choosing burden
This Week in Reading
52 Loaves: One Man's Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning, and a Perfect Crust by William Alexander
In 52 Loaves, William Alexander bakes a loaf of bread a week for an entire year in hopes of mastering the perfect peasant loaf. I usually love books like this-- books that explore history through personal anecdotes, each chapter bookended by a recipe. I am a sucker for a book organized around a rigid framework. But one loaf of bread a week? I don’t know if that is actually impressive. I made three loaves of bread last week alone. It’s not that hard.
The premise of this felt a little bit gimmicky. “I’m going to bake a loaf of bread every week and write a book about the history of bread” is exactly the type of proposal you write to land a book deal. I don’t doubt that his interest in breadmaking was genuine, but something about this book didn’t feel organic.
As he delves into his quest to bake the perfect loaf, Alexander goes deeper and deeper into the history of bread. He investigates what is actually in enriched flour, competes in the county fair, visits a yeast factory, and goes (as everyone does in these types of books) to France, to take a week-long intensive class in bread.
In many ways, he makes his challenge more difficult than it needs to be. He wants to mill his own wheat, build his own bread oven in his back yard. He worries that the tap water in the Hudson Valley is reacting badly with his starter and switches to bottled French spring water for a few weeks. He decides that in order to bake the perfect loaf of bread he needs to take a class in Paris, needs to visit Morocco, needs to spend a week in a monastery. Maybe, instead of doing all this... he should just bake the damn bread.
At one point he tries the famous Mark Bittman No-Knead Bread recipe, the one I myself made three times last week, but derides it for being too easy. While I was largely disgruntled by his contempt of my own stand-by recipe (for the record, it is excellent, which is more than his own children had to say about Alexander’s bread), I also understand the impulse to make something more complicated than it is.
During my second to last semester of college, John Peña stopped by for studio visit. I was neck deep in projects, each of which had spiraled into exceedingly elaborate processes. Each project contained so many ideas, required specific materials and methodology, each of which would supposedly give the final piece layers of depth and nuance, embed a history of labor into the physical product itself. There were obvious ways to make my life easier, but I ignored them. I couldn’t bring myself to cheat, to rob the piece of that authenticity, even if the viewer would be none the wiser. Hearing all of this, John turned to me and said “burden, I think that is an important word for you.”
He was right. I am someone who relishes a burden. I like fussy processes, upholding traditions. For a long time I thought that the more work you put into something, the better it was. How could something be good if it didn’t cost you hundreds of hours of your life, and potentially a chunk of your soul? While those things often correlate, it is also a logical fallacy. You need to give things the time and attention they deserve to reach their full potential, but creating additional work just makes something more convoluted, not more meaningful.
I have still not escaped the lure of burden. I do feel like grunt work matters, that pushing past easy desires to work and toil, is valuable. If I didn’t have such distaste for sourdough bread itself, I would love to bake from a sourdough starter. Needing to feed a jar of dough weekly is exactly the type of high maintenance bullshit I love to commit to.
I am someone who takes pride in fulfilling my obligations, most of which I have put on myself. But I am trying to let go of the idea that burdens are necessary for greatness. My greatest weakness as an artist is that I often fall prey to overly complicated concepts. I am thinking about a lot, and I have a tendency to want to shove all of those thoughts into the same piece. As I’ve matured, I have slowly moved towards simpler and simpler ideas. I have finally begun to understand that smaller concepts are the easiest to connect to, that things are at their most potent when they are given room to breathe.
Which is to say, I understand why William Alexander wanted to master bread in the most complicated way possible, but I don’t know if was actually the best way to approach it. You don’t have to lay your own bricks for an outdoor bread oven, you don’t have to marry yourself to a rising schedule. Bread is one of the simplest foods, and perhaps what it actually needs is to be approached in a simple way.
Like many memoirists, it seems like Alexander is sometimes chasing a story, rather than actually reflecting on what is in front of him. He decides that he wants to go to a monastery to learn the ancient tradition of breadmaking from the monks. But after contacting numerous monasteries across France, he learns that none of them make their own bread anymore. He was chasing a particular narrative, and found that that narrative didn’t exist, which you would think would put a kibosh on the whole venture. But instead of giving up, he shanghais himself into a French monastery under the guise that he himself will reinstate the ancient craft of breadmaking to the abbey. He goes, he bakes, and he learns some tidy lessons about spirituality and slowing down. But I can’t help but feel that he had pre-fabricated the story of his time at the monastery long before he boarded the plane for France, and simply went there to enact it. He forced reality into the shape of his prewritten story, rather than letting the story write itself. This is something that I too, am guilty of at times.
All of this is to say, I understand how this book came into being, but I also feel like William Alexander gave into his worst impulses as a writer, and it made for a weaker memoir.
[For the curious: I use the same NYTimes Mark Bittman recipe that everyone else in America is using to bake bread. I cover my bowl with a damp towel, which seems to keep the dough moist without needing to use plastic wrap. I let my dough rise for 24 hours usually, just because it is more convenient for my schedule. I’ll mix up the dough after work (it does legitimately take no more than three minutes), let it rise overnight, stick the towel covered bowel in the fridge in the morning, take the dough out of the fridge after work, let it do it’s second rise on the counter and then bake it. I do not have a Dutch Oven but have found that baking it in my cast iron skillet with a piece of tinfoil draped on top works fine (I take the tinfoil off for the last 15 minutes so it can golden up).
This recipe is consistent and super easy, but I am looking to diversify a little bit. Send me your favorite bread recipes please! My apartment doesn’t have heat, and cranking my oven up to 450 degrees for an hour is a good way of warming it up in the evening.]
Further Reading:
Food memoirs are one of my guilty pleasures. I even like reading cookbooks cover to cover sometimes. A few of my favorites: Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Anya Von Bremzen (I know I recommended this like two weeks ago but whatever). Also Heartburn by Nora Ephron, which is a novel that feels like a food memoir.