Guilt-free "Hippy Cookies"
- 3 cups flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 3/4 cup applesauce
- 3/4 cup honey
- 2 teaspoons vanilla
- 1/2 cup walnuts
- 3/4 cup carob chips
Mix solids and liquids in separate bowls, then mix together.
Add nuts and chips.
Bake 15 minutes at 350 degrees.
Winner of the 2005 James Beard Award for best baking book, Maggie Glezer's A Blessing of Bread: The Many Rich Traditions of Jewish Bread Baking Around the World is a significant work of scholarship. Is it one for you to add to your collection? Click "Read More" for my take on it.
This is by far the most thorough book on Jewish baking traditions I've ever seen. If this is a particular interest of yours or a tradition that you participate in, then this is a no brainer: you need this book. It is a major scholastic accomplishment, as much a work of anthropology and oral history as it is a baking book, and worthy of the accolades that it received this year. Buy it today.
For someone like me, who read Gershom Sholem and some of the Talmud in college but grew up in an area with little overt Jewish culture, this book is less essential. As I mentioned in my review of her previous book, Artisan Baking Across America, Glezer tends to emphasis the anthropological over the instructive, preferring authenticity over simplicity. The bagel recipe she includes in this book is insanely complicated, requiring mail-ordered ingredients, a special food processor (stand mixers aren't good enough), and custom built baking utensils. If you are already an accomplished bagel baker this recipe may be the one that will push your bagels over the top from good to world class, but if you are trying to bake bagels for the first time this is not to recipe to take on.
My own interest in baking books is still primarily as a source of instruction, and on that level this book is of less value. That said, the shaping instructions at the beginning are quite nice, even for amateurs. If you are interested in elaborate braiding techniques, this book has merit.
I suspect that, once the buzz around this book has died down and I can find a copy used or in paperback, I'll probably pick up a copy. There is a lot to explore here: Glezer certainly deserves credit for exposing the breadth of the Jewish baking experience. Challah and bagels are what most gentiles think of when they think of Jewish baking, but Glezer shows us how much broader we should think. Jews in the Diaspora have incorporated the flavors and styles of many other traditions, from Middle Eastern flat breads to North African spiced breads to Central Asian crackers. All of these have been adapted to be expressions of the Jewish religious experience, an interplay of the sacred and the day-to-day, which Glezer makes clear, continues to this day.
North African and Central Asian baking traditions are areas I have not explored; I probably wouldn't know how to begin exploring them even if I wanted to. This book offers a decent introduction to those traditions.
I finished Six Thousand Years of Bread last weekend and since have been trying to figure out how to describe it. It is an exceptional book, unlike any I have encountered before, and reminding me more of works by Emile Durkheim or Claude Levi-Strauss than books by Peter Reinhart or James Beard. It is neither a cookbook nor just a history book; the back cover suggests it be shelved under "Cooking/Literature" but "Cooking/Anthropology" or "Cooking/Religion" would be more appropriate.
According to the foreword, H. E. Jacob was Austrian Jew who fled to New York in 1939 after spending a year in a Nazi work camp. His manuscript for this book, which he had been working on for over ten years (and claimed to have examined over 4000 works in researching), was also smuggled out of Europe. Jacob finished researching it in New York, where it was first published in English in 1944.
Although it went out of print fairly quickly, Six Thousand Years of Bread became a cult classic for bakers. In the 1990's, with the renewed interest in artisan breads, The Lyons Press began reprinting the book, and it appears to have become a part of the canon for serious bread people.
Six Thousand Years of Bread is not an easy read. And it isn't just about bread the way of a lot of recent "histories of the mundane" are just about nutmeg, salt, or the pencil. Topics covered include the role of magic in Egyptian religion versus Christianity and how it affected each culture's understanding of fermentation; how the Elusian cult of Demeter prefigured the Christian Eucharist; how ignorance of basic agronomy was a critical factor in onset the Dark Ages; how corn's short growing cycle was critical to the settlement of the American West by European colonists; how the French Revolution was largely triggered by a wheat shortage; and how the victories in both the American Civil War and World War I can largely be attributed to superior access to and distribution of grain. Fascinating stuff, but something that requires more mental energy to read than your typical baking book.
Although not a religious person, I find the mythological and ritual aspects of bread baking to be fascinating. Having worked in a bakery run by Orthodox monks, I have a hard time viewing the production of bread as a pure material transition. Though fully explained by today's science, the experience of conjuring life out of inert ingredients is better expressed in myth than equation. This book records the various ways humans have tried to enshrine that experience in folklore better than any other book I have come across.
One should be warned that this book is unabashedly Eurocentric. When it was written this was an accepted feature of most scholarship; references to "primitive peoples" or "women's role as nurturers" were not cause for alarm. I don't think the Eurocentrism in any way diminishes how outstanding this book is, but obviously if it were written today some things would be written differently. The reader should accept that this book is a product of its time and not be surprised when they run across things that would not fly today: it was a different era. Allowing such concerns to get in one's way would be to miss out on enjoying a remarkable work of scholarship.
Editor's note: I wrote this recipe last year, before hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.
Baking a King Cake is still a fun way to celebrate Mardi Gras, but at least North American readers may want to consider ordering one from a bakery in Louisiana as a way of helping those folks get back on their feet. Many of the ads that appear at the top, side, or bottom of this page are for bakeries that will bake and ship them to order. Consider clicking though and ordering one!
Although not as popular a method of celebrating Mardi Gras as drinking excessively and pressuring young women to remove their clothing, making a King Cake is a fun, festive way of taking part in a centuries old tradition of excess.
Below is a bit about the history of Mardi Gras and instructions on making this sweet, rich, festive bread.
History of Mardi Gras
The origins of Mardi Gras are obscure: it is possible that many of the traditions predate Christianity and were adapted from the Roman celebration of Lupercalia. What we do know is that by the Middle Ages Christians throughout Europe celebrated the period between the end of the Christmas Season (the Twelfth Night, January 5th) and the beginning of Lent (Ash Wednesday) as a period of merriment and excess.
Mardi Gras, as the final day of this period of festivities known as Carnival (believed to be derived from Latin carnem (meat) + levare (lighten or raise), literally "stop eating meat," since Lent will be a time of fasting), became the pinnacle of this period of self-indulgence. Think about it: it is the last evening that you are going to be able to eat meat, butter, and eggs for over a month. What are you going to do?
Laissez les bons temps rouler!
As you probably know, "Mardi Gras" literally means "Fat Tuesday." In the English speaking world it was known as "Shrove Tuesday," derived from the old English word "shrive" which means to hear confession of, assign penance to, and absolve.
Throughout the Christian world the tradition developed of using up all of the extra eggs, milk, and butter in the house by baking rich cakes and pastries. The Brits often celebrated Shrove Tuesday by eating pancakes. The Scots also celebrate Pancake Tuesday, the Aussies Pancake Day. The Swedes and Poles also celebrate the day with rich regional baked goods.
Which brings us back to the King Cake.
The King Cake
The King Cake is a rich, sweet, yeasted bread that is eaten in celebration of Mardi Gras. It is believed to have been originally baked in 19th century France to honor the three kings who visited the newborn baby Jesus. The round shape of the cake is believed to represent the unity of the Christian community. The tri-colored sugar represents the three kings and also symbolize justice (purple), faith (green), and power (yellow).
Hidden in the cake is a small toy baby. Whoever gets the slice of cake containing the toy baby is crowned the king or queen of the celebration (and also gets a lesson in the Heimlich maneuver, if she isn't careful about removing the toy from her slice before putting it in her mouth... let this be a warning).
My King Cake
Let me begin with the disclaimer that I live in Oregon, about 2,000 miles from New Orleans. I have only been to New Orleans once and it was not for Mardi Gras. Everything I know about King Cakes I've learned from the internet and a disreputable liturgist I work with, so my interpretation of the King Cake may not 100% accurate. If you are worried about accuracy, take a look at some of the other recipes available online (here or here or here or here), or order one online from here. However, this was a blast to make and everyone who tasted it enjoyed it. I believe it captures the spirit of the season.
I found quite a bit of variety in King Cake recipes. Some were filled with sweet cream cheese, others with nuts and raisins, and others were unfilled. Some were completely covered with colored sugar and others were just lightly iced. They all were rich, but while some were merely artery-hardeningly rich, others were stroke-inducingly rich. I opted for nuts and raisins and a less rich cake: were I having a party and having many people help me eat it I'd consider making it richer, but as it is only myself, my wife, my son, and perhaps a few close friends eating it, I thought the less heavy recipe gave us a better chance of completing it.
To begin, I mixed together the dry ingredients:
4 cups flour
2 tablespoons instant yeast
1/2 cup white sugar
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon grated nutmeg
1 teaspoon lemon zest
To that I added the following wet ingredients:
5 egg yolks
1 cup warm milk
1/2 cup (1 stick) melted butter
1/4 - 1/2 cup room temperature water
I mixed everything together, adding a little more flour as I mixed until I had a nice moist (but not wet), waxy dough to knead. I kneaded the dough for around 10 minutes and then put it in a greased bowl, covered it with plastic wrap, and set it aside to rise for an hour.
While it was rising, I created a simple filling:
1/2 cup raisins
1/4 chopped walnuts (pecans would be more appropriate, but I didn't have any around)
1/2 brown sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 cup (1/2 a stick) melted butter
When the dough had risen to twice its original size, I removed it from the bowl and stretched it into a long skinny strip.
I spread the filling on top of it and then picked the sides of the dough together, creating a long, skinny tube of filled dough.
I carefully lifted the tube of dough onto a greased cookie sheet.
Then I twisted the dough and brought the ends together, creating a loop.
I covered the dough with a kitchen towel and set it aside to rise again.
Approximately an hour later I preheated the oven to 375. Just before placing it in the oven I brushed the outside of the dough with an egg wash (I used some of the egg whites left over from the 5 yokes that are in the dough). I put the dough in the oven and baked it for 30 minutes, rotating it once so that it would brown evenly about half way through.
After the cake had cooled a bit, I slipped the toy baby into one of the seams that had burst open when the cake was baking.
We found the toy baby in the baby shower section of a local party supply store. Resist the temptation to use a toy troll, Smurf, or army man if you cannot find a toy baby: some of your guests may take offense. Using a crucifix is also probably inappropriate: discovering Christ on the Cross in your cake is not nearly as festive as the baby Jesus.
I coated the cake with a simple powdered sugar and lemon juice glaze (approximately one cup of powdered sugar mixed with the juice of half a lemon).
Then I sprinkled colored sugar over the top.
I made the colored sugar by putting 1/4 cup white sugar in a Ziploc bag with 5 or 6 drops of food coloring and shaking well. I was a bit concerned about where we were going to find purple food coloring when my wife reminded me that you can make purple by adding an equal amount of red and blue, two of the four colors in your basic grocery store food color kit (the other two being green and yellow, the two other colors needed to decorate this cake). I guess it is rather obvious which one of us thought about being an art major and which one has never painted in his life.
Aftermath: The Glucose Hangover
The cake turned out very good. The cake itself was rich and yellow and had a nice, subtle spiced sweetness.
The icing and the filling were a bit much for me. Three hours after eating a couple of slices my teeth started throbbing and I felt let down like a kid who just ate his whole bag of Halloween candy. Perhaps if you are raised on a Southern diet of Krispy Kreme Donuts, Pecan Pie, and Goo Goo Clusters you can handle this much sugar, but for me it was too much. My wife sufferred no ill effects, but she exercised more restraint, choosing to have only one slice of cake with her tea.
But perhaps that is the point, isn't it? Indulge yourself in such excess on the final day before Lent that you won't miss all of the treats you can't eat again until Easter. Well, at least not if you are Catholic.
Happy Mardi Gras, all.
If there is one book that I would recommend to an amateur baker interested in experimenting with artisan breads, Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice is it.
https://www.amazon.com/Bread-Bakers-Apprentice-15th-Anniversary/dp/1607748657/ref=dp_ob_title_bk
All of Peter Reinhart's books are good, but I find The Bread Baker's Apprentice the most rewarding.
The book is divided into two main sections. The first half of the book introduces the reader to the basic concepts of bread baking, the science of bread, and information about equipment and ingredients. This includes an extremely useful section on the twelve stages in the life of bread.
Even when I am baking breads from other cookbooks or from recipes I find online, I find myself referring to back to this section. No other cookbook that I can think of does as good a job as this one in giving the reader the information they need not just to follow the recipe but to understand why the recipes do what they do. Using the information Peter provides here, I have frequently been able to adjust recipes to my liking or to the ingredients I have on hand with a much higher level of confidence and sophistication than a typical baker at my level has.
The second half of the book is the recipes, about 50 total. I've probably baked half of the recipes in the book. All of them have been excellent. The Pain a l'Ancienne is a beautiful and facinating bread. The Anadama Bread is amazing on a cold day, and the updated version of Straun Bread in here is wonderful.
There are a lot of wonderful photos of each bread. Most of the recipes take up three or four pages and are much more in depth than in a typical cookbook. The recipes are not complicated, mind you, just a lot of emphasis is placed on the techniques involved in the shaping and baking traditional breads and in making sure the baker understand what it is about each bread than makes it unique.
There are a lot of other good bread books out there, but if I could only have one bread book in my kitchen The Bread Baker's Apprentice is it.
