The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [4]
My son was three, and I was watching him eat one of his favorite breakfasts: cornmeal ground fresh the day before, cooked into a buttery yellow mush, cooled down with homebrew soy milk, and sweetened with a trickle of maple syrup. He tucked it away with voluptuous appreciation. Watching, I recalled suddenly the picture I had been looking at just the day before of refugee children somewhere in the Third World. From huge kettles, relief workers were ladling into battered tin basins a porridge of corn and soy, mixed, as was my boy’s, in a proportion intended to maximize nutritional benefits. It would take a lot of that porridge, though, eaten over many weeks, to flesh out the matchstick arms on those children, bring light to their shadowed eyes, and return to normalcy bellies distended from chronic hunger.
Knowing that my son’s diet is simple, grain-based, and inexpensive did not begin to mitigate the sorrow I had felt on looking at his counterparts in that refugee camp. Nor should it have. But it did help keep that sorrow from turning into despair: which seems very important if we’re to work toward solutions. To a small, yet meaningful degree, deciding to simplify one’s diet and limit oneself to foods that could conceivably be enjoyed by everyone on earth, begins to diminish the terrible and disempowering gulf between “them” and “us”—between “those children” and our own.
I WOULD ADD, finally, that our profound attachment to whole grains has also to do with a feeling that has deepened steadily over many years’ experience as bakers and eaters of these splendid foods, and which can only be called, at the risk of sounding somewhat balmy, reverence.
There it sits—a single kernel of wheat, maybe three sixteenths of an inch long, creased along one side and rounded on the other. At the bottom nestles a tiny oval compartment, the minute beginning of the plant’s rebirth, called the germ. Above the germ is the endosperm, a protein- and calorie-rich food reservoir that will fuel the plant as it germinates. Enveloping both is a hard seed coat, impermeable for decades to anything but the warmth and moisture that will bring the seed to life.
What’s so marvelous about this simple structure is that everything that helps the grain preserve and reproduce itself also suits the needs of human beings and animals superbly well. It comes close to being a complete food, needing to be supplemented only by small amounts of animal products and/or legumes, and the leafy green and yellow vegetables that almost any environment between the polar caps will provide in some form. The same hard seed coat that protects the seed’s capacity to reproduce itself has also made possible for humankind the almost indefinitely long storage of a wholesome food supply.
There are those who can look on this kind of arrangement and keep their wits about them. There are others who can’t conceive of it as anything but a sure, small sign of some larger benevolence, hidden deep behind the appearance of things—and who feel, too, that nothing could be more fitting in response than to summon up all that is skilled and artful in themselves to bake a fine, high-rising loaf of uncompromisingly whole-grain bread.
YES, BREAD. For no matter how much we enjoy whole grains in other guises—creamy oatmeal, kasha cooked with mushrooms and potatoes, and platters of yellow polenta topped with tomato sauce and cheese—no matter how much we value the sheer variety for nutritional reasons as well as pleasure, we always come back to bread—the convenience food par excellence, ready at hand, good with anything or almost nothing, synonymous, in the West, with “food” itself.
So all right, whole grains—one hundred per cent whole, and no fudging. Bread, moreover, and not just a pot of steamed wheat berries. Are you ready, though, for the “home-baked and regularly