Going with the Grain
A Wandering Bread Lover Takes a Bite Out of Life
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
"My lifelong love affair with bread has less to do with crust, crumb, and the vagaries of sourdough cultures and more to do with bread as a reflection of people's varied beliefs, daily lives, and blood memories....Bread tells the most essential human stories."
So begins Susan Seligson's personal and often humorous journey to discover the secrets of the baker's trade and the place bread has in the lives of those who consume it. Part travelogue, part cultural history, with a handful of recipes thrown in for good measure, it is an exploration of the customs, traditions, and rituals around the creating and eating of this most basic and enduring form of sustenance.
Bread is the stuff of life. Governments have been overthrown and religious rituals created because of it. Fry bread, matzo, ksra, nan, baguette: all are as resonant of their specific culture as any artifact. In Going with the Grain, Seligson wanders the streets of the Casbah in Fès, Morocco, to unlock the secrets of the thousand-year-old communal bakeries there. In Saratoga Springs, New York, she finds a bread maker so committed to making the ultimate loaf, he built a unique sixty-ton hearth and uses only certified biodynamically grown wheat. Seligson knelt in the Jordanian desert beside a woman turning flat breads over glowing embers and plumbed the mysteries of Wonder Bread in an aseptic American factory.
As satisfying as a slice of good bread with butter, Going with the Grain is for the armchair traveler and armchair baker alike.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Seligson's no loafer; her quest for bread from French baguettes to lab-crafted field rations courtesy of the U.S. military takes her around the world and across America, five countries and six U.S. cities in all as she explores cultural difference and identity through a common creation. As Seligson explains, "My lifelong love affair with bread has less to do with crust, crumb, and the vagaries of sourdough cultures and more to do with bread as a reflection of people's varied beliefs, daily lives, and blood memories." Serious stuff, but Seligson best known as a journalist and children's book author (Amos: The Story of an Old Dog and His Couch) leavens this offering with keen observations and a wicked sense of humor. She starts off in Morocco, where Fesi women rise at dawn to prepare the dough that will be baked as it has for centuries in huge communal hearths. Stops in the U.S. include Eunice's Country Kitchen in Huntsville, Ala., where the spitfire proprietress helps maintain the down-home feel of the former cotton-farming town turned NASA hub by serving up biscuits, ham and red-eye gravy, and the Wonder Bread plant in Biddeford, Maine, which emits no discernible smell. Seligson ends her tour in Paris, where, after a decade-long denigration of traditional technique, legislation was passed to protect and maintain the art of the boulanger. Seligson's debut essay collection is as smart and evocative as it often is laugh-out-loud funny.
