seasons,” he wrote in his journal. “Now I am ice, now I am sorrel.” We can’t be sorrel—vivacious and fresh—the whole year. But we can be warm, calm, comforting. We can be bread.

Almost as if anticipating the current assault on carbs, Thoreau’s passionate defense of his favorite food resonates today as it did in that small cabin. “Bread may not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy.”

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Virginia Woolf: Cottage Loaf

On January 25, 2013September 2, 2013 By paperandsaltIn 20th century, Breads and Pastries42 Comments

Every time I get discouraged by writing, I engage in a bit of schadenfreude, and soothe myself with the frustrations of others. “I write two pages of arrant nonsense after straining … Then I trust to some inspiration on re-reading.” That’s Virginia Woolf while writing The Waves, but I’m pretty sure I said the same thing, more or less, while writing this post.

This constant self-effacement is a theme that runs through Woolf’s letters. Her talents didn’t really lie in the library, she would tell you. They were in the kitchen. “I have only one passion in life — cooking,” Woolf wrote to her friend (and occasional lover) Vita Sackville-West. “I have just bought a superb oil stove. I can cook anything … I assure you it is better than writing these more than idiotic books.”

Where Woolf hesitated to praise her own writing, she wasn’t nearly so shy about her talent for baking. “Cooked lunch today and made a loaf of really expert bread,” she wrote. Bread was her specialty, particularly a traditionally British double-decker creation: the snowmanesque cottage loaf. Her dedication to the kitchen was unusual for a woman of the upper-middle class. She did, however, draw the line at doing the dishes (“How servants preserve either sanity or sobriety if that is 9/10ths of their lives … God knows”).

In Recollections of Virginia Woolf, Louie Mayer, the Woolfs’ cook, marvels at Virginia’s calm expertise. “She showed me how to make the dough with the right quantities of yeast and flour, and then how to knead it. She returned three or four times during the morning to knead it again. Finally, she made the dough into the shape of a cottage loaf and baked it at just the right temperature.”

It’s Woolf’s birthday today; she would have been 131, although she didn’t make it even half that far, her mental illness wearing her away. But from Woolf’s letters, the time she spends cooking seems to be its own rest cure, clearing her head of everything else but the dough. “My bread bakes well,” she writes in her diary, and it resounds like a soothing mantra. If all else fails, I tell myself, my bread bakes well. My bread bakes well.

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Honoré de Balzac: Ukrainian Black Bread

On January 23, 2012September 2, 2013 By paperandsaltIn 19th century, Breads and Pastries9 Comments

You might have seen the title of this post and had an immediate disconnect. Balzac and Ukrainian black bread? Wasn’t he more of a baguette kind of a guy? But that’s one of the things I love about Balzac. He was a baguette kind of guy. And a peasant bread kind of guy. And a traditional Easter paska bread kind of guy. He was just a man who loved food. He was a fan of the whole genre.

He is also one of the best writers of early “food erotica,” lingering over an account of a meal sometimes for several pages. Take one of his shortest descriptions in The Seamy Side of History: a breakfast of “monastic frugality” that “consisted of a small turbot with white sauce, potatoes, a salad, and four dishes of fruit: peaches, grapes, strawberries, and green almonds; then, by way of hors d’oeuvres, there was honey served in the comb as in Switzerland, besides butter, radishes, cucumber, and sardines.” If that’s what they’re serving at monasteries, sign me up.

Balzac’s encounter with Ukrainian bread happened late in life, but at a transformative moment. In 1832, he began a correspondence with one of his readers, a married woman living near Kiev who enigmatically signed herself “The Foreigner.” It was the beginning of a fifteen-year long-distance relationship – and soon Balzac found himself falling in love with his pen pal, Ewelina Hańska. So when her husband died in 1841, Balzac made his move, traveled to meet her, and eventually married her at her estate, in what’s now Ukraine.

Ewelina wasn’t the only thing that impressed him about the country – the bread did. He famously counted 77 different kinds of bread-making techniques used there, a fact that local tourism brochures don’t hesitate to play up (Visit scenic Ukraine! Land of the fabled 77 breads!). And one of the most popular (and most delicious) is the Russian black bread, which gets its color from dark rye flour.

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