Since I’ve started this whole organic kick, I’ve found myself tied more and more to my kitchen, though perhaps not in the way one might expect.
I have sudden cravings to make things like cinnamon rolls, berry pie, and French baguettes from scratch. The more ridiculous the recipe — the more bowls I can dirty, the more specific the rising patterns of dough — the better. The other day I even googled cheese-making.
Part of this is no doubt about some calming factor (I do like to bake, after all), but by the time I calculated the number of hours I would need to make a single recipe of baguettes — at least 12, and they only bake for 30 minutes — I started to realize that Barbara Kingsolver was right: my sudden yearning to make food from scratch was less a desire for French yeasty goodness and more a desire to see the thing done.
As in: How does one make baguettes, anyway?
We eat them all the time, this mainstay of Western-style restaurants — sopping up soup with them and eating them with things like ham and cheese. But what are they, exactly, before they arrive at our neighborhood bakeries, cafes, and supermarkets, where they populate Windexed display cases looking long, lean and mannered?
These questions strike me as somewhat reminiscent of a five-year-old’s “but whyyy?” whine of curiosity, like asking where worms come from or how airplanes stay up, but I think that maybe those five-year-olds might be onto something.
We adults can get so involved in the day-to-day business of our lives that we forget where things like baguettes come from, that they have a lifeform and a history. We are alienated; alienated from the people who grow our vegetables, harvest our wheat, collect our eggs from clucking, uppity chickens, or raise the sirloin steak we eat for dinner. And further, we’re alienated from how they raise that meat: We might not know from which part of the animal a sirloin steak is cut from (it’s the hip, incidentally). We might not know if that cattle is grass-fed or if, more probably, it has never seen the light of day since its arrival in its feedlot. We might not know if its been given hormones or antibiotics or if it stands in its own filth while munching its feedlot corn. We might even forget that sirloin comes from an animal at all. (It comes from the supermarket, right?) And if we don’t know all of that, then we can’t know how our lives are connected to the people who quite literally feed it.
If we really are what we eat, then this stuff has to be important.
My sudden craving to make baguettes, I think, is some sort of deep-seated response to this. Some people need to take apart a car engine on the weekends, embroider table runners, or grow tomatoes and herbs in their back gardens to satisfy this same basic curiosity of how things get made. I need to be in the kitchen. Somehow I need to see the bread rise under a flour sack towel or realize exactly what a cinnamon roll’s filling looks like before it gets rolled into the dough and baked.
The antidote to alienation, Marx calls it. We call it having a hobby.
I doubt my dad would ever describe himself as a Marxist. But there he is, growing leggy edibles in the back garden, where he can go pinch off herbs to rub on roast chicken and pluck the tomatoes sunning themselves in late afternoon light for that night’s salad. Not a bad antidote to alienation.
