Because Russian Orthodox Easter falls on the same day this year (2010) as the Western Easter, it seems appropriate to include recipes for Russia’s most well-known Easter sweets: Kulich, a tall puffy “baba” or sweet-bread cousin to Italian Panettone (maybe with phallic overtones and fertility in mind?) and Paskha, a cheesecake-like dairy-rich concoction eaten with…
Category: Bread
Cheese + Flour + Yeast + Salt + Eggs = The Ancient Mystery of Bread
To contemplate bread even more, please go my previous post, Panis Gravis, or, Bread, Endless Nurturer. I’ve baked bread for years and years. In fact, except for the odd hamburger bun, my family never eats “boughten bread,” as my mother-in-law called it. In a time when “carbohydrate” evokes images reminiscent of horror films, singing the…
Telling Stories, About French Bread
Even years later, long after someone took this photo, I can see this young boy – I’ll call him Jacques – standing in the street, lugging his heavy basket made of tree branches, no doubt the same ones that Jacques’s father might use on the poor boy’s legs if he doesn’t sell all the bread…
RAMADAN KARIM — The Fast
(I wrote this several years ago and include it here as a tribute to the Moroccans I knew then and to all the people who will begin fasting for Ramadan starting on Monday, August 1. Note that while Paula Wolfert’s cookbook, Couscous and Other Good from Morocco, seems to be cited everywhere, Kitty Morse — who…
Panis gravis, or Bread, Endless Nurturer
A whole world dwells within each tiny seed. Of porridge, of bread, of love it whispers – in all these lies the promise of wheat. With it all comes both the caress of crumbs and the sour stink of brown bread and garlic, the pain of brokenness … and the bitter bread of exile. But…
Water, the Essence of All
Begin with a washing of hands, cleansing and purifying, before approaching the stove, as to an altar. Pouring water into a pot, do you remember the source? Rain, clouds, rivers, streams, lakes, oceans … Transformation, from elements and compounds and chaotic matter to life. Essence. Alchemy. In your hands, a cook’s hands, water shape-shifts into…
Panis focacius, la Gibacié, and la Pompe à l’huîle, Kin Under the Crust, One of the Thirteen
Christmas cakes were baking, the famous pompou and fougasse, as they were called, dear to the hearts of the children of old Provence. ~~ Christmas in Legend and Story A Book for Boys and Girls I’ve always loved the “Jacob’s Ladder” look of fougasse. The lacy leaf-like lattice reminds me of the connection between bread and…
Idylls of Cuisine, #91
[A photograph, and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]
