Singing Bread and Other Lost Arts

My husband’s latest DIY project is baking bread.  However, this is not the squishy hippy dippy whole grain loaf of the 70s.  This is serious artisan stuff, and it’s also extraordinarily easy to make.  The recipe comes from Jim Lahey of the Sullivan Street Baking Company in NYC, who realized that bread was elemental to human history, something that most cultures had developed before recorded history.  Baking really good bread just couldn’t be that complicated!  I’m not giving away his technique here, but it’s revolutionary in its simplicity, and it requires just 4 ingredients.  My favorite part is when the bread comes out of the oven – it sings!  (Actually it crackles and hisses, but Lahey describes it as singing and I love the idea.) It’s also the most wonderful, thick crusted, slightly sour bread I’ve ever tasted, and I’ve been to Poilane in Paris.  Twice.  So now Bill bakes bread at least once a week, and sometimes more, whether we need it or not…

On the subject of larger scale DIY projects, we spent the better part of the weekend digging a trench 6 feet long and 5 feet deep.  We diverted the plumbing from our Lake County kitchen into a large leach field for gray water – the stuff that drains down the kitchen sink and can be recycled to water gardens and such.  And what a task it was.  After digging through the soft top soil, we hit a hard rock layer, and then underneath hard clay.  I fear I was not as forceful as I’d hoped in driving my shovel into the earth.  Bill demonstrated how to hoist the shovel, thrust it down hard, and then jump on it for maximum impact.  Unaccustomed as I am to jumping on shovels, I tended to wobble off, and then try again, and again.  My efforts at filling the trench, however, were far more fruitful. When finished, the sense of accomplishment was pretty amazing.  The task took about 8 hours, and our front yard still looks like giant gophers are at work, but all that gray watery goodness will now go back into the earth, helping to keep the lavender  thriving during the long hot summer.

As you might have guessed, this blog is about work – sometimes back-breakingly difficult, and sometimes elementally simple.  In our rich Western society, simple hard work is becoming a lost art.  So much of what we do is over-complicated, erratic, distracted, or unfinished.  There’s nothing like finishing a task, whether digging a trench or baking a loaf, to keep you focused, in the moment, and even happy. 

Learning to sing, and singing well (whether alone or in a chorus) is really hard work.  Sometimes it’s simple, and sometimes it’s complicated, but it requires focus and effort and commitment at all times.  SFGC is doing something extraordinary for girls – teaching them basic DIY life skills like perseverance and the satisfaction of a job well done, along with notes and meters and pitch and breathing and phrasing, etc. 

And by the way, the singing bread is actually still working while it sings – it’s releasing moisture and firming the crust.  You’re supposed to wait until it cools completely and stops singing before tasting it.  But it’s so delicious, we never do.