Going with the Grain A Wandering Bread Lover Takes a Bite Out of Life

by Seligson, Susan

• ISBN13: 9780743255516
• ISBN10: 0743255518
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-05-18
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Summary

"My lifelong love affair with bread has less to do with crust, crumb, and the vagaries of sourdough cultures and more to do with bread as a reflection of people's varied beliefs, daily lives, and blood memories....Bread tells the most essential human stories."So begins Susan Seligson's personal and often humorous journey to discover the secrets of the baker's trade and the place bread has in the lives of those who consume it. Part travelogue, part cultural history, with a handful of recipes thrown in for good measure, it is an exploration of the customs, traditions, and rituals around the creating and eating of this most basic and enduring form of sustenance.Bread is the stuff of life. Governments have been overthrown and religious rituals created because of it. Fry bread, matzo, ksra, nan, baguette: all are as resonant of their specific culture as any artifact. InGoing with the Grain, Seligson wanders the streets of the Casbah in Fes, Morocco, to unlock the secrets of the thousand-year-old communal bakeries there. In Saratoga Springs, New York, she finds a bread maker so committed to making the ultimate loaf, he built a unique sixty-ton hearth and uses only certified biodynamically grown wheat. Seligson knelt in the Jordanian desert beside a woman turning flat breads over glowing embers and plumbed the mysteries of Wonder Bread in an aseptic American factory.As satisfying as a slice of good bread with butter,Going with the Grainis for the armchair traveler and armchair baker alike.

Author Biography

Susan Seligson has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Redbook, and Outside, among other publications. With her husband, cartoonist Howie Schneider, she is coauthor of four children1s books, including the award-winning Amos: The Story of an Old Dog and His Couch. She lives in North Truro, Massachusetts

Table of Contents

Introduction: No Samples Today	1	(6)
The Bread Mystery: Fes, Morocco	7	(18)
Bread Is My Path: Saratoga Springs, New York	25	(19)
The Bedouin Way: Jordan	44	(32)
The World's Largest Bakery: Biddeford, Maine	76	(13)
Simple Gifts: Shanagarry, Ireland	89	(23)
Bread of Affliction: Brooklyn, New York	112	(16)
No Trespassing: Pueblo Country, New Mexico	128	(21)
Brijendra's Kitchen: India	149	(32)
An Army's Greatest Ally: The Bread Project; Natick, Massachusetts	181	(12)
The Biscuit Lady: Huntsville, Alabama	193	(14)
La Fete Du Pain: Paris, France	207	(17)
Bibliography	224	(1)
Index	225

Excerpts

The Bread Mystery: Fes, Morocco Bread is the main thing to understand: the staple of speculation, the food for all theories about what happens next.-- Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater SafetyIn the name of Allah give me bread.-- Fesi street beggarMy husband and I spent Christmas 1997 in Morocco. I'd been pestering Howie for years about escaping for the holidays to an Islamic country, somewhere we could get through the thick of the season without ever hearing dogs bark "Jingle Bells" or the words "great gift idea." As our base we chose the northern imperial city of Fes. We'd visited this chaotic, ancient metropolis the year before. Both of us were smitten and sad to leave it so soon. Also, I had some unfinished business there. I longed to solve the bread mystery.A person doesn't blithely stroll into the ninth-century medina of Fes. Stepping through the gates of the old city, Fes-el-Bali, is more like being pulled into a raging river; you catch your breath and surrender to the current. How strange, I thought, that this sensory extravaganza is as familiar to Fesis as a suburban mall back home would be for me. It seems unthinkable that anyone, even over a lifetime, could fail to be startled by the dancing colors, the pungent air, the bone-rattling insistence of this thousand-ring circus. Howie and I step over the cobbled threshold from extremely old to ancient, and we're pelted with the sweet-savory smells of cooking fat, jasmine, orange blossom, musk, and mud-crusted pack mules. Allergic mess that I normally am, I don't even sniffle. It's as if every receptor cell in my body is already on overload.From the din I make out the ageless entreaties of street commerce. The common denominator is bread, universally required, perpetually produced. A new day yields about one fresh loaf for every inhabitant of the old city. Carted in sacks, perched on the tops of heads, balanced precariously by mischievous toddlers, nearly identical Moroccan round loaves crisscross the narrow streets like Federal Express packages on Seventh Avenue.The medina bakeries offer no bread for sale. Their business is to immerse the homemade loaves in gaping wood-fired hearths, after which customers retrieve the fresh-baked breads, each a fragrant pillow. By the time a typical Fesi family tears off hunks of semolina loaf to dip into the lemony juices of the supper tagine, or stew pot, the breads have made a round-trip journey at the behest of a system sustained not by lists and figures but by dogged attentiveness, faint nods of the appropriate heads, and sheer faith. Few words are exchanged, nothing is written down. No one with whom I spoke would change a thing about the system. My tagged luggage has been waylaid to cities I've never visited, the photo store has sent me home with snapshots of a stranger's family barbecue, and I once lost an entire outfit at the dry cleaners. But in Fes it's an unspeakable rarity for a baker to misplace or misdirect a single bread. How is it possible?Morning seems the best time to make sense of what appears to be a bread-centered conspiracy. In the company of a sullen young translator from the Arabic Institute named Karim, I survey the bread traffic from the vantage point of a cafe, in Place Nejjarine, near the henna souk. The proprietor produces a rickety spool table and laborer's bench, which I drag beside a mosaic fountain framed by elaborately carved cedar. In the carless square a gaggle of children are playing tag. One tiny girl carries a wooden slab with two loaves on it, and as the children sprint and giggle, she just manages to save the shaped dough from slithering off the tray to the rank stones under her feet.I gulp my second espresso and, to Karim's frustration, bound off in a misguided attempt to shadow these trays of loaves as they come and go. A native of the medina, Karim knows it's a futil