Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

Lebanese Man'oushe Bread classes are now taught on-line, and Susan, Leah, and I signed up to learn how to make flatbreads from Andrew Janjigian,  pizza professional, former bread expert at America’s Test Kitchen, and current bread blogger ( https://wordloaf.substack.com/ ). Before he started mixing his first dough, an Armenian Lahmajun, Janjigian explained how early emigrants from Armenia and Turkey settled in Greece bringing their flatbreads with them. Greek explorers later moved to Italy with their variant of Lahmajun, developing, in turn, one of the world’s most prominent flatbreads in the city of Naples: pizza. That is one theory for the origin of pizza. At the very least, according to Janjigian, Levantine flatbreads pre-date pizza. Probably by several thousand years. Cheese bread, an antecedent of pizza. Lahmajun, a kind of Armenian pizza, was first up. A ten-inch round was topped with a thin film of ground lamb spun in a food processor with onions, red bell pepper, red pepper...

  The Volunteer  was one of the last sailing whalers to take off from Hull, England for the icy seas around Greenland. So many whales had already been killed that paraffin and coal were already less expensive than whale oil and though Captain Brownlee had already lost one ship to ice floes, he commanded another, and secured insurance for it. The kind of men that sign up to sail ships between icebergs and sheet ice, face north Atlantic storms and blizzards vicious enough to coat rigging with enough ice to topple a boat are hardened to the point of violent indifference.  As the ship drives north, Mcguire's descriptions of the inexorable, silent encroachment of towering icebergs, the squeal and roar of gales, the grinding of ice floes driven by wind into pancakes of shattering and exploding shelves, and the smell of unshowered men that have spent two days and two sunlit nights flensing blubber from the inside of a whale are so realistic that when violence erupts the smell of...

As much as it sounds like a contradiction in terms, Tolentino is a millennial intellectual. As an heir to the now deceased Christopher Hitchens, Tolentino possesses an unerring eye for the strengths and foibles, mostly the foibles, of her generation, and by extension anyone else alive in our era.  Trick Mirror  consists of nine essays written in the first two years of the Trump administration and yet in so many ways predicted the isolation of a post-Covid world and the depth to which Trumpism would drive a wedge between right and left America. Much of her distress lies in the rise of the internet and the degree to which social media - Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and now TikTok - have commodified our lives. Put simply, the internet has impelled us to sell ourselves with carefully curated photos and stories of our perfected lives, pushing upon others an image of ourselves that is just one step below reality TV. Have we all become Real Housewives? Compounding matters we are in f...

Not once does Stephen Greenblatt or William Shakespeare mention Donald Trump by name but it is obvious from page one that at least one of the authors has Trump on the brain and the other predicted him 500 years ago. What Greenblatt does best is make it painfully clear that tyrants of all ages and locations bear many of the same character traits: insecurity, bullying, toady advisors to whom they have no special allegiance, narcissism, abusive relationships with women, and an absence of empathy. Shakespeare's tyrants like Richard II, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and King Lear seen through a Trumpian lens are sadly familiar. Their adherents are the same group of people either willingly hoodwinked out of desperation for their personal plights or self-serving jerks who think they can ride the tyrant's coattails for personal gain. It is in some ways encouraging to recognize that Trump is not unique to America or our era: his type has been around since the beginning of power struggles. The...

Growing grain in colonial America was a difficult endeavor. New England soils were rocky and hard to plow. The weather was cold and rainy. Wheat was especially prone to infections by fungi and molds. Settlers anxious to make bread had to be creative and use whatever flour was in abundance. Native Americans were master farmers of corn and settlers referred to all corn meal as Indian flour.  Rye is more tolerant of cold, wet conditions than wheat and was also relied upon for nutrition. The combination of Rye and Indian was, when cookbooks were first printed in the 1800s, also referred to as Ryaninjun, and in this version of the recipe, Thirded Bread, because I have used one third of each type of flour: rye, corn, and wheat. Depending upon what was available, the bread might have a lot more of one kind of flour than the other two. This bread is also quite similar to Boston Brown Bread and back before the days of Keurig and pour-overs, like in the 1950s, when coffee came in large tin c...

Detective Antoinette Conway has finally achieved her goal of reaching Dublin's murder squad, but Antoinette is not only the first woman to enter Ireland's male bastion of investigators, she is also the daughter of a dark-skinned (absentee) father. Conway is hazed mercilessly by her fellow officers who spit in her coffee when gets up from her desk, pat her backside, pee in her locker, throw away her files instead of handing them in, and mess with her computer.  Conway proudly stands her ground and when she and her partner are handed what should be a routine murder case -- girlfriend is reported dead in her living room right after her boyfriend is seen leaving the house in a hurry -- she does a full-on investigation.  As mysteries go, this one is just the right amount of tortuous to make it a page turner, but what Tana French does best is introduce us to the routine doubts and in-our-head-rebuttals that all of us endure. She does it by introducing complex, slightly flawed charac...

  Every summer when I traveled to Cape Cod, one of my favorite breakfasts was a loaf of raisin bread fresh from the Flying Fish bakery in Wellfleet. To be honest, I'm not even sure they still make it; they've become more of an upscale eatery. Still, every September, when I get back home, I try to make it. I got it right with this recipe from Maurizio, Cinnamon Raisin Sourdough . I made a few variations: I added my starter right from the get-go and I subbed dried cranberries for about 40% of the raisins. But oh my. Getting the cinnamon to stick around through the bake was a complete success. Too often the flavor of cinnamon simply dissipates, but these loaves, four of them, were still aromatic when I made toast three days later. Right from the oven, the fruit was well distributed, the crumb was open and full of holes to absorb lots of butter, and the crust was so crackly that as I sliced a flaky snowstorm burst onto the cutting board.