Around 30,000 years ago one, or some, or our ancestors found that cooking a mixture of ground cereal grains and water produced a wholesome and tasty (presumably or they'd have stopped making it) flat bread. This must surely have been an accidental discovery. I don't consider myself completely lacking in invention but if bread had never been invented and you sat me down next to a roaring fire with a handful of wheat and a bowl of water the result, after several days of procrastination, would have been; a handful of wheat, a bowl of water and a burnt out fire. Mind you, maybe that says more about me than it says about the leap of imagination required to turn the bare ingredients into bread.
Fast forward to 2012. For my birthday a friend of mine bought me Paul Hollywood's Bread and a loaf tin. Little did I know that this would be the beginning of an almost spiritual relationship with loaves, rolls and wheat-based produce of many varieties.
Mr. Hollywood first came to my attention on the great British bake-off. Looking like a cross between an oversized breeze block and the sort of male model you find in the older-but-still-trendy section of the White Stuff catalogue, he quickly established a reputation as the bad judge to the saintly Mary Berry's good judge. The camera would pan in on a quivering contestant as they awaited the pronouncement from the Silver Fox. Then two bright blue laser beams would appear to emanate from those adamantine eyes before a more refined version of the Scouse brogue delivered the verdict. The hoped for 'that's a good bake' would see a huge, visible sigh of relief escape from the contestant. However, a variety of less complimentary utterances such as 'your dough's overproved', 'it's overworked', 'they're all different sizes' and, the ultimate disgrace, 'you've got a soggy bottom' would send the victim sloping back to their station, dejected and deflated.
So, having had a cursory glance through the foreword, there I was standing over a mixing bowl with the same sapphire-tinted irises staring out at me from the cover of the Hollywood tome. His expression said 'go ahead punk, make my bread'. Reading the first chapter was the hardest part of the process. This is mainly because my brain is wired to make puns out of almost anything that I see or hear; a fact that drives my wife to distraction. Therefore resisting the temptation to attempt to come up with a bread-making top ten proved impossible. However, after 'When I Knead You', 'Pappadom Preach', and 'Roll With It' I managed to pull myself together and concentrate on the text. Goodness me, was I glad that I did.
Mixing the ingredients in the bowl is banal enough; not much different to cake making. It's when you take the rough dough from the bowl, slap it on a lightly-oiled surface and start kneading that the magic starts to happen. Somewhere in that process of compressing the parts together, stretching the dough out and repeating over and over again a sense of timelessness overtook me. I've always had a nagging sensation that my ancestors are watching everything I do, which can be a trifle embarrassing at times, but the process of kneading bread takes me right back to those pioneers of the loaf. The sense that this is an act of apparent alchemy that has been repeated for thousands of years all over the world filled me with an overwhelming feeling of spiritual comfort. Comfort is the right word because it takes me right back to that fireside, that place where our basic human instincts make us feel safe from marauders. The connection with basic human instinct is also there in the rhythm of kneading. As I've got better at it I've found that it is important to set up a rhythmical pattern to kneading. This reinforces that sense of primeval connection that I spoke of earlier. People say that it is a good way of taking out frustrations, this bashing of the dough: I don't see it that way. It's the creativity that releases the frustration not the brute force.
The next phase is even more magical: rising (or proving). Leave your dough for an hour, or two, or even three, and you will come back to a behemoth twice the size of your puny dough ball. The sheer enchantment of this discovery never wears off. Then the creative aspect is further bolstered by the shaping stage. Rolls, loaves of all shapes and sizes, flat breads, pittas, foccacia; the process of moulding the dough into something recognisably 'bread' is immensely satisfying. In a way, the baking stage is fairly mundane, yet still the golden browning of the loaf and the hunger-inducing aroma emanating from the oven hold an allure all of their own. When the finished product comes out of the oven, and not only is it edible and recognisable as what you intended it to be but it is also actually rather good, the sense of achievement is immense.
On a more prosaic level, there is comfort to be had in knowing which ingredients have gone into my bread. In an increasingly homogenised world it is also good to know that each loaf or roll that I produce is unique.
Now some cynics might say that none of this is magic; it's all science. Developing the gluten, enlivening the yeast bacteria etc. I say to them 'you have no soul'. In a world where the orthodoxy of science as the be all and end all of humanity's struggle for existence is rarely challenged we need to be able to connect with the spiritual drive that our forebears have always found within their souls. Perhaps it is somewhat hyperbolic to equate bread making with a connection to our, increasingly tenuous so it seems, grip on spiritual meaning. But, for me, sharing the wonder of turning a handful of simple ingredients into something delicious with those antecedents and their simple grainy paste is part of my own human experience for which I'm very grateful to 'old blue eyes'.
No comments:
Post a Comment