Baking bread with the Romans
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- May 29, 2020
- 961
I have to confess, I’m a little sad to see the strict shelter-in-place rules come to a slow end. My office is wherever I’m standing at the moment anyway, so it was no big adjustment to shift some things to phone interaction or written correspondence.
It has meant more time to spend with someone I love to spend time with anyway, and staying at home has been a fat bonus of allowing guilt-free time to catch up on private projects and some cooking experiments at my leisure.
Oh, but it will be a grand thing indeed to be able to eventually spot people I know and stop for a chat in the store. As it is, the face masks we should all be wearing obscure our identity enough to make me wonder if I’m rudely passing people who should get a “hello” without giving them so much as a nod. And how many warm hugs are we missing because of this truly important duty to stay safely and respectfully apart?
It will be good to invite friends over again or to go out without being made constantly aware of how close others are standing and questioning whether the other guy looks a little sick.
I’ll pray all this “get away from me” doesn’t become too deeply ingrained in our social psyche. Wear your mask now; I promise to hug the snot out of you later when it’s safe.
Perhaps a renewed appreciation for human contact will be one of the silver cloud outcomes of all this troublesome pandemic worry.
Creating a sourdough starter a few months ago could not have come at a better time, as time has opened up to babysit the dumb thing and learn how and when to feed, burp and diaper it.
My wife looks with dread at every new batch of dough. It seems one can get sick of the same loaves over and over again. I make two loaves at a time, and the result is more sourdough croutons in the freezer than we’ll ever have salads for. Let me tell you, I eat a lot of sandwiches.
I wish I could say all this attention means I can claim to have mastered artisan sourdough breads, but the opposite is true. It’s more clear now why bakers fuss so much over nailing down exact measurements, proofing times and baking steam. Even when I am painfully careful, the results are a crap shoot.
After weeks of making loaves, both of those I made last weekend went into the trash. They were flat as pancakes and hard as marble, even as the starter has seemed to truly blossom and bloom.
In the previous week, I made a single loaf from a different recipe source. I once shared with you the story of the Roman baker’s oven from Pompeii, which was revealed intact during excavations.
The poor man or woman had just filled the stone oven with loaves all slashed and marked with Caesar’s tax stamp when the whole bakery was suddenly buried in fiery ash. A couple thousand years later, the ovens were opened and there was the bread, blackened but still otherwise perfect.
Bakers have tried to replicate the loaves, which used ingredients available at the time that are a little hard to match in 21st-century East Central Ohio. Still, I wanted to try my hand at such a thing, at least in appearance. I found a good recipe for rye bread and gave it a shot.
The shape of the Pompeiian bread was odd, with a puffed top and cinched “waist” around the middle. Curators at the British Museum surmised the middle was cinched all the way around as the result of having a string tied around it before baking, with a loop likely added to allow for easy carrying. So that’s what I did.
I used some stray metal clips to press a “stamp” into one of the sections, weighed them with a piece of terra cotta and then tied a string around it with a loop. The rye recipe is one I’ll make again and share with you soon, as it baked beautifully and was delicious with molasses, caraway, fennel and anise flavors. Next go around, I’ll tie the string much tighter.
It’s another reminder of the ancient continuity of cooking. A long-nameless Roman baker and I share something across the centuries, both of us pounding and kneading the wheat harvest into something edible. He has been dead for 2,000 years, but last week he taught me how he made bread to sell in the market.