52 Loaves

by William Alexander

  The enrichment of flour, and eventually cornmeal as well, was so successful that few contemporary Americans have even heard of pellagra. Of course, no Americans had heard of it in 1900, either. I still wondered why pellagra suddenly appeared in the United States in the early twentieth century.

  I brought the librarian at the research institute where I work a loaf of bread and a long list of interlibrary loan requests, and a few days later I learned that the conventional explanation involves corn. This didn’t take a lot of research, to be honest, as one oft-cited book on the subject is titled A Plague of Corn. Corn is high in niacin, but most of it is bound and cannot be metabolized in humans. Unless, that is, you first treat it by soaking the corn overnight in a limewater bath, which happens to be the first step in making tortillas. For centuries, Native Americans had been soaking their corn overnight in water to which either mineral lime (calcium carbonate) or wood ash had been added in order to soften the dried kernels and make it easier to remove their thick, tough hull (think of popcorn).

  Was it just the Native Americans’ good fortune that this chemical softening treatment happened to release the niacin in maize, or did they also learn over the generations that families who ate treated maize were healthier? My reading suggests that the answer depends on how you view the Native Americans. What is certain is that their knowledge of the need for liming the corn was lost to the conquerors who defeated them. Corn was still soaked (or “tempered”) before grinding, whether stone-ground or crushed by industrial roller mills, but the lime was omitted; thus much of the niacin remained unavailable. This became a moot point around 1905 because a new invention, the Beall degerminator, was selling like hotcakes. Millers loved it because it greatly increased the shelf life of cornmeal and corn flour by stripping the fatty germ and outer bran from the kernel. Unfortunately, as with wheat, those were also the very parts of the seed where most of the vitamins and minerals were concentrated.

  Corn was now nutritionally bankrupt, and this “plague of corn” is the conventional reason given for the rise of pellagra in the United States. As I read Goldberger’s original papers, however, something bothered me, something that is virtually unmentioned in the literature. Goldberger kept meticulous notes, down to the weight (in grams, bless his heart!) of all the food his subjects were eating, and I noticed his pellagrins were eating a lot of bread, largely in the form of biscuits made with self-rising white flour (which is leavened with baking powder), denying themselves even the niacin present in yeast.

  At the time that pellagra started appearing in the United States, corn consumption was on the decline and wheat flour consumption was on the rise, the completion of the railroads having resulted in the flow of inexpensive wheat from the Midwest. In 1931, during the peak of the pellagra epidemic, a survey of South Carolina farm families affected with pellagra found that corn was providing only 16 to 20 percent of their caloric intake.

  I wondered, had corn gotten a bum rap? The scientific literature on pellagra nearly unanimously cited corn, ignoring wheat flour, but it seemed to me it might well have been bread, my beloved bread, that was primarily responsible for pellagra in the United States. Scientists, historians, and the government credited enriched wheat flour and bread with preventing new outbreaks of pellagra, but they did not connect changes in those same foods with the cause.

  Which brought me right back to my original question: What had happened to white bread? When did this sustenance food become unhealthy, and why? I pondered this as I made another piece of toast.

  WEEK

  25

  Sweeney Todd

  The Gillette safety razor became an object for heightening sexual pleasure when it received the “united thanks of two fond hearts” by allowing the honeymooner to shave off a 3-day beard. Underarm deodorant, toothpaste, mouth wash, Wonder Bread . . . and a host of other products were advertised as . . . ensuring the attentions of a new lover.*

  —Joel Spring, Educating the Consumer-Citizen, 2003

  Here’s why I’m still a working man: Back in 1952, if Floyd Paxton of Yakima, Washington, had offered me an opportunity to invest in his new invention, little plastic clips to close bread bags, I’d have said—well, I’d have to have said, “I can’t. I won’t be born for another year yet.” But even if I’d been fifty at the time, I’d have said, “No thanks, Floyd. You can only charge a fraction of a cent for them. Do you know how many of those you’d have to sell to make any money?”

  A hundred billion Kwik Lok tabs later, Floyd presumably knows, while I’m clipping coupons. The Kwik Lok Corporation sells over five billion bread tabs annually. Most of these wind up in landfills, but a handful end up in human intestines, which isn’t a bad percentage, all things considered. Unless you happen to be one of the unlucky ones. As foreign objects go, this is one you really don’t want to swallow. Kwik Lok tabs have been found to cause, in the words of one medical journal, “small bowel perforation, obstruction, dysphagia, gastrointestinal bleeding and colonic impaction.” It seems that the same tenacious qualities that make these clips so effective at staying attached to plastic bags make them equally effective at staying attached to your small intestine.

  Still, there are worse things to swallow in a loaf of bread—for example, a double-edged razor blade. Like the one on the end of my lame right now. Yes, I finally had a real, professional lame. Well, almost. Charlie van Over had sent me home with one, which I’d promptly misplaced before I could use it. So I’d made my own from something I’d inexplicably found in my desk at work—an unapologetically nerdy little metal ruler, a quarter-inch wide, with engraved rule markings and a clip for your chest pocket.

  Figuring I’d have less need to whip a ruler out of my shirt pocket for an impromptu measurement than I’d have for scoring dough, I removed the clip and ground one end of the ruler to make it narrow enough to fit into the slots of a double-edged razor blade. Surprisingly, I found double-edged razor blades near the checkout counter at Kmart. This bothered me for days. Finally I asked Anne for a consult.

  “What are they doing at the checkout counter? For that matter, why are they even still manufactured? I can’t believe anyone shaves with these anymore.”

  She patiently listened to my diatribe about how the double-edged safety razor was good in its heyday, especially compared to its early predecessor—the jawbone of an ox—but the decades since have seen the introduction of the twin-bladed Trac II, the triple-bladed Mach3, the four-bladed Quattro, and, most improbable and redundant of all, the five-bladed Fusion, which we can only hope represents the end of this artificially extended evolutionary line. Choose your favorite weapon and number of blades, but any of these razors shave closer and nick less than the so-called safety razor invented in the late eighteenth century.

  “How do they sell any?” I concluded. “Name me one person who even uses a double-edged razor.”

  “My dad.”

  By the way, if you’ll pardon one more digression—this one is worth it, trust me—I have it from an extremely reliable source who works in market research that when a razor company introduces a new razor, which they do every few years whether there is a consumer need for one or not, they intentionally dull the replacement blades of their existing razors to make the new one feel superior. So, caveat emptor. (That’s Latin for “the bastards!”)

  In any event, I had no sooner thrown away my ten-dollar mail-order lame, with its nonreplaceable blade embedded in a stick of green plastic, and loaded up my homemade French-style lame with a fresh double-edged razor blade when I came across the following piece of information, staggering in its magnitude: My “authentic” French lame had recently been outlawed in France. Boulangers giving up their metal lames? Unthinkable! As was the replacement: the fixed blade on a plastic stick I’d just thrown away. Indeed, “fixed” was just what le docteur ordered; the reason for this blasphemous law was that while Americans were merely digesting Kwik Lok tabs, the French were swallowing double-edged razor blades that had fallen off bakers’ l
ames and ended up in loaves of bread!

  Now, consider this for a second. Imagine you’re a baker in a large bakery, maybe even a production bakery. And granted, you’re slashing hundreds of loaves, quickly, rushing to load them into the oven, just as I always find myself doing, even with a single loaf. You suddenly realize that your lame is missing its blade. Do you stop and look for it, to determine whether it’s on the floor or in a baguette, or do you yell, “Merde!” then pop on a fresh blade and just keep going?

  Apparently, French boulangers have been doing the latter. Well, I wasn’t going back to that ten-dollar lame with its non-replaceable blade for anything (presumably they’re considerably cheaper in bulk, in France), but I’d make damned sure my metal ruler still had a blade attached when I was done.

  I was determined to slash like Scaramouche today, having been inspired at the kneading conference in Maine, where I’d seen what a lame in the right hands could do. The very same professional baker who’d embarrassed me with his cutting remarks about my kneading did have a redeeming quality: he was an artist, I mean a veritable Rembrandt, with a razor, a regular Sweeney Todd. In less time than it takes me to make a simple crosshatch on my loaf, he’d scored a butterfly into his boule. And I don’t mean merely scratched into the surface. This butterfly opened up in bas-relief as the loaf baked! This is even more difficult than it sounds, for not only do the cuts in the wet dough have to be done in the right shape, but they have to be made at a consistent depth and at the correct angle. This was something I was having difficulty doing even with my simple crosshatch. The lopsided loaf I’d baked for Charlie van Over was a fairly typical case.

  Still, my makeshift lame was working far better than the single-edged razors I’d also tried for a while. One thing I’d learned from Lindsay at Bobolink’s bakery is that you have to slash almost with abandon, that is, with confidence and without hesitation, and on an angle, not perpendicular to the loaf. A slow, careful cut will invariably catch and drag in the dough, while a quick, bold slash will slice through cleanly.

  Slash with confidence and abandon. As the Katha Upanishad exhorts, “Arise! Awake! Approach the great and learn. The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to salvation is hard.”*

  And not about to get any easier.

  WEEK

  26

  Pane Toscano

  You shall find out how salt is the taste of another man’s bread, and how hard is the way up and down another man’s stairs.

  —Dante

  One bite, and I desperately wanted to spit it out. Fortunately it wasn’t my bread. Unfortunately we were in a fancy restaurant known for this very bread, according to the review we’d read, so I couldn’t just cough it up or pocket it in my napkin.

  The bread, baked on the premises, was flat, tasteless, and heavy. This was, in fact, some of the worst bread I had ever eaten. I looked around at my fellow diners to see if anyone else was pointing to it and gesticulating like me. Clearly the baker had screwed up tonight.

  “I think he forgot the salt. I should let someone know, shouldn’t I?”

  “You absolutely should not!” Anne pleaded. “Why would you want to do that?”

  “If I were the baker, I’d want to know my bread was terrible.”

  But to my utter astonishment, we seemed to be the only ones in the packed restaurant who felt that way. Everyone else was enjoying the stuff, tearing off chucks and dunking them in olive oil. The only way I could eat the doughy, tasteless stuff was to add salt and pepper to the olive oil before dipping.

  I was sooo glad I listened to Anne and kept my mouth shut. As we left the restaurant, we stopped to read a framed magazine article hanging near the doorway, and the mystery was solved. The inedible bread the restaurant is known for is their faithful reproduction of the traditional salt-free Tuscan bread, pane Toscano. According to legend, the recipe evolved centuries ago during a dispute over a salt tax, when the locals simply refused to buy salt rather than pay the tax. Although the bread was born of necessity, the Tuscans, who are famed for their gastronomic prowess (and whose restaurants are spreading through America faster than Fascism spread through Italy), inexplicably developed a taste for it; thus the bread continues to be popular there to this day. With all due respect, my advice to Tuscany is, get over it. The evil salt-taxing king is long dead, and a few grams of salt would do wonders for your tasteless bread. With tourists flocking to Tuscany—the new Provence—you really don’t want their first taste of your region to be flavorless bread.

  Salt. If Tuscany is the new Provence, then salt is the new olive oil, providing ample opportunity to spend major sums of money on something to which your mother never gave a second thought. “Blooming in summer, it develops a pink tinge and an aroma of violets.” This has to be a critic’s description of a bottle of wine, right? Wrong. Try French sea salt (fifteen dollars for ten ounces) from a mail-order catalog. Salt elitism first became trendy in a few high-end restaurants, then quickly caught on among foodies, leading some home chefs to discard their Diamond Crystal for twenty-dollar-a-pound fleur de sel from Brittany. Well, Thomas Keller and Jean-Georges wouldn’t be caught dead using the same salt in their kitchens as you use in yours, so they had to up the ante, turning to such exotics as African clay salt and black lava salt from Hawaii. David Pasternack, the chef at the highly regarded Manhattan seafood restaurant Esca, keeps several types of sea salt on hand, matching the salt to the fish.

  Whatever. In my bread, I simply use the coarse kosher salt I keep for my everyday cooking. I don’t even have conventional table salt in the house, by the way. After you get used to coarse kosher salt, the traditional fine stuff becomes quite unappealing, a weak, chemical imitation of the real thing, as Cool Whip is to whipped cream. Now, have I done a blind taste test? No. Am I then as guilty of salt snobbery as David Pasternack? It’s all about scale, I say. I just like using coarse kosher salt. Whatever it is the rabbi has done for it works for me.

  Salt was very much on my mind as I chewed joylessly on my pane Toscano because I had just started following a recommendation from my latest bread book to withhold salt until the very end of kneading. Salt, the author said, interferes with gluten development. Frankly I couldn’t say I had noticed any difference, but I continued holding the salt back anyway, out of equal parts superstition and reluctance to ignore a renowned baker, but also just in case it really was a critical step—one whose benefit was being masked by the other mistakes I was making.

  It certainly isn’t making the bread any worse, I figured, so what’s the harm?

  WEEK

  27

  The Sound of One Hand Kneading

  MASTER: In clapping both hands a sound is heard: what is the sound of the one hand?

  STUDENT: The pupil faces his master, takes a correct posture, and, without a word, thrusts one hand forward.

  MASTER: It’s said that if one hears the sound of the one hand, one becomes a Buddha. Well, then, how will you do it?

  STUDENT: Without a word, the pupil thrusts one hand forward.

  —Buddhist koan

  “This is really good bread,” Katie said as she buttered up another slice. “But the loaf seems smaller.”

  “That’s because I didn’t measure anything.”

  Her eyes grew wide. “Why?”

  Because for the past week, during my commute I’d been listening to a recording of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—at least trying to listen to it. It wasn’t going well. I hadn’t read the book back when it was originally published; I was too cynical, too closed-minded to want to read such nonsense. The fastest way to get me out of a room back then was to say “Zen.” (Saying “motorcycle” was a close second.) Now, thirty-some years later, my mind was open to the concepts expressed in the book (okay, more open, at least), and I popped in the CD with anticipation, only to find that the book had grown as stale as last week’s bread.

  Today the prose of ZMM, as fans call it, sounds (to my ear, at least)
stilted, pedantic, and preachy. Maybe it always sounded that way. I wouldn’t know, but it seemed now as if there never really was a good time for reading this book. When the book was ready, I was too young; when I was ready, the book had aged. Still, it seemed important, so I was determined to finish it, until, about a week into it, I realized with genuine horror that I was starting to write—even think out loud—in Pirsig’s preachy prose. Somewhat shaken, and praying that my own voice would return, I slammed the lid on the CD case and returned it to the library. Maybe I’ll read the ZMM Cliff’s Notes—the quick path to enlightenment.

  I’d heard enough ZMM, however, to understand that in Pirsig’s way of looking at the world, the perfect loaf was not something I was going to create; it was something that I was going to find. It was already there, waiting to be discovered or baked, but I had to elevate myself to reach it. It would not reveal itself until I was ready.

  I’d been coming around to this way of thinking of late, which is perhaps subconsciously what led me to this decades-old book, a book about another journey. Although the writing didn’t impress me, I was struck by the relevance of its themes—the divide (bridgeable, in his view) between spirituality and technology, the attempt to define quality—to my own culinary undertaking. Is bread making art or science? Must we scorn technology and resort to wood-fired brick ovens and stone-ground flour in order to achieve truth in bread? Or could technology help me find the perfect loaf? And what, indeed, constitutes perfection? In any event, the book had inspired me to create a loaf of bread by feel, without measuring, trusting my instincts and whatever skills I’d developed over twenty-seven weeks.

  I didn’t know how to explain all of this to Katie over dinner, so I just mumbled something about wanting to get closer to the bread.

  “But Dad, what if this had been the perfect loaf?” Implying, of course, that it wasn’t. I let her continue. “You didn’t measure. How would you ever make it again?”