Bread and Music

I learned to make bread before I learned to boil water. It is my primary cooking skill, built on the experience of many failures. I made mud pies as a child, and as a bride of 19, I baked my first loaf of tsoureki, the Greek Easter bread, which looked like a big brown clover leaf with a red egg in the middle. The recipe failed to mention that you were supposed to roll out and braid the three sections of dough.

Bread-making is satisfying on many levels, especially the part where you knead the dough. I whale the dickens out of the raw dough, because the more you beat it, the better it is. There are all sorts of bread rituals such as "proving" the yeast, though I have yet to find any supermarket yeast which does not foam up in warm water with a bit of sugar in it. 

The Tassajara bakers advocate making a paste before adding most of the flour, and this does seem to strengthen the leavening power of the yeast, but I doubt that the folk traditions of punching the dough down exactly three times or putting a man's garment on top of the towel covering the dough make much difference.

My piano teacher, Robert Sheldon, and I wrote quite a few songs together. He would take my lyric and make it into music. The main difference between lyrics and poetry is that the words must be subject to the music, rather than containing the music within themselves. 

The Kneading Chant below was one of Ten Pastoral Songs. Sheldon's music actually sounded like the rhythmic kneading of bread, and at the end of the song, the harmony sat down, like the words of the lyric. I still don't understand how he worked this bit of magic.

Kneading Chant

Green is the wheat

when it springs from the field.

Green goes to brown in the sun of the summer.

Brown goes to white in the press of the millstone.

Flour, draw the water;

leaven, draw air.

I beat the dough just as fierce as I'm able

and we all eat the bread

at my grandmother's table.