Franz Kafka (translated by Michael Hofmann and retrieved from The New Yorker)
A large loaf of bread lay on the table. Father came in with a knife to cut it in half. But even though the knife was big and sharp, and the bread neither too soft nor too hard, the knife could not cut into it. We children looked up at Father in surprise. He said, “Why should you be surprised? Isn’t it more surprising if something succeeds than if it fails? Go to bed, perhaps I’ll manage it later.” We went to bed, but every now and again, at all hours of the night, one or another of us got up and craned his neck to look at Father, who stood there, a big man in his long coat, his right leg braced behind him, seeking to drive the knife into the bread. When we woke up early in the morning, Father was just laying the knife aside, and said, “You see, I haven’t managed yet, that’s how hard it is.” We wanted to distinguish ourselves, and he gave us permission to try, but we could hardly lift the knife, whose handle was still almost glowing from Father’s efforts; it seemed to rear up out of our grasp. Father laughed and said, “Let it go. I’m going out now. I’ll try again tonight. I won’t let a loaf of bread make a monkey out of me. It’s bound to let itself be cut in the end; of course it’s allowed to resist, so it’s resisting.” But even as he said that the bread seemed to shrivel up, like the mouth of a grimly determined person, and now it was a very small loaf indeed.
Samuel Beckett (from Dante and the Lobster, in the Evergreen Review)
For bread to be toasted as it ought, through and through, it must be done on a mild steady flame. Otherwise you only charred the outside and left the pith as sodden as before. If there was one thing he abominated more than another it was to feel his teeth meet in a bathos of pith and dough. And it was so easy to do the thing properly. So, he thought, having regulated the flow and adjusted the grill, by the time I have the bread cut that will be just right. Now the long barrel-loaf came out of its biscuit-tin and had its end evened off on the face of McCabe. Two inexorable drives with the breadsaw and a pair of neat rounds of raw bread, the main elements of his meal, lay before him, awaiting his pleasure. The stump of the loaf went back into prison, the crumbs, as though there were no such thing as a sparrow in the wide world, were swept in a fever away, and the slices snatched up and carried to the grill. All these preliminaries were very hasty and impersonal.
It was now that real skill began to be required, it was at this point that the average person began to make a hash of the entire proceedings. He laid his cheek against the soft of the bread, it was spongy and warm, alive. But he would very soon take that plush feel off it, by God but he would very quickly take that fat white look off its face. He lowered the gas a suspicion and plaqued one flabby slab plump down on the glowing fabric, but very pat and precise, so that the whole resembled the Japanese flag. Then on top, there not being room for the two to do evenly side by side, and if you did not do them evenly you might just as well save yourself the trouble of doing them at all, the other round was set to warm. When the first candidate was done, which was only when it was black through and through, it changed places with its comrade, so that now it in its turn lay on top, done to a dead end, black and smoking, waiting till as much could be said of the other.
I.love.this.
Grips me every single time i read it.
Both writers very much in their element.
Richard Brautigan (originally published in 1959 in Lay the Marble Tea and printed again in The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster in 1968 and online in the Brautigan Archives)
In a Café
I watched a man in a cafe fold a slice of bread as if he were folding a birth certificate or looking at the photograph of a dead lover.
Extract from "Bread" by Margaret Atwood:
"Imagine a prison. There is something you know that you have not yet told. Those in control of the prison know that you know. So do those not in control. If you tell, thirty or forty or a hundred of your friends, your comrades, will be caught and will die. If you refuse to tell, tonight will be like last night. They always choose the night. You don't think about the night however, but about the piece of bread they offered you.
How long does it take? The piece of bread was brown and fresh and reminded you of sunlight falling across a wooden floor. It reminded you of a bowl, a yellow bowl that was once in your home. It held apples and pears; it stood on a table you can also remember. It's not the hunger or the pain that is killing you but the absence of the yellow bowl. If you could only hold the bowl in your hands, right here, you could withstand anything, you tell yourself. The bread they offered you is subversive, it's treacherous, it does not mean life."
❕❗️‼️ thanks!!!
Excerpts from Pablo Neruda's Ode to Bread:
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
7s
Kamau Brathwaite
1930 - 2020
Bread (2005)
Slowly the white dream wrestle(s) to life
hands shaping the salt and the foreign cornfields
the cold flesh kneaded by fingers
is ready for the charcoal for the black wife
of heat the years of green sleeping in the volcano.
the dream becomes tougher. settling into its shape
like a bullfrog. suns rise and electrons
touch it. walls melt into brown. moving to crisp and crackle
breathing edge of the knife of the oven.
noise of the shop. noise of the farmer. market.
on this slab of lord. on this table w/ its oil-skin cloth
on this altar of the bone. this sacrifice
of isaac. warm dead. warm merchandise. more than worn
merchandise
life
itself. the dream of the soil itself
flesh of the god you break. peace to your lips. strife
of the multitudes who howl all day for its saviour
who need its crumbs as fish. flickering through their green
element
need a wide glassy wisdom
to keep their groans alive
and this loaf here. life
now halted. more and more water add-
itive. the dream less clear. the soil more distant
its prayer of table. bless of lips. more hard to reach w/ penn-
ies. the knife
that should have cut it. the hands that should have broken open its victory
of crusts at your throat. balaam watching w/ red leak
-ing eyes. the rats
finding only this young empty husk
sharp-
ening their ratchets. your wife
going out on the streets. searching searching
her feet tapping. the lights of the motor-
cars watching watching round-
ing the shape of her girdle. her back naked
rolled into night into night w/out morning
rolled into dead into dead w/out vision
rolled into life into life w/out dream
super ... thx!
There are lots of examples. c
https://weightloss-slim.fit/node/15348/bread-literature%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E%3Cp%3E%3Cbr%3EFrom 2010 TFL
And this:
https://weightloss-slim.fit/node/55394/sourdough-literature%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E%3C/div%3E
The creative craft of baking.
"For me the role of a baker is to provide food and nourish their community. As a food provider, this was a responsibility I took very seriously, and one which I also found hugely rewarding.
Focussing more on teaching now, allows me to continue this role by ensuring others can do this either for themselves or others. This is why our recipes and classes always have a focus on the nutritional value of bread. And also how to make bread delicious, so people will eat it.
As the months passed since I stopped baking, something else has begun to reveal itself: what I am really feeling, is that I am missing the creative craft of baking.
Being physically creative in a focussed and often intense way. Acquiring a skill, honed over years, repetitive processes of shaping, scoring and baking hundreds of thousands of loaves by hand. Constantly bringing something new into the world.
Being immersed in the flow of the day. And standing back at the end of it with a sense of achievement. The creative craft of baking bread and all creative processes should be recognised, valued, and celebrated.
When we bake bread, we use our hands and minds to create objects, which are not only visually appealing, but also fill so many of the other senses: taste, smell, and care.
Bread's primary role may be to nourish, but to the baker, be they home or professional, that creative act is important.
Physical creativity cannot be replicated through an ever increasingly digital world.
As I have slowed down and allowed space to see what would come forth it is this creative side which is revealing itself.
Before becoming a professional baker I consciously gave up a career as a creative artist in theater set production. It seems like, almost unbeknownst to me, the creative practice of making bread at scale was after all one of the elements of being a baker which kept me baking for so long."
Taken with permission from a newsletter by Joe Fitzmaurice of Riot Rye Bakery and Baking School after he recently retired from full time baking.
Lance
So many poems and creative expressions of the art of baking. None are the same and yet all are alike in the devotion to an art.