The Bread Book:
  All About Bread and How to Make it
   Carolyn Meyer
   Illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman
  1971 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.NY USA
   ISBN: 0156140705

The humorous story of a most basic need in our existence. Ever since we first discovered that grain was good to eat, our attempts to get it have influenced history & deeply changed our lives.

When I first came upon Carolyn Meyer's The Bread Book: All About Bread and How to Make It I was a busy mama of two little chickadees making my own traditions one of which was the deeply satisfying & connecting ritual of Baking of the Bread for the family for the week.

This ritual is satisfying because all the aromas in the kitchen with the children at hand, stimulate senses & memory; connecting because the physical effort in the steps of this ritual are movements that women had been performing since we learnt to mash grains, ferment them, knead them & bake them.

I was privileged, many years ago, to witness the most elementary of bread baking - the rough grinding of grain, the mixing with stream water, the rolling flat & the baking on a hot rock at midday under a midsummer sun. The resulting manna, unleavened & heavy, had a surprisingly satisfying crunch & munch to it.

My copy of The Bread Book was printed in 1971 & I suspect it has long since outlived its shelf life, however, Trina Schart Hyman's pen & ink illustrations are timeless, delightfully ethnic, charmingly funny & expressive. The drawing of the woman kneading a huge lump of dough while a girl child looks on; the Christmas celebration; the various grains - Trina Schart Hyman obviously had a superb skill & as wry a sense of humor as a loaf of rye bread.

“Many people have a special feeling about their bread, no matter how strange and unbreadlike it might seem to us. They treat it with a respect that they do not have for a bunch of carrots, for example, or a slice of meat. Perhaps this is because bread has been the world's most important food for such a long time, since before man could write their own history. The story of bread is really the story of people, too...”

As a teaching tool The Bread Book was read for all the years of my children's childhood, traveling around the globe, visiting other people & their rituals of bread. More often than not, as they learnt to read, one of us would read a chapter out loud as the others baked our weekly loaves. It was epiphanic when they'd read the words & make the connections, peer at the pictures & see the jokes. Watching children think, learn & laugh.

With 30 years of more information, baking machines & juvenals gone from the nest, The Bread Book is for memories now, not just of mine in this lifetime, of all the generations making bread from icy northern latitudes to hot equatorial reaches.

I hope you can find a copy in a secondhand book store, it's not politically correct & it's written for children to get a glimpse of people around the globe & their religious rituals & the social superstitions that have grown up around our love of bread. There are also some rather tasty recipes given.

Look for the moose in the tent, fun puns & buns & the story about waffles!

More from Carolyn Meyer: Miss Patch's Learn-to-Sew Book; Stitch by Stitch: Needlework for Beginners & a host of adult novels.
(05/28/00)

Rebecca