A Bread-Making Adventure
by Robert Penn
• Particular Books
Childhood pickiness aside, bread was the first food I deliberately rejected (many years before gluten-free diets made this fashionable). Bread was always some combination of blandly flavourless, disgustingly sweet and tooth-shatteringly inedible. The only benefit it ever brought to the plate was providing essential structural integrity in, say, sandwiches. But Robert Penn’s enthusiasm for what he calls ‘the most symbolically evocative foodstuff ’ is so infectious and persuasive, I’m finally willing to revisit this assessment.
Penn describes the humble bread as an everyday miracle by which photons of light, nutrients in the soil and a bit of human effort become something delicious to eat. Discovering that modern industrial bread was giving him painful gastric distress, Penn turned to trendy ‘real bread’. It was a revelation. ‘It felt good in the hand, and it tasted great,’ he writes. ‘Miraculously, it did not upset my stomach.’ With hands full of seeds, he decides to grow his own crops, mill his own flour and bake enough bread to feed his family for a year.
Penn makes a convincing case that ‘bread is kneaded into economics, politics, human biology and religion... its story is the story of humanity’. In Slow Rise, he travels the globe, documenting this tangled relationship through time: from the Fertile Crescent, where domestic cereal crops were first grown thousands of years ago, through to the war-winning ‘breadbasket’ of the US Great Plains, the Bread Riots of 1970s Egypt and the rise of contemporary artisanal home baking.
With a vast array of bread-based words embedded in everyday language (everything from ‘breadline’ and ‘breadwinner’ to collectively ‘breaking bread’, or having one’s ‘nose to the grindstone’) it’s hard to disagree that one of the central nutritional staples of early civilisation deserves better than the mass-produced interpretations that sit upon supermarket shelves.
It’s a pleasingly evocative tale, told with the same rich descriptions and wistful asides that Penn bakes into all of his books. Whether or not readers will also feel compelled to swing a sickle or nurture a sourdough starter, for even the most bread-adverse of us, the book elicits a strong temptation to reach for a freshly baked loaf.