Monday 10 January 2011

Musing On Breads, And Cook Books

So, I really had started to play with some of the recipes from Jacqui Wood’s book Prehistoric Cookery. (I was fortunate that she started out talking about bread. While there are some ingredients I had to track down sources for – I live at the back of beyond – at least they tended to be items I could track down!)

And while I knew, even starting out, that I’d want to re-do the experiments using my outdoor kitchen, it seems I really wasn’t canny enough to make good concise notes, or write here about the experiments at the time I did them, so now I’ll probably need to take another look at even the recipes I’d attempted. ** sigh **

Unfortunately, I also need to re-source ingredients for the very first recipe, which concerned sprouting wheat. It instructs me to take whole wheat grains. I had eventually tracked down something I could use for that, but later in the summer I realized that the sealed container I had the leftovers stored in was alive with weevils! [Eek!] And they quickly were tossed outside to provide a nice feast for the birds.
I started doing a bit of research on weevils (or whatever I’d determined them to be at the time…) and it seems like it’s pretty much an inherent problem with whole grains. So for the most part I think I’m going to want to only obtain these sorts of things in smaller quantities, which means I’ll always have to plan ahead of a cooking experiment.

(And I’ll have to try and shut off the squeamish part of my brain that goes “eeewwhh!”.)

I will go back through my brief notes, and ferret out the few photos I’d taken, which have now shuffled through some hard drive changes, and at least make a bare bones start.

But I’ve been getting urges, in the pre-wheat-kernel moments to do something… anything… that has to do with some historical food experimentation. And a couple of lists I subscribe to have had some conversations on the topic of breads, or breadlike foods.

And to eke out reading material, before I finished up one series of novels and had to decide what to read next, I had been reading my copy of Flatbreads and Flavours, by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. They write stunning cookbooks, as full of text and pictures as they are of recipes. And I’d been meaning to sit down with one or other of their books, (I have a number, and have just ordered another), and thought that the flatbreads volume might have some interesting insights along the whole bread idea, as they discuss breadmaking technology in some of the more primitive-seeming cultures around the world.

I also pulled out my copy of Mary Savelli’s Tastes of Anglo-Saxon England. She also starts her book on the topic of bread.

And then, in a moment of pantry rearrangement, to store some new kitchen-related Christmas gifts, I came across a copy of an article from Acta Archaeologica: Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread; a Study of Late Viking Age and Medieval Quernstones in South Scandinavia, by Peter Carelli and Peter Kresten.

So, definitely there are signs and portents pointing me towards bread!

~vandy

No comments: