The Circle of Bread
The vocabulary of baking is no longer obvious — unless you’re a food historian
My earliest baking memories are sitting at my grandmother’s kitchen table while she and her mother-in-law (“Nona”, my great-grandmother) would make bourrekas (spinach- and cheese-filled hand pies) and tarolikas (hard, egg-washed cookies that were meant for teething toddlers — but could be enjoyed by anybody). We’d try to “help” and were given small amounts of dough to try to manipulate the same way Nona did…
Nona’s bourreka recipe started with mix “equal parts water and oil, then add enough flour to make a rollable dough”. Dad’s gravy recipes started with sauteeing onions, then adding them to a half-dozen or more beef bouillon cubes in a mix of half dry-red wine and half water. Mom’s recipes started with what she remembered from her mother and grandmother and moved on to the recipes she and her colleagues would share with each other.
My recipes started with cookbooks.
Most girls of my generation could read a recipe by the time we were ten, although our parents didn’t trust us to actually prepare food unsupervised until our babysitting years (pre-teens and teens). Junior High cooking class emphasized following recipes to the letter, rather than adjusting based on ambient temperature and humidity.
Or volume.
My university years were spent in a living group where we split into four-person teams to make meals for our thirty-person home, each team taking a different day of the week. In the process we learned that an average college-aged man eats a volume of food that magazines and cookooks intended for a family of four (or more), that a stew-type recipe where the meat and veggies were multiplied by ten often only needed the gravy ingredients multiplied by four, and that cooking times may vary.
It was at uni that I started collecting cookbooks and experimenting with breads. Our house’s go-to cookbook was Joy of Cooking. Some of my housemates had copies of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook or one or two James Beard cookbooks. My two go-to cookbooks were The World-Famous Ratner’s Meatless Cookbook and The New York Times Bread and Soup Cookbook. I was sure Mom had a Better Homes and Gardens NEW Cook Book (she actually didn’t), but when I saw an inexpensive paperback new edition in 1981, I added that to my nascent collection.
By the time I graduated, I had a go-to challah recipe (from Ratner’s), could manage basic jams and jellies (Putting Food By, Second Edition), and had played around with every possible grain I could find in the bulk bins at my local Bread and Circus (a local chain that was later acquired by Whole Foods). None of this was passed on from my foremothers (or my father). I ended up the odd collegian who went home with “care packages” for my family…
Life has taken me in and out of baking as both family food preparer and hobbyist, and going back through old cookbooks — or comparing multiple versions of the same cookook title — has shown me how much has changed in the short space of one adult life. My original Better Homes and Gardens paperback contains recipes for jello salads and information for properly setting a table for several different types of service (depending on who loaded the dinner plates and where). While published in 1981, its focus seemed more the mid-century housewife. My 2003 edition has more of an aspirational bent, explaining the different types of pastas and grains; its recipes are more international, and require access to a greater variety of source ingredients than most 1980s cooks could fathom. My 1976 edition of Recipes for a Small Planet is based on the concept that if one doesn’t consume an ideal mixture of amino acids for “complete protein” at a single meal, the body won’t be able to use the “leftovers” — we’ve since learned that’s not at all the case. It’s also a lot more dependent on eggs and dairy than I’d expect from today’s “earth-friendly” recipes (or its inspiration, Diet for a Small Planet).
Some of the biggest changes, however, are in the ways we bake bread.
When I first started bread baking, yeast came in three varieties: dry yeast in pre-measured packets on the shelf, dry yeast in jars on the shelf, and yeast in compressed cakes in the refrigerator case. One cake of yeast was equivalent to two packets, the standard amount for a home-baked bread recipe. The yeast was “proofed” in warm sugar water, a process which made sure the yeast was still good by waking the organisms up from their dormant state and getting them multiplying and ready to digest a whole lot of grain starch.
Today, you can still find packets of yeast, but many modern recipes call for “instant dry yeast”, which is sold by the pound. It’s not available everywhere, so if you’re a modern bread baker you either have to visit your local Whole Foods or order it through the mail. I’m not sure how long “instant dry yeast” is good for, and since you don’t proof it, there’s no way to tell if it’s still good until you’ve already made your dough and it doesn’t rise properly. (Hint: I refrigerate mine in the very back of the refrigerator and it still seems to be working okay a couple years past the “best by” date.)
Modern recipes also call for what to me are new ways of preparing yeast doughs: things called biga, tangzhong, levain, altus, and a whole bunch of different types of sours — most of which are just different ways of waking up your yeasts, or sourdough starters based on different grains (or a couple of slices of stale bread). Others — like tangzhong and its Japanese counterpart, yudene — are ways of treating flour before introducing yeast to it.
As it turns out, these “new” methods aren’t new at all. They are, in a way, “folk” methods of breadmaking in that they are traditional methods used by different peoples and cultures in past generations, and through to today. (“Traditional ‘Jewish’ Rye” bread starts with an altus and a rye sourdough starter.) And there’s a growing interest in traditional and historical food preparation (and preservation) methods.
Just as my 2003 Better Homes and Gardens cookbook included once-foreign dishes and ingredients in its pages, baking experts like those on Craftsy and at King Arthur Baking are including recipes and techniques from other countries, and experimenting with them in creating new and exciting recipes for the modern home baker.