In Memory of Bread: A Memoir - Hardcover

Graham, Paul

 
9780804186872: In Memory of Bread: A Memoir
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0804186871 ISBN 13: 9780804186872
Verlag: POTTER CLARKSON N, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

The funny, poignant memoir of one man’s struggle to come to terms with his celiac diagnosis, forcing him to reexamine his relationship with food.

When Paul Graham was suddenly diagnosed with celiac disease at the age of thirty-six, he was forced to say goodbye to traditional pasta, pizza, sandwiches, and more. Gone, too, were some of his favorite hobbies, including brewing beer with a buddy and gorging on his wife’s homemade breads. Struggling to understand why he and so many others had become allergic to wheat, barley, rye, oats, and other dietary staples, Graham researched the production of modern wheat and learned that not only has the grain been altered from ancestral varieties but it’s also commonly added to thousands of processed foods.

In writing that is effortless and engaging, Paul explores why incidence of the disease is on the rise while also grappling with an identity crisis—given that all his favorite pastimes involved wheat in some form. His honest, unflinching, and at times humorous journey towards health and acceptance makes an inspiring read.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

PAUL GRAHAM is an associate professor of English at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York and his essays have appeared twice in the Best Food Writing anthology (2012 and 2013). Graham lives with his wife and their German shepherd in rural New York on the Canadian border.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

chapter 1.

Last Meals

A winter several years ago will forever be the time when I discovered the intense yet simple pleasures of great homemade bread.

As with most transformative experiences, the timing was everything. My wife started baking in January, after one of our friends introduced her to Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. Its basic recipe, as Artisan devotees know, makes baking bread with a chewy crumb and shattering crust tantalizingly easy: you mix up a mess of dough, let it age in the fridge, and pull out handfuls to shape, let rise, and bake whenever the urge for a fresh loaf strikes. I often stepped inside—­from walking the dog or carrying firewood, leaving behind a blanched sky and snow that literally blew sideways—­to hot bread waiting on the wire rack. The windows were steamed over; the whole house bloomed with heat. What I felt was beyond anticipation or joy—­it was a sense of wealth and gratitude that humans have known for a long, long time. I couldn’t have contrived this feeling if I tried, and it had everything to do with the smell and taste of baked grains against northern New York’s cold, sparse background.

As she explored the cookbook, Bec made whole-­wheat loaves, white loaves, cheddar cheese bread, dinner rolls, cinnamon buns, and my favorite, limpa, a Swedish rye seasoned with orange peel, star anise, cumin, and sugar. At first she baked one or two a week. I tore off chunks while they still steamed from the oven. In the afternoons, I made a cup of tea with toast and chose a jar from “The Vault,” a hutch in our dining room stacked with homemade preserves like brandied melon jam and crab-­apple jelly. Every summer and into the fall, Bec puts up seasonal fruits and vegetables she gets from the market and our farm share, and (in the case of the crab apples, anyway) that we forage on the college campus where I teach English. By most estimates, you only have a year or two to eat that stuff. I was doing my part in the race against spoilage.

Sometimes, I ate a loaf in a day.

Once or twice, I may have eaten almost two loaves in a day—­most of ours, and then most of our friends’ when we went over to their place for dinner, where the talk, which always turned to food, inevitably gravitated to our helplessness around this bread.

Geography was a factor in our raptures. We live in a rural place, and at the time the sole good nearby bakery was attached to our local food co-­op. We had been enjoying the co-­op’s loaves for years, but the Artisan bread was even better, and more fun. We loved the ingenious substitution for the steam jets in professional ovens, which involved pouring a cup of boiling water into a preheated sauté pan, creating a dramatic hiss. When we took the bread out and it hit the cooler air, we bent close to the counter and listened as the crust tightened with a series of crackles. But most of all, we loved the sweet, comforting smell of bread baking away as the temperature dropped and we turned local root vegetables into soups and stews.

If we and our friends were conscious of the symbolism of “breaking bread” at these meals, nobody ever mentioned it. And yet, I think if you’d asked any of us whether the experience would have been diminished without my friend David’s triumphant soda bread, or without my friends Sarah and Mere’s perfect airy, white loaves, or without whatever fifty-­times-­better-­than-­supermarket bread anyone else had made, we would have said, Yes, of course. Now I know that to be the truth. You can have fellowship over any meal, but sharing bread seems to deliver an especially high emotional return for a simple food. Bread has always inspired such excitement, even reverence, in those who have so much as stood near a fresh loaf.

In those days I had no reason to feel guilty or wary about my bread consumption. I did not obsess over calories or carbs, preferring to believe that if you’re eating good food, whole food, and frequently moving your body, the math all works out in the end. I’ll immediately add, however, that until genetics came calling, I had been one of those annoying types who never had to think about what they ate—­or did not eat. In retrospect I see that I was consuming a ton of gluten. But I didn’t know then that gluten could be a problem for me. I didn’t think that gluten could be a problem for anyone, actually, until one day when I heard someone, a student of mine or a colleague, mention her dietary restrictions. I registered this person’s pain distantly. (As a friend would later say to me, “All I know is that I’m glad I don’t have what you’ve got.”) I certainly did not yet understand that those who cannot tolerate wheat struggle against a tradition so long and so deep that some anthropologists believe that by now, the desire for grain in general, and bread in particular, is all but “hardwired” into people of European and Middle Eastern ancestry.

Bec registered the staggering speed at which I was consuming her bread. It took her time to make, she said, and it’d be nice if now and then a loaf could hang around the house longer than a day and a half. In response, I might have pointed out that ancient Egyptian temple officials, instead of being paid in cash, received a share of 900 fine wheat breads, 36,000 flatbreads roasted in coals, and 900 jugs of beer per year, if the archaeological records are to be believed. (That’s 3,000 flatbreads a month, and you haven’t even drunk the beer yet.) Surely these officials were feeding their huge families, servants, and slaves. But they still had a few flatbreads left over for themselves. Against such impressive consumption, my own looked modest, even pitiful.

Speaking of 900 jugs of beer: At about the same time as the Artisan Bread discoveries, my friend David and I began brewing beer. In this way, our homes were not unlike those of the ancients, who baked their bread and brewed their beer in adjacent rooms, often using the yeast in the beer scum (known in some places as “barm”) to inoculate their bread dough.

That’s not how our beer project came about, though. David is a volcanologist, schooled in the geology of small-­scale environmental apocalypses, and thus concerned with living in a way that is as gentle on the environment as possible. He believed that home-­brewed beer could be as good as most commercial brews, and also more ecologically sound: less gasoline used in transport, less refrigeration at the store, less packaging in the recycling bin. We set out to start our own school of sustainability—­green hedonism. Our goal was to become completely self-­sufficient in the beer department. The challenge was that David could drink a lot of beer. I had a lower tolerance but still put in a respectable effort.

We started in March by putting up five gallons of American-­style amber ale from a kit. We boiled the wort and added hops, cooled it, pitched our yeast, and left our beer to ferment in a sterile and air-­locked five-­gallon bucket. After a week we added two ounces of Cascade hops, a common American varietal, and let it continue to ferment. Then we bottled our ale and waited for it to age. Finally, in May, we sat on David’s “deck”—­the flat roof of the porch below his second-­story duplex, which we accessed by climbing through a window—­and watched the sun set over the trees as we emptied the bottles over two or three weekends. Quite often we accompanied our beer with some cheese and, naturally, a fresh loaf of bread.

By midsummer, we had twenty-­five gallons of beer—­a couple hundred...

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Verlag
POTTER CLARKSON N
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804186871
ISBN 13 
9780804186872
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
272
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