On Food and Cooking

sustenance. It also represents a truly
remarkable discovery, a lively pole on which
the young human imagination may well have
vaulted forward in insight and inspiration. For
our prehistoric ancestors it would have been a
startling sign of the natural world’s hidden
potential for being transformed, and their own
ability to shape natural materials to human
desires. Bread is nothing like the original
grain, loose, hard, chalky, and bland! Simply
grinding grains, wetting the particles with
water, and dropping the paste on a hot surface,
creates a flavorful, puffy mass, crisp outside
and moist within. And raised bread is even
more startling. Let the paste sit for a couple of
days, and it comes alive and grows, inflated
from within, and cooks into a bread with a
delicately chambered interior that the human
hand could never sculpt. Plain parched grains
and dense gruels provide just as much
nourishment, but bread introduced a new
dimension of pleasure and wonder to the