In Memory of Bread Read online

  Our Neolithic ancestors would have quickly realized that wheat and barley grains were so easy to gather that the plants cried out for domestication. In a famous and telling 1960 experiment, the archaeologist J. R. Harlan re-created the Neolithic reaping process, and discovered that a single person could gather two pounds of grain, or around two thousand calories, in one hour. In three weeks of eight-hour days, a gatherer with the same tools could collect enough grain to feed a family of six one pound of wheat per person each day, for a year. That’s a big insurance policy against starvation, especially after millennia at the mercy of roving herds and the fruiting of plants. When farmers began to domesticate the wild grains, they next would have observed that wheat germinates rapidly, pollinates itself, and responds well to dry (no irrigation) farming. Grain was, in many senses, the perfect crop.

  The immediate culinary payoff, however, is a little harder to see. Even after domestication, the leavened bread that today is all but synonymous with wheat was still some 3,000 to 4,000 years in the future (it is a development credited to the Egyptians). And after the easy harvest, the rest of the processing was drudgery. Early gatherers and farmers freed the edible part of the wheat grains from the chaff, or the tough, indigestible casings, by pounding them: a knuckle-busting, finger-sanding, and sweaty process that makes any modern kitchen chore, from deveining shrimp to breaking down pomegranates, seem pleasant. After the grains were freed and sifted to separate chaff fragments, they still couldn’t be eaten; raw wheat is not digestible. Some unlucky people must have first tried emmer, einkorn, and barley right from the plant and, an hour later, felt a little like a celiac feels after downing a bagel.

  While the Chinese had been making clay vessels for several millennia by the time people in Mesopotamia were gathering wild grain, pottery was still a few thousand years away in the Near East. Thus there were few cooking options. One was to dig a pit and boil the grains by leveraging in rocks heated red-hot over a fire—an inefficient approach that some early European communities later used to make beer. Another process completed two steps at once by cooking the grains with hot coals where they were threshed. Threshing is the loosening of the grains from the chaff that surrounds them before the chaff is removed, or “winnowed.” The hot coals split the shells and made separating the chaff easier once the wheat was cool. But a fire of this kind was uneven, scorching some grains, roasting others perfectly, and leaving others incompletely cooked. “Let not the perfect be the enemy of the edible” must have been the guiding philosophy of most early meals.

  Roasting those grains created yet another problem. The coarse, dried groats, as they’re called, were now digestible but too dry to eat. Popping a handful would be like eating dry couscous. The solution was to grind the cooked groats into a primitive flour on a saddle-shaped stone called a quern (more knuckle-busting, finger-sanding, and sweating), mix them with water in a gourd or skin to make a paste, and then eat the paste. You can call it mush, if you like. Thinned, it becomes gruel. Thinned even more, and left to be inoculated by wild yeasts, it becomes one of the earliest precursors to beer. Indeed, there is a debate as to which might have come first after these pastes: flatbread or beer. As unappetizing as “emmer paste” or “einkorn paste” sounds, this food, and not beer, likely provided the nutritional rationale for domesticating grains.

  In a culinary (as opposed to caloric) sense, the bigger motivator for domestication was the invention of flatbreads, which an early cook made by slapping the paste on a rock heated screeching-hot in the fire—a primitive griddle—and cooking until golden and crusty. Behold the earliest Near East ancestor to the tortilla, the chapati, the crêpe, the pao ping. For those people who first smelled the browning, caramelizing dough, the payoff after all the work must have been more immense than even what we feel when bread is baking in our ovens. At the first whiff, they desired to have flatbread tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. I’m pretty sure that’s how I would have felt.

  Perhaps nothing speaks to the innate human response to wheat and barley more than the speed and completeness with which these grains spread across Eurasia. From its epicenter in Mesopotamia and Anatolia, wheat traveled to Greece, Cyprus, and India by 6,500 BC, and to Egypt by 6,000 BC. Around that time, the true magic and joy of gluten was discovered when bread became leavened. This second breakthrough might have come as early as 6,000 BC, but certainly no later than 4,000 BC. The first loaves of leavened bread were accidental creations, kitchen mistakes made glorious by a combination of time, atmospheric conditions, and the microorganisms (yeast, or a fungus named saccharomyces cerevisiae, technically) circulating in the ambient air. A cook set down a bowl of emmer or club-wheat dough—by this time, both varieties were preferred to einkorn—meant for the fire, and forgot about it. The wild yeast in the air was attracted to it like iron filings to a magnet. By the time the cook remembered it and returned, the dough had doubled in size.

  Like the first taste of flatbread or sip of frothy, refreshing beer, the experience of eating an airy, risen loaf for the first time must have been powerful and inspirational. I find it a wonder that the discovery of leavened bread did not lead to a mythical story of yeast’s arrival into the world. It seems fitting that such a thing came to human tables because, as with Prometheus’s fire, someone absconded with yeast from the kitchen of the gods.

  Few foods have shown leavened bread’s power to completely rewire eaters’ brains throughout an entire section of the globe. We must have this. All the time. Usually such foods have stimulating qualities that speak for themselves, like the caffeine in coffee and tea; or pungency and depth, as in the case of spices. Leavened bread is more mysterious in its capacity to hook humans because it is neither psychoactive nor especially exotic. Despite this simplicity—or because of it—leavened bread moved rapidly across the West, reordering societies socially, economically, and gastronomically, creating insiders and outsiders, contented eaters and those with their noses forever pressed to the proverbial bakeshop windows. Bread inspired greed and artistry. Monarchies toppled over the want of grain. In Europe especially, bread became equally a sustainer and, when the wheat and barley crops on which millions depended crashed, an executioner.

  By the late Middle Ages, wheat had displaced all other flours as the grain of choice in Europe, except in rural communities that farmed for subsistence and could not trust their well-being to wheat, which could still be difficult to grow in northern climates. Wheat tasted better, cooked better, and was believed to be more digestible than other grains. In the countryside of Tuscany, millet apparently made a decent bread and was used until relatively late, but anyone who could afford to live above subsistence preferred wheat because it is delicious. Finely milled, wheat is sweeter, nuttier, smoother, and makes bread that is more beautiful to look at than any other grain. Not everyone was eating finely milled flour, of course, but wheaten bread in any form was valued enough to remain a form of currency. As late as the 1300s, the salary of a Sicilian worker remained 1.3 to 2.0 kilograms of wheat bread per day.

  Well into the eighteenth century, Britons lived on two to four pounds of wheat bread daily, a figure that humbles my own pre-celiac consumption. By 1870, this figure had dropped to about a pound per person per day, and in 2002 it was 3.8 ounces. By that time, even the French averaged only 5.6 ounces of bread per day. Americans also eat less bread now than we used to, because of a monumental change in the mid-twentieth century: the cost of industrial meat production fell, making meat more accessible. However, wheat remains crucial. Through a combination of bread and other foods, Americans consume approximately 114 pounds of wheat per person per year—still more than any other grain, even corn.

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  This was the history I was up against.

  And when Bec and I began testing commercial gluten-free products, we got an immediate education in why so many populations have always preferred to eat wheat. We bought GF brownie mixes and prepared cookies, GF cereals, GF prepared pastas and crackers and brea
ds. Most of the store-bought items used mixtures of brown rice, cornstarch, and less-familiar things like tapioca and millet. While it seemed pretty hard to screw up a brownie, every other food we tried fell far short of its wheaten counterpart. The pastas may have been the least offensive, though the noodles made of beans and quinoa tended to turn mushy if you didn’t watch them closely. Compared to wheaten pasta, almost all rice pasta tastes at least a little insipid. We tried coconut macaroons that fell into dust; gritty chocolate chip cookies that left something astringent, a little metallic, on the palate; cornstarch-based pretzels with oily aftertastes; pizza crust that tasted like a paper plate; and “panko” that tasted about as flavorful as blender-blitzed packing peanuts. In a very short time, we compiled a list of disappointments that outnumbered the good (let alone great) experiences.

  The “fresh” GF breads were the worst: soft and squishy yet dry, with a powerful yeasty scent, they became grainy in my mouth almost the moment I bit down. Given their shelf life—somehow, they’re stable at room temperature for months—I had no reason to be surprised that they tasted so bad. The frozen loaves (which were completely baked and ready to eat) were overly sweet, seemingly to cover the lack of bready flavor, body, and depth. I thought toasting slices of them might help, but that made them even worse: the grit sucked up the butter and made the bread, if it could still be called that, gummy and pasty. I considered finding out just how big a train wreck French toast would be, but decided to save my money.

  In the midst of this inauspicious introduction to the GF world, my friend Margaret, who had recently been misdiagnosed with celiac disease (quite the reversal of alimentary fortune), brought me the leftovers she hadn’t eaten from the “poor, sad freezer,” as she called it, where the GF products lived at the health-food store. Thus we encountered the calamity of our first gluten-free “baguette”—a roll of tapioca, rice flour, and oil so weirdly greasy that it seemed to come out of the oven pre-buttered. Bec and I each tried a slice and then threw the remainder away. We also pitched the brown-rice “tortillas” Margaret brought, and shoved a cookbook with a ghastly title—The Bland Diet Cookbook—into another desultory corner, where it belonged.

  Why the hell were people eating these foods? I realized the answer after we, too, kept going back to the grocery store for products that we didn’t even like: eating a GF signifier of a familiar real food can be more comforting, if not better-tasting, than eating a strange food nobody in your family grew up eating, and which therefore conveys no meaning at all. And to be fair, food producers are only leavening dough made of sorghum, or making cupcakes out of batters of cornstarch, cocoa powder, and coconut oil, because consumers are asking them to do it, both with their “likes” on social media and their dollars. There is so much money to be made that any large-scale producer would be foolish not to meet the demand. In 2014, the GF industry totaled sales of $10.5 billion, and 2016 sales are expected to top $15 billion. Furthermore, I am aware that the efforts of these companies are appreciated by many gluten-intolerant eaters, especially those who have been eating GF for decades and not a few brief years or months, as I have. They can remember the days when the options were even smaller in number, and tasted worse.

  I might have found the commercially prepared GF foods less disappointing if they did not cost so much. It was offensive to pay five dollars a pop for snacks like pretzels or crackers that were shadows of their wheat-based counterparts. I knew that I gambled every time I tried a new product—a bottle of wine, cheese, a new type of sorbet—but the stakes seemed higher when I bought gluten-free. As of 2013, the prices for GF products were, on average, 252 percent higher than for their conventional counterparts. The numbers change as prices for ingredients and fuel fluctuate, but fixed costs include maintaining a dedicated GF facility to ensure no cross-contamination, and, in the case of some companies, testing to make sure the product is safe (though the FDA does not require food producers to test for the presence of gluten). The cost of GF bread, whether it’s good or not, is especially high. The better flour blends tend to be proprietary mixes of rice, chickpea, tapioca, millet, or coconut. The cost of these ingredients on average is higher than for a commodity like wheat or corn, and that expense gets passed on to the consumer. For example, a package of California-based Pamela’s bread mix—which is widely regarded as one of the best prepackaged bread mixes available (and I came to agree, despite an aftertaste one GF artisan baker once accurately described to me as “alkaline”)—goes for nearly $6.00 for a one-loaf bag, compared to $1.29, and sometimes less, for a loaf of generic grocery-store white bread. You still have to add eggs and canola oil, and bake it yourself, so the cost is closer to $6.50 or $7.00. (You also need a stand mixer, or at least a hand mixer, if you’re going to get the best-tasting loaf of bread out of your investment.) For sure, this GF bread can be an effective stage for homemade preserves, but it was still far from the real thing. Nonetheless, I kept baking and eating it anyway.

  Almost everyone is going to feel the pinch of a 200-plus-percent increase to their grocery budget, but the cost of “going gluten-free” is a particular concern for those who must do so from near or below the poverty line. The IRS allows tax deductions for GF products because, for celiacs, they’re a medical expense. But not everyone is going to itemize his deductions down to the GF cereal he eats for breakfast—I don’t, though I’ve met people who do—and a tax deduction is not the same thing as a price break in the checkout line; it’s actually a regressive tax policy, because most people who are struggling to buy groceries are not paying accountants or splurging on tax-prep software. When I asked my gastroenterologist about his worries for his poorer patients’ abilities to comply with a gluten-free diet—St. Lawrence County is the second poorest in New York State, and celiac, like all diseases and conditions, does not discriminate—he became visibly frustrated.

  “I know of many patients,” he told me, “who simply cannot afford the foods. And so they don’t buy them.”

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  Those days would have been even darker if we hadn’t had a winter farm share (CSA) with our friends and growers Dan and Megan Kent, and if we hadn’t had good meat from our local ranchers, the Bartons. Winter vegetable farm shares are a rarity this far north. Even with insulated greenhouses and triple-lined high tunnels, a grower courts disaster when he tries to provide fresh greens in a place where the temperatures regularly drop to ten below. That is why the Kents and their workers harvested an abundance of storage crops and root vegetables in the summer and kept them in a cooler the size of our house. So in the depths of winter, we were well stocked in supplies of onions, garlic, winter squash of four or five varieties, celery root, cabbages red and green, beets, turnips, potatoes, radishes, shallots, carrots, and, as well, produce that Megan froze fresh out of the fields in their certified kitchen: peppers, corn, cauliflower, broccoli, cherry tomatoes, and beans. Subscribers received fifteen pounds of vegetables biweekly to mix and match. As Dan was fond of saying, there was always plenty to eat (notably, he never said, “You will get exactly what you want to eat”). We also received popcorn on the cob, frozen apple cider, cranberries, strawberry jam, maple syrup, and pickles. On top of this, they provided subscribers with every northern grower’s holy grail for as long as it lasted: fresh greens in the form of spinach, kale, chard, and lettuce. If memory serves, they were helped by a milder winter that year.

  Eating the foods grown in this place, by these people, raised my spirits. They kept me from falling over the edge into gloomy GF eating of the sort that can lead a person who goes on an elimination diet to experience even more problems, as the hole in his diet becomes a vacuum for fake food out of despair. Simply because the CSA kept coming, I was forced to transition back to real eating, to use great ingredients, no matter how humble, to make meals. The hope I felt stemmed from a belief I’ve long held that cooking and sitting down to eat, whether alone or with another person or a group, is the single most important and restorative thing we can do each day.

/>   When I began cooking these ingredients for my breakfast or dinner, I felt as if I was finally back home again; my life resumed some of its normal rhythms, so many of which are based in the kitchen. For the entire month of December I had barely cooked. Now the knife once again felt familiar in my hand. The pots and pans again hissed with aromatics, or a hash of butternut squash, onions, celery root, and herbs. I turned the berries we’d frozen in the summer into crisps and crumbles, substituting ground nuts for oats. From the sweet corn, potatoes, and peppers, I made spicy chowders. I regularly raided The Vault for tomato sauce to make a ragout, Bolognese, chili, goulash. Eventually, as my health improved, I made soups, boeuf Bourguignon, chicken fricassée, poule au pot (my sister-in-law had given me Mastering the Art of French Cooking for Christmas that year), and plenty of gratins, sautés, and braises.

  And yet, immediately after dinner was over and the dishes were washed, something strange often occurred.

  I turned on the television and watched Guy Fieri—sometimes for hours—as he moved through the lurid, greasy world of mega-gluten-eaters on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. Our basic cable service had recently added the Food Network, and for some reason Guy Fieri drove into our living room almost every night in one of the many red Camaros he purportedly keeps on reserve throughout the country, shouting over the wind as it zipped through his spiked, bleached hair. The only explanation I can offer for the amount of time I spent watching Guy in January and February is that if I had no energy in the middle of the day, I was totally drained by evening. My resistance was down. I was in a strange mood, caught somewhere between rage and resignation, withdrawal and recovery.*

  I watched Guy hoark down burgers. I watched him tip his head back and drop in the noodles, the dumplings, the fritters. I watched him drink beer from a glass the size of a bucket.

  I developed a refrain that I delivered aloud from the couch even as I helplessly kept watching: “Fuck you, Guy Fieri.”