Dear bread,
Do you know how much learning you inspire? The books, video courses, live classes — so many channels.
How we learn is a big question. Am I a natural writer or a nurtured writer? Both. Learning is a personal and community process. I learned to bake because I was given free reign in the kitchen. We had enough ingredients and I followed instructions until I could read recipes myself; as a young adult, I taught myself to cook by watching PBS cooking shows, reading old copies of Gourmet magazine, and borrowing cookbooks from the library.
My curiosity stretched into old cooking pamphlets in the early 90s. I ran a thrift store in Seattle, and on my days off I went to other thrift stores and scouted vintage kitchen tools and recipe booklets — baking powder & Crisco ones in particular. I loved how these book length advertisements looked & read. The cake images caught me in a dream, and Crisco’s articulation of purity was intriguing.
I have never stopped gathering printed matter about old baking products, so thought I would share some images and information, like the cover above, from Fleischmann's yeast in 1917.
The page above reads:
“Throwing and Rolling the Dough easier than kneading
(1) Mix dough by stirring with hand (fingers spread) until particles cling together.
(2) Remove dough from bowl and strike it with force against board (lightly floured).
(3) Keep hold of dough while striking it down on board.
(4) Roll like jelly roll, taking care not to tear dough with fingers.
Pick up the roll of dough at one end, repeat throwing and rolling about twelve times, or until dough is smooth. This method of handling the dough, as show above, takes about five minutes.”1
Do you recognize these motions in the slap and fold method?
I have some very different manuals from 1973, student and teacher guides that accompanied filmstrips from Betty Crocker Kitchens. I can hardly believe that I threw the actual filmstrips away, but I did! I found a slideshow of an earlier series of Betty Crocker bread baking filmstrips on the Internet Archive. The slides are labeled as missing audio, but the narration would have been provided by the teacher, reading the text that accompanied each image.
Would this have been a good way to learn? I remember the filmstrips I saw, in darkened classrooms. What an odd tunnel of facts!
Picture the girls — because these were not made for mixed classes of home ec — listening to instructors read the booklet’s words, as below:
"Today it's true, we buy most of our bread and supermarkets or bakeries, but more and more people are baking bread at home. Making yeast bread with our own hands is fun and rewards us with fragrant, tender loaves and roles." 2
The rest of the captions name and advertise nutrition, and describe the processes involved in bread making. Yeast is a "tiny one cell plant which grows by budding when it is fed… as yeast grows or ferments, carbon dioxide is formed. This helps makes the bread light and porous.”3
Another paragraph states that adding moisture to flour and kneading it forms gluten — this is good, basic information, and I bet, I hope, that afterwards, people made bread, too, maybe breaking into small groups at long counters? I imagine hands shaping rolls, as I’ve been practicing, making pampushky — Ukranian garlic rolls — to bring to the county fair.
Cupping a ball of dough under my palm, working it round and round on a floured wooden board, I think I am getting the hang of it. Cutting into a bun and seeing its even, concentric growth, I see that I am gaining some facility.
I admire how bakers develop their shaping skills, handling hundreds of loaves and rolls a day. That development of physical understanding is individual, and supported by repetition. Years ago, before I was crazy about flour or bread, I interviewed a potter. Sometimes he worked as a baker, and he drew a parallel between the crafts. What pottery didn’t have was a conviviality, he said, that came with a bunch of bakers standing around the bench, shaping bread and chatting.
Do you think of that togetherness as you bake? Maybe you feel, as I do, wild appreciation for the magic of leavening, and dough? My appreciation goes all the way back to the field, where the bread magic begins. Thank you farmers, for letting us love bread, and for working every day with and against the elements, and risking your lives against machinery. We really can’t know what you do for us. But we are grateful.
Yours,
Amy
Bread Books:
Chelsea Green is having its end of summer clearance, and my book, The New Bread Basket, is half price, and so is Richard Miscovich’s From the Wood-Fired Oven. Two other bread books from my publisher are Jack Lazor’s Organic Grain Grower, and Alan Scott & Daniel Wing’s The Bread Builders.
Happy book birthday to Tara Jensen’s Flour Power!
Looking forward to Greg Wade’s Bread Head & Maurizio Leo’s The Perfect Loaf
Scott Reynolds Nelson’s Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World is pretty great.
Fleischmann’s Recipes, booklet dated 1917.
From the 1973 filmstrip narration guide to Homemade Breads, Betty Crocker Kitchens.
Ibid.