by Paul Graham
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I would remember this winter as the one when I thought about food all the time, and not in a good way. Late in the afternoon, as the dinner hour approached, I ran through the naturally GF foods I couldn’t tolerate because my system was still trashed: fish, dairy, legumes, quinoa. I thought about the traditional dishes I didn’t want to attempt as GF any longer, like pasta with olive oil, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and garlic, since they didn’t taste the same. I also wanted to avoid eating so much rice; the repetition was boring, but I was paying attention to discussions about arsenic content in rice.
The restrictions led us to sample new grains that we would not have ordinarily purchased, simply because they were now safe and “for us.” We could have gotten along just fine with corn, potatoes, and rice (and eventually, we would), but the hole left behind by wheat seemed so large that we felt we had to avail ourselves of every chance to fill it in. We picked up bags of millet, amaranth, and teff, and tried to work them into our meals. This might have been a good thing to do six or eight months later, but to move into such unfamiliar cooking territory in the midst of withdrawal, longing, and frustration was, I now think, a mistake.
It led me to develop an immediate hatred for millet. Bec hated it too. We tried to love it, but in the end could only wonder why the Chinese had called this grain “king” before rice (and wheat) cultivation moved northward. Maybe King Millet was a despotic ruler, and rice was the liberator? The history of millet is in fact longer than that of wheat, but it was not a history I could appreciate. Millet looks like birdseed (because it is birdseed), and it cooked up dry, gritty, and less flavorful than any other grain I had ever tasted. Over a period of several weeks I attempted to steam millet, boil it like a porridge, and use it like couscous in tagines and salads. I toasted millet in a pan, then prepared it like risotto, and loaded on the cheese. I made millet pilaf. Nothing could make me like it.
I tried to enjoy amaranth, too, but couldn’t find any enthusiasm for a pile of gray mush, even though the flavor and texture appealed to me more. I had heard it was possible to pop amaranth like corn kernels, but I couldn’t work up the interest to try it. I felt the same way about teff. In the next town over, an Ethiopian woman was making huge, round, flat loaves of injera, the staple bread from Ethiopia. The texture of injera is spongy, and it tastes a little like sourdough. Ethiopians use it to scoop up pieces of cooked meat and vegetables. I bought a few wheels—they aren’t really loaves—from the health-food store, and although I enjoyed them, I could not commit. Injera became a food fling, an impulse buy.
There was a pattern here. Almost any grain indigenous to African and Asian cuisine (with the exception of rice) failed to appeal to me. Sorghum fit this pattern too, and so would tapioca (cassava). Intellectually, I knew that millet, amaranth, and teff had been enormously important to huge populations for eons, but I could not see them as my food. The millet was even regionally sourced, from the Finger Lakes, but that didn’t make it taste any better. I bitterly reminded myself that being able to disparage these grains was a “first world problem.” The only explanation I could come up with was that the stability of wheat supplies in the course of recent history had quite literally ruined me. I wasn’t a picky eater. I was even in a mood of receptivity—I wanted to like these foods, and Bec did too—but it seemed that only those common to the history of Western cuisine made the cut and remained in our regular rotation.*1
I had a suspicion that I might have enjoyed these grains more if other people were eating them along with me. I did not feel like a gastronomical explorer, as I did whenever I discovered a new dish and eagerly presented it to my friends. There was no way in hell I was going to prepare my guests millet or amaranth, and this made the experience of trying and disliking them feel more isolating. In the entire time I’ve been on a GF diet, I’ve talked to only one person who expressed real enthusiasm for either grain: a friend who is an adventurous traveler and true Renaissance man, an early-modern literature scholar and hobby farmer who translates Chinese by day and sees to his grove of nut and fruit trees in the evening.*2 There’s nothing he will not eat. More power to him, I say. There will be more millet and amaranth for him if I don’t buy it.
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Meanwhile, we persisted with our attempts to procure, by some means, edible bread, though at this point it would have been easier to just give in and go without. But I couldn’t do that, because a day without the promise of leavened bread of some kind seemed emptier to me. A breadless day did not seem as impossible as a day without salt, or without a spot of sugar, but it felt as uncomfortable as the days I’ve gone without coffee. And a week without bread felt as incomplete as a week without wine. Some of this was the experience of baking loaves in the house, which had come to happen with such regularity that the smell of bread had nearly become part of the house—as much as the smell of wood smoke in the winter months, cut grass in the summer, and lilac in the spring. For a time, the smell of beer had also regularly wafted throughout our rooms as David and I boiled wort for stouts and ales. I have not smelled that earthy, pungent aroma since barley vanished along with wheat; when I finally do, I know it will hold me in a nostalgic swoon. But Bec and I baked far more often, and for far longer, than David and I brewed.
For all of the regularity of our baking, I never took the smell or the sight of a loaf of fresh bread for granted. I remarked it every time, not so much out of a habit of mindfulness, I’m sorry to say, as out of comfort and anticipation. I did not participate much in the preparation, the tactile experience of kneading the loaves themselves; this was Bec’s job, because she both enjoyed it and excelled at it, and because touching the flour caused my hands to break out in painful blisters—one of the earliest warning signs of celiac disease, I now know.*3 More than anything, though, the presence of risen bread in our house had come to signify stability. Routine. Reliability. To mix the dough and allow it to rise requires time; to bake it properly requires more; to let it cool requires still more. The demands for time and focus, and for putting other things aside, may explain why so many home bakers find that bread-making is an antidote to stress.
Helpless against this personal history, and still lacking a good, reliable recipe, we stopped baking from scratch and turned to bagged mixes. The first we tried was from Bob’s Red Mill, and when I opened the oven, I could hardly believe my eyes. The bread looked beautiful. Finally, here was something that resembled the airbrushed covermodel loaves from the GF cookbooks. I snapped a picture of the triumph and sent it to a few friends. When the loaf cooled, though, it tasted nothing like the appearance suggested. The crumb wasn’t as strange or gritty as the train wrecks we’d made or bought from the store, but the garbanzo bean flour gave it a funky taste—“beany,” in the accurate words of America’s Test Kitchen—and the overall flavor lacked depth. I bought a few more bags because I thought I might learn to like it, but that never happened. After the Bob’s Red Mill, we switched to the bagged mix by Pamela’s, another stalwart in the field of GF baking. This bread did taste fuller, a little spongier, and even like the loaves of potato bread and commercial white that Bec and I grew up on, though not at all like the Artisan wheat breads we had been baking. The finish was a little unpleasant, but we made our peace and started buying six-packs of bags from Amazon.
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I later learned that there is a long historical precedent for these bagged mixes and the ingredients they utilize, and even for the wayward cookbook recipes we followed for a time: having a loaf of something on the table has long been more important than what that loaf is made from.
When wheat, barley, and even rye have been in short supply in Europe, eaters have automatically switched to making bread out of peas, beans, nuts, acorns, and even inedible material. Famine was almost always the mother of this type of innovation. During hard times, the Corsicans made cheap “tree bread” from ground chestnuts. In the 1585 famine in Naples, people were compelled to eat a bread known as castagne e legumi, a mixture of ground
chestnuts and chickpeas. In especially ghastly times, the French foraged for acorns, which are tannic and bitter even after soaking and roasting, and mixed the acorn flour with chaff, or with straw and clay if they had no chaff. Then they baked it, and found a way to get it down. Similarly, the Scandinavians used dried, ground pine bark to stretch meager supplies of wheat flour. And when the Puritans reached the New World, they attempted to grow wheat, failed, and would have starved if the Native Americans had not shown them how to grow corn. They forsook the wheat and bread they knew, but instead of preparing the corn as the Native Americans did, they ground and attempted to leaven the cornmeal, and gave thanks for the flat, gritty result.
Above all, a loaf was an effective method of getting down chaff or sawdust, if that’s all one had to fill his belly, or to make the edible ingredients go further. However, the common practice of making bread out of ingredients that were edible but poorly suited to baking—beans, peas, and tree nuts—suggests the intensity of the psychological need for something that looks like bread. An Italian with a sack of chickpeas, or an Englishwoman with a bag of chestnuts and peas, has the raw, unprocessed ingredients for a perfectly satisfying meal for her family. The breads they made could not have tasted as good as a stew or potage of those same beans, vegetables, a little bit of fat (if it was available), and herbs. To bake the peas and beans in bread form also requires more human energy for grinding and mixing. The only reason to go to the trouble to make an ersatz bread out of something you could prepare in a number of other ways is because those ingredients become “worth” more to the eater when they are converted into something that resembles a wheaten loaf.
Bec and I lived a version of this without knowing it. I never eyed the acorns on the campus where I teach (not for long, anyway), and I didn’t think about grinding into flour the chestnuts we roasted on top of the woodstove, but the bread mixes we bought were made of raw ingredients we already had in the house in their whole, unprocessed forms: white rice, brown rice, and potatoes. I didn’t want to eat another bowl of rice, but I eagerly ate it in bread form. We had cans of chickpeas and dried chickpeas in mason jars, and while I didn’t often use them to make hummus, or simmer them in stews, I ate them in the bagged mixes. I would not have eaten tapioca, and I had banished millet—but these went down more smoothly when they had been blitzed into a powder and mixed into loaf form, as well. And when they came out of the oven? They looked exactly like the thing I had been hoping to eat.
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My transition into GF cooking wasn’t going much better when it came to other foods made of wheat, either. The worst streak began one winter’s night when I foolishly decided that from now on, there would be no difference whatsoever between the way we had eaten before my diagnosis and the way we were eating now. I was tired of thinking against the grain. I would begin my comeback by making fresh egg pasta with a GF “all-purpose” flour blend. I took the pasta maker down from the pantry. It felt good to have it in my hands again. I opened up Jack Bishop’s Complete Italian Vegetarian Cookbook, an old volume, spotted and worn, which had taught me how to make salads, frittatas, and granitas. I measured out my rice-and-potato-based flour and proceeded as I always had. Autopilot. Muscle memory. No problem at all.
I needed all of thirty seconds to see that I was screwed. The eggs weren’t blending with the flour, which was so dry that it had sucked up all of the moisture like sand. I had anticipated moisture issues, but thought I could work around them. My solution was to crack in a few more eggs, and, when that didn’t lead to a workable dough, I added a few tablespoons of water in desperation.
Now my dough was sticky, heavy, and, paradoxically, both slimy and gritty. There was no way it would tolerate being fed into a pasta machine and rolled into a thickness of half an inch, let alone an eighth of an inch. So I switched plans. Instead of making fettuccine, I would make ravioli. This would give me more control over the dough because I could roll it out by hand, fixing cracks and tears as they appeared.
But that didn’t work either, because by this point the dough was total shit. It wound around the rolling pin and stuck there like wet cement. I gave in. I threw a fit. I tossed measuring cups and spoons into the sink, threw chunks of dough into the trash can. We ate premade rice pasta instead. It tasted fine. I would need more than a year to work up the courage to revisit the scene of this particular kitchen disaster.
About a week later, possibly even in the same week—the whole month is a blur of frustration, longing, and rage—a recipe for crêpes also made me its bitch.
At first glance, crêpes seemed so much easier to adapt to GF than fresh pasta. For one thing, the batter is wetter, and for another, what is simpler than a crêpe? Well, if you’re counting ingredients and considering chemistry, pasta is simpler, but crêpes are pretty basic too: flour, milk, eggs, and either salt or sugar, depending upon whether your taste is running savory or sweet. I love them because they’re like dressed-up pancakes: lighter, airier, more elegant. The possibilities expand significantly past the usual maple. We used to have them for late-night dinners with cheese and vegetables, or smoked salmon and a salad, and some wine. It had been a long time since I’d made them, and I had been pining.
I don’t know whose recipe I was using—maybe from The Joy of Cooking, or Julia Child’s, or Mark Bittman’s—but it doesn’t matter, because I think the results would have turned out the same with every recipe. I can’t remember which GF flour blend I was using, either. Maybe Pamela’s, King Arthur, or even Bob’s Red Mill. I tried so many products in those days, just spraying and praying and hoping to hit the target, as a soldier I know puts it. The problem is that a true gluten-free equivalent of all-purpose wheat flour does not exist; “AP GF” (all-purpose gluten-free), or “cup for cup,” is a marketing ploy based in good intentions or false hope, depending upon where you fit on the spectrum of GF-cookery rage.
Once again, I proceeded with poise and confidence. When the first crêpe ripped as I tried to flip it, I thought my technique was rusty. Then another one ripped, and another, because without gluten, the batter was as anemic as I was. I burned my fingers trying to flip the next ones, because it seemed that if I tried to use a spatula, I shoveled them into a mess.
Cooking was officially no longer fun.
The last crêpe was basically a pancake—I poured it thicker, thinking why the hell not—and when I tried it, instead of experiencing the savory, glutinous chew I anticipated, I tasted blandness and grit. That was enough for me to pull the ejection handle. The evening ended with no crêpes, burnt fingers, piles of ruined dough on the counter, hot metal flung into the sink, expletives, and my wife leaving the kitchen, unwilling to bear witness to my Gordon Ramsay-esque antics. The thing is, I wasn’t trying to channel Gordon, or any other celebrity-chef blowhard; I was just tired of everything I touched turning to shit.
The failures kept stacking up: a cornstarch-based “panko” for pork and chicken that went from dry to charred on contact with heat, bypassing the nicely browned stage (and it stank, like burnt popcorn); sauces that wouldn’t thicken predictably, since most GF flour blends contain potato and/or tapioca starch; the roux that would not brown but readily burned; the crisps of thawed berries that turned into fruit soup; cobblers that wouldn’t cobble; cookies that wouldn’t form. If I adapted a recipe that called for even a modest amount of wheat flour, the result was as if I had never cooked anything before in my life.*4
I was not flying blind, either. I was attempting to work from my favorite cookbooks, writers, and recipes. For as often as I cooked intuitively, I also took real joy in knowing that I was following a path that had been blazed by a sage. I loved the sense that I was entering the mind of a writer like James Beard, or Claudia Roden, or any of the other authors on my shelf, and experiencing a rich tradition through their eyes, hands, and words. To be unable to follow their recipes to the letter—to have to use GF substitutions, or omit some ingredients and steps entirely—compromised and even destroyed the heart and soul of
the recipes, which was their replicability. GF cookbooks were available, yes, but there weren’t many good ones at the time, and I had something of a literary sensibility in the kitchen: I was loath to scrap a beloved canon just because I could no longer keep wheat flour in the house.
Unless the recipes called for no wheat or other unsafe ingredients (like oats) at all, I never knew for sure how far off the author’s ideal I might have been. Quite often I was left to work purely on instinct, or, even worse than that, to guess. Sometimes I knew something that was supposed to happen had not: the meat in a stew, for example, which was supposed to develop a brown crust in the casserole after getting a light coating of flour, did nothing but get slimy; the biscuit didn’t fluff or flake; the sauce didn’t thicken correctly. Other times, I felt only a suspicion that I had missed the mark, and I couldn’t say why. It was beyond frustrating, and I could see no easy solution, at least not in the immediate future.
One night, I had a cookbook come-to-Jesus moment. All of this hurling myself into adaptation was clearly not good for me. So I removed all of the bookmarks and unfolded all of the dog-ears identifying dishes I probably should not try again for a long time—if ever. I looked briefly at the pages, some of which were spotted, stained, or torn, and took my leave. Then I turned to the indexes. A great attribute of any literary tradition, from short stories to cookery, is durability: it holds up to different readings at different times. In Beard on Food, I looked under “Rice” first, of course, and read all of the recipes I had never tried before: tians for the summer months, along with rice with sausage and tomato, and saffron risotto, and the list went on. There was another tian from Elizabeth David, and an adaptation of mujaddarah, a dish of lentils, fried onions, and rice, from Deborah Madison. And at the recommendation of a friend, I bought Chang and Kutscher’s Encyclopedia of Chinese Food and Cooking, which provided enough inspiration to keep me busy for a long while. It would occur to me, much later but with a shock of understanding when it did, that this was what gluten-free cooking really meant: not paying attention to wheat—or trying to imitate it—at all.