The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [6]
Today, though, there is good reason to question whether our present food system can be sustained—so profoundly dependent on petroleum is it, and so flagrantly wasteful of other resources as well. Good reason, too, to seek out more direct ways of meeting our food needs, and to breathe a little easier when you find them. This ease of mind is yet another source of satisfaction that comes of being a competent whole grains baker. Revival of what is, yes, a subsistence skill, means you know yourself able to turn just about any flour or grain that might come your way into something that will nourish and even delight. Knowing this, you feel that much less vulnerable to circumstance. It’s a subtle change, but it goes deep.
Reinstate breadbaking as a home-based activity, and you begin to change the home, too. Once you have established a regular baking pattern and the people who live with you know that on, say, Tuesday evenings and Saturday mornings there will be fresh bread, and good smells, and you there, too, manifestly enjoying yourself, there begins to be more reason for them to be there as well. The place starts to exert its own gentle tug, a strong counterforce to the thousand-and-one pulls that would draw them out and away.
The creature comfort of a warm kitchen and people to chat with accounts only in part for this magnetic force. It’s the baking itself: the artistry, the science, the occasional riddle of it. People of all ages, but particularly children, seem to draw immense satisfaction from hanging around a place where work is taken as seriously as we’ve come to take baking. We observed this when we first began the kitchen research that preceded Laurel’s Kitchen, and had a chance to reaffirm it just last year, when we constructed the oven where our beloved “desem” bread is baked.
Building the oven, which extended along the top of an enormous fireplace as part of a large new kitchen, was a formidable undertaking. It drew in an architect, bricklayers, carpenters, a blacksmith, and several master bakers. It also drew in every toddler in the vicinity. At every opportunity, there they’d be, watching unblinking as each brick was laid in place and each fitting was forged. My own son was among them, and for months afterward, once the oven was working, he would watch twice weekly with equal fascination as the bread itself came out of the oven—loaf after round, brown loaf, sliding out on a wooden paddle we learned to call a “peel,” caught in leather-gauntleted hands and then pitched onto racks to cool. Back in his room later, he would re-enact the entire sequence, molding loaves out of clay, using a spatula and my old driving gloves to unload the “oven” he’d built out of wooden blocks.
Now, at four, Ramesh proudly brings in firewood for the baking—and he’s not likely to stop there. He is as crazy about the desem bread as we are, and he’s well aware how much care goes into its making. To him, a kitchen is a place where unquestionably important things go on, and where everyone has a contribution to make. I’m profoundly glad he feels that way.
Much of what gives traditional communities their special character and form has to do with the way they go about meeting basic life needs. In the past, to get crops harvested, wheat ground, or a well dug and maintained, people had to come together in respectful cooperation, suspending for the moment any private grievances they might be nursing. Often, they even managed to get some fun out of what they were doing—enough, even, to lay some of those grievances to rest. It was in the course of carrying out all that