Part 37 (1/2)

Chia-Yu Chen, Rosalind, et al., ”Cooking Frequency May Enhance Survival in Taiwanese Elderly,” Public Health Nutrition 15 (July 2012): 114249.

I. A GREAT WHITE LOAF

* Hammes, Walter P., et al., ”Microbial Ecology of Cereal Fermentations,” Trends in Food Science & Technology 16 No. 1-3 (2005): 411.

* Sugihara, T. F., et al., ”Microorganisms of the San Francisco Sour Dough Bread Process I. Yeasts Responsible for the Leavening Action,” Applied Microbiology 21 No. 3 (1971): 4568. Kline, L., et al., ”Microorganisms of the San Francisco Sour Dough Bread Process II. Isolation and Characterization of the Undescribed Bacterial Species Responsible for the Souring Activity,” Applied Microbiology 21 No. 3 (1971): 45965.

Candida milleri is sometimes also referred to as Saccharomyces exiguous.

* I would learn later that the dough at Tartine is even wetter than what the published recipe calls for; in the book Robertson reduced the amount of water by 10 percent or so, fearing that home bakers confronting a dough too wet to knead would ”freak out.”

* What gluten offered human wheat eaters is obvious enough, but what, if anything, did it offer the plant? I've put this question to several wheat breeders and botanists, and the consensus answer seems to be: nothing special. All seeds store proteins for the future use of the new plant by locking up amino acids in stable chains called polymers. The default storage protein in most gra.s.ses is globulin, over which gliadin and glutenin offer no advantages-except, that is, for the one tremendous advantage of happening to gratify the desires of an animal as well traveled and influential as h.o.m.o sapiens.

In his book 1493, Charles Mann suggests that the first bread wheat was planted in the New World in Mexico, after Cortes found three kernels in a bag of rice sent from Spain. He ordered the seeds planted in a plot by a chapel in Mexico City. Two of them took and, according to a sixteenth-century account, ”little by little there was boundless wheat”-much to the delight of the clergy, who needed bread to properly celebrate ma.s.s.

* Milton has a beautiful pa.s.sage in Paradise Lost in which he describes humankind's inexorable progress toward ever more ethereal types of nourishment, culminating in the bread of Christ:

So from the root

Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves

More airy, last the bright consummate flow'r

Spirits odorous breathes: flow'rs and their fruit.

Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed,

To vital spirits aspire ...

Time may come when men

With angels may partic.i.p.ate, and find

No inconvenient diet, nor too light fare;

And from these corporal nutriments perhaps

Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit. ...

II. THINKING LIKE A SEED

* John Marchant, Bryan Reuben, and Joan Alc.o.c.k, Bread: A Slice of History (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2009).

* The epidemiologists correct for the fact that, today, people who eat more whole grains also tend to be more affluent and better educated and more health conscious in general.

* Jacobs, David R., and Lyn M. Steffen, ”Nutrients, Foods, and Dietary Patterns as Exposures in Research: A Framework for Food Synergy,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 78 suppl. (2003): 508S13S.

* Many products that call themselves ”whole grain” turn out to have white flour as their first (and therefore biggest) ingredient. A product may use the Whole Grain Council stamp even if it contains as much as 49 percent white flour. A bread, like Wonder Bread's Soft 100% Whole Wheat is not 100 percent whole wheat-only the part of it that is wheat is, and much of it consists of other ingredients. The idea of whole grain is evidently much more appealing to industry than the reality.