The Rambling Epicure Voices

Published by Monday, February 7, 2011 Permalink 0

Food writer, Culinary Chemistry, The Rambling EpicureJenn Oliver writes our column Culinary Chemistry. She has a Ph.D. in science, where she explains the scientific aspects of what really goes on when you cook (the next Harold McGee?). She’s been running a gluten-free blog, Jenn Cuisine, since 2008 and her kitchen is more like a laboratory than a kitchen. She’s focuses her chemical calculations and experiments on figuring out how to make traditionally glutinous food gluten-free.

Esmaa Self writes the Wild Woman on Feral Acres column. She lives on a small farm in Colorado where she employs organic and sustainable methods to grow fruits, vegetables and herbs, raise chickens, bees and fish and where she routinely turns out imaginative, healthy, guilt-free meals from scratch. One of her numerous blogs recounts her farming adventures: Backyard Eggs. She also writes novels and contributes to numerous organic farming and green publications, and runs a sustainable living site, Homeostasis.

Simon de Swaan is Food and Beverage Director at the Four Seasons hotel in New York City. He studied at the Culinary Institute of America and has an incredible collection of antique cookbooks and books about food and eating, from which he often posts interesting and unusual quotes. In his column Simon Says, he gives us daily food quotes from his tomes.

Jean-Philippe de Tonnac is an essayist, editor and journalist. He directed the special editions of the Nouvel Observateur for almost ten years and and has published twenty books. As preparation for publication of his Universal Dictionary of Bread (Dictionnaire universel du pain, Bouquins Laffont, 2010), he obtained a baker’s certificate (CAP) at the Ecole de Boulangerie et Pâtisserie de Paris in 2007, and traveled worldwide to countries where bread held a particular cultural significance.

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The 7 Lives of Bread: Recipe for Bread by the Sweat of Their Brow

Published by Wednesday, February 2, 2011 Permalink 0

by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac

Translated and adapted by Diane Castiglioni

Discriminating bread lovers and sensitive natures, please abstain.

Photo: A Crow sweat lodge, photo from Museum of the American Indian.

The activity of kneading several pounds of bread dough, before the introduction of mixing machines, brought about a condition not unlike what the Lakota Sioux undergo in their I-ni-pi ceremonies, what is commonly called a “sweat lodge.” Theirs is an act of ceremony honoring the link with the Great Creator, and inside this veritable oven, the participant performs his metanoia (μετάνοια) by ritually “crying the tears of the body.” One offers this water in a manner to allow that which is within to be given back to Mother Earth.

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