When I thought of preparing an article on bread, I felt perfectly qualified for the job, not because of exceptional experience in baking bread but because of unrivaled experience in eating it. I had eaten thousands of miles of bread—long white loaves, round black loaves, loaves of every shade and gradation, every shape and form. I was, in fact, panivorous. I would work at leisure, giving myself plenty of time to send for stone-ground hours and to let out my dresses. My article would attempt to get the cook hack to the bread—baking oven, for most women. I decided were afraid to bake bread and defeated by the word “yeast” in a recipe. It seemed to me that if more women would return to simple, homely tasks—such as the baking of the daily bread—fewer would be writhing on psychiatrists couches or lolling in from of television screens. If America's husbands could return home from tension filled days at the office and open their front doors to the aroma of freshly baked bread, more of them would feel the awakening of long-forgotten memories of carefree childhoods and helmed mothers. They would feel welling up in their hearts a great new love for the wives and children who might have been getting on their nerves.
I would urge my readers to lake inspiration from primitive woman, with whom my article would begin. She, at least, proved her mastery of the science of nutrition by combining grass seeds and water into a “dough” which she balked in the sun and fed to her family. But modern woman, the object of my missionary program, had struck bread from her diet for the rest of her life.
To lead the cook back to the oven and to guide her wisely past all the seeming pitfalls of bread-baking, I would first have to take myself back to the oven and produce my own perfect golden loaf of bread. I would not have attempted to write the article if I had never baked bread. But a loaf of bread baked quietly at home without written notes, temperature-takings, and stopwatch timings was very different from what I contemplated doing.
At the beginning of my four months with bread, long before I developed a mild psychosis called panomania, I took what I considered the intelligent approach. I gathered as many books on bread and its history as I could locate and wrote to book finders for the rest. Books came trickling in from England. the Continent, America—every book I wanted except, of course, the one I wanted most, That, they said, was impossible to find anywhere; even the public library sent a pessimistic card saying its copies were so long overdue that they were considered permanently lost. Books on bread are still coining to me from the book finders and probably will for years.
Next, I visited large organizations which were devoting millions of dollars a year to the production of flour or yeast, and still other organizations actually engaged in baking vast quantities of bread. Everyone was kindness itself: They didn't suspect the loss of trade that loomed ahead! All this research took more time than the article required, but what of that? I had modern woman by the hand and I was determined to give her life new meaning and her home a fabulous Old World fragrance.
I now started to read the books I had collected; though misleading, they all agreed on some points. Bread, they said, was the Staff of Life. If also had made history with Marie Antoinette's fatally tactless remark, “Let them eat cake.” I learned, too, that the fine for murdering a baker was three times as high as the fine for killing an ordinary man—in the centuries before a baker in Pudding Lane started the Great Fire of London in 1666. After that my authorities disagreed. Some books contained fascinating graphs on potash and calcium. Temperatures were in centigrade, Celsius, and Reaumur, and measures were in kilos, grams, deciliters, centiliters, c.c.'s, and percentages. No one ever wrote on bread in simple straightforward Fahrenheit, pounds, ounces, cups, and spoons. Some said bread was invented; others claimed it was discovered, I decided then and there that in my article it would be both invented and discovered. Some dated bread-baking from 5000 B.C.. others, from 15000 B.C. One cryptically said 25000 Z.R. (1 spent hours tracking down this abbreviation only to find it meant “time of reckoning.”) Another authority, who bit off far more bread than he could chew, wrote that man was 600, 000 years old and bread roughly 500, 000. An Albanian adage said bread was older than man while an Italian adage said it was wiser than man. In a chapter on bread-stamping and trade-marking, 1 found a strange little story about a well-marked loaf:
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