Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas
As long as you know how to bake, life is sure to be sweet. Unknown
Everyone seems to be baking up a storm during our stay-in. To join the baking club I made banana bread yesterday. When we cook we take a few ingredients and turn them into something else. It is a form of alchemy, chemistry in action.
When we think of alchemy we may think of wizards brewing up concoctions and isn’t that what baking is? Flour sugar and fat becomes a cake. Some researchers see alchemy as the forerunner of modern science particularly chemistry.
Trial and error lead us to become good bakers. It helps if we keep good notes on what we liked, what we added the next time, or what we took away.
What a discovery it must have been when bread was first created. It is believed the earliest bread was baked around 8000 B.C. in the Middle East specifically Egypt and would have been a flatbread like chapattis (India) or tortillas (Mexico).
The first leavened bread was made with wild yeast (sourdough) and dates back about 1000 B.C. Louis Pasteur in 1859 discovered how yeast works and nine years later Fleischman’s Yeast was founded and the modern baking era was born. The bread slicer was invented by Otto Frederick Rohwedder in 1912 and the first automatically sliced loaves were produced on July 6, 1928.
Many people are learning to make sourdough bread and creating their own sourdough starter or getting it from someone who has some. I’ve never tried to make sourdough bread but the starter sounds pretty easy to make just water and flour left to ferment and then you feed it equal parts water and flour until you are ready to make a batch of bread leaving ¼ cup of the starter for next time.
Cakes are like books, there are new ones you want to read and old ones you want to reread. Ellen Rose
Whatever we bake when we are done we have something to show for our efforts. In a time like this feeding people is something we can do. It feels wholesome, nurturing, and loving to provide food and there is something about the smell of baking that adds something extra to our day. If we want to sell our home we are told to create the smell of baking by boiling cinnamon and sugar or actually baking something to give our home that homey feeling and scent.
Maybe we are soothing our fears in an uncertain time by creating a safe and nourishing home filled with good food. We are once more gathering around the kitchen table drinking coffee, eating bread or cake, talking and laughing.
If we don’t have a house full of people we can put our creation on FaceBook or Zoom and eat our creation with a friend while they eat theirs. We may have to make an effort to connect with people but technology makes it easier. There is always the phone if we can’t get our computer to work with Zoom or other programs.
Reach out and touch someone through technology. We can have a laugh, break some bread and talk about what we’ll do when this is over. We can think about those keeping everything together while we stand and wait. We can offer up prayers for them, give thanks for them, and be grateful for what we have in our lives. When this is over we will all reflect on the part we had to play, and if we did it as well as we could. Will we be proud of ourselves?
Sometimes me thinks “What is a friend?” And then me say, “Friend is someone to share the last cookie with.” The Cookie Monster
Today I will live in the moment unless it’s unpleasant in which case I will eat a cookie. The Cookie Monster
If baking is any labor at all, it’s a labor of love. A love that gets passed from generation to generation. Regina Brett
Thank you for reading this post. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you will come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, joy, and love.
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