Of bread and recipes

I take cooking seriously. I was raised to believe that all should be welcome at my table, nursed on stories of rivals meeting at the chuck wagons in the old west, the story of the unending milk jug, the numerous stories of angels and deities testing the ancients by visiting the huts, tents and manors to see if the occupants were willing to give their best for strangers. It is an act of love, and I try to always treat it with the respect it deserves.

This is doubly true of bread. The staff of life has been around as long as civilization. To bake it is to step into that stream of history. It is also the only food that lives in our kitchen and dies in our oven to feed us and our guests. The kindest thing ever said to me came from a friend who waved a piece of wheat bread I'd baked at us and said, "This is you." I was touched. I still am.

So, when two friends of mine sent me a loaf of Cozonac at Christmas, I had to ask for the recipe. The idea of cross-country bread breaking is too rich a symbol to pass. What they sent, however, was more of a lesson than I anticipated.

The recipes on this blog follow a style common in American texts on cooking (at least that's as far as I've read). Recipes are precise, to be parsed, lexed and assembled by the user, who is admonished in the introduction to follow the recipe exactly, at least the first time. I consider a recipe on this blog successful if it is so clear and easy to follow that you do not need to contact me to make something exactly as delicious as I did. Food, according to this method, is at its best as exact reproduction. Each recipe is discreet, a self contained particle of information that need not interact with the world, a concept with a finite basis of support.

My friends opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about the transformation of dead grains, sterile eggs and milk that will not nourish a young creature. By first inspiring me to make Philo-crusted Pear Apple Pie, they started the hunger that lead me to this recipe. Try to parse it. The ingredients list doesn't map perfectly to the instructions, which themselves are not easy to follow. I had thought this was a translation error. The grammar of the piece wasn't very good, and clearly reflected that English is the author's second language. I appreciated the knowledge that was conveyed, albeit imperfectly, and posted my own version in High Level Cooking Language (HLCL).

But I was wrong. The cozonac recipe they sent had the same structure. The grammar was perfect and both of them, especially Magda, are fabulous writers (if they give me permission I'll post the recipe here). The ingredients did not map perfectly to the directions. The directions could not be parsed into distinct steps "from wheat to eat." I could not bake that bread without engaging creatively with the recipe. Had I not been making it close to midnight on Good Friday (Gegorian calender), I would have engaged with them by calling and asking what the "missing" steps were, and the conversation would certainly have flowed beyond that. Better still would have been to be in the kitchen learning directly, and thus be able to hold their baby, seen their Church, entered their world. Cooking is not compiling. The recipe is not "perfect" because it is not meant to be a distinct particle of information, available for exact reproduction. It should connect people, be an analog process with infinite support, a wave (maybe a cosine wave since the loaf kind of collapsed in the middle).

Happy Easter!