Saint Roch of France, and the dog that brought his bread

Image of Saint Roch, with the dog bringing bread


August 16 is the feast day of St. Roch (also known as St. Rocco, or St. Rollox), a patron saint of dogs. He was born into French nobility in 1295, but orphaned at 20. He gave away his money to become a pilgrim, wandering through the countryside. Arriving in towns near Rome that were afflicted by the plague, he stayed there to help the sick. After several years curing people and whole towns in the area through his prayers, he caught the plague himself, and went into the forest to die. A count’s hunting dog (assumed to be a greyhound) found him, and brought bread from his owner to St. Roch. St. Roch believed that his guardian angel brought the dog to him, and showed the dog how to heal him by licking his wounds. Paintings of the saint portray him in pilgrim’s robes with a dog by his side carrying bread in its mouth.

After St. Roch recovered, the count, who had become his friend and student, gave the dog to St. Roch. The pair traveled back to Montpelier, France. Arrested as a spy during a civil war in the area, the saint and the greyhound spent five years in jail. Some say that he was cared for by an angel in jail, and some say that he and the dog ministered to other prisoners. Both could be true, of course. He died in jail in 1327.

These dates might not be precise.  A Dominican priest and archbishop, Blessed Jacobus de Varagine, Archbishop of Genoa, wrote one of the best known saints' books of the medieval times. He published the Golden Legend in 1295, and included a detailed account of St. Roch, who (in theory) would still have been alive at the time.

How Saint Roch's dog also became a saint to some

Image of St. Guinefort, the holy greyhound

This is not the end of the story. The dog, named Guinefort, lived on, and became part of another noble family. One day the family went out leaving the baby, a nurse, and Guinefort. When the nurse was in another room, a serpent approached the baby, but Guinefort killed it, leaving a fair amount of gore around. When the family returned they saw the blood, thought that Guinefort had harmed the infant, and killed the dog. But then, on closer look, they saw the snake and realized their mistake.

The nobleman buried Guinefort in a well, and planted trees to mark the grave. Local women began bringing their babies to the site, praying to the dog for protection. In days past, the same peasants had made offerings to the fauns and spirits in the area; now they brought their children's clothes and lit candles as ritual offerings. Despite numerous criticisms and attempts to quash the beliefs, a historian passing through the area noted that it was still practiced after World War 1. "Saint" Guinefort even has his own day, August 22.  The Catholic Church certainly does not consider Guinefort a saint, but many people appreciate the story and sentiment and continue to tell it.

Dogs and bread

Fire Island bread cooling on rack [photo by TWC, July 29, 2018]

The association of the dog with bread might seem accidental, but in fact it is likely that we owe our friendship with dogs to the fact that they developed a love of wheat when people began to plant it 11,000 or so years ago.  One of the most important ways in which dogs differ from their ancestors, the wolves, is their ability to thrive on grains. To do this, dogs evolved genes that increased their starch-digesting enzymes. Human digestive systems also developed more of these genes and enzymes at about the same time. The Nature article that described the genetic research concluded, “The results presented here demonstrate a striking case of parallel evolution whereby the benefits of coping with an increasingly starch-rich diet during the agricultural revolution caused similar adaptive responses [i.e., new ability to digest starches from grains] in dog and humans.” So wheat may be a crucial part of the process that gave us not only the food of life, but our best friends in the animal kingdom. Although other theories about how dogs joined their fates to humans exist, evidence supports the wheat theory, and the other theories are not mutually exclusive.

The American Kennel Club advises that it's still OK to feed your dog certain kinds of bread, in moderation. No raw bread dough, however, and no bread with raisins (raisins are toxic) or some sorts of nuts (especially macadamia), some brands of peanut butter, and no Xylitol.

Mom Oreo advises her young daughter on how to catch the tastiest dinners and invite your humans to provide some tasty bread [photo, Micki Glueckert, July 28, 2018].

My thanks to Barbara Armstrong, a dog lover who told me about St. Roch, and the dog who brought his bread.

14,000 year-old bread discovered in Jordan

Stands of wild einkorn wheat ( T. boeoticum ) in the Karacadag mountain range. Picture taken by H. O ̈ zkan in early July 2004 

Someone burned the toast, apparently, and that's part of the reason that researchers still found bits of it in 14,400 year-old ovens in Shubayqa 1, a hunter-gatherer archaeological site in northeastern Jordan.  Headlines on July 16, 2018 described the study about the oldest bread known, led by Amaia Arranz-Otaegu from the University of Copenhagen. Turning most beliefs about agriculture and society on their heads,  it showed that our ancestors baked bread with einkorn, a wild wheat, thousands of years before the first cultivated fields.

Scientists already knew that people managed existing stands of einkorn (wheat) and many other plants, that they harvested and stored grains, that they ground grains, and that they made them into flat cakes that they cooked, long before they began to grow wheat in fields. Archaeologists have discovered grinding tools with grain fragments in Mozambique from 105,000 years ago; from Australia about 50,000 years ago; and from several places in Europe about 33,000 years ago. Shubayqa 1 is the first site, however, to have the burnt bread in the hearth.

Australian Aboriginal grindstone, about 30,000 years old.

Even Paleolithic hunters and gatherers had a good reason to go through the laborious process of harvesting grains and tubers, and preparing the bread. Grinding and cooking plants allows people to gain substantially more energy from them than from the raw ingredients.  Some archaeologists think that the bread discovered at Shubayqa 1, however, may have taken even more energy to make than it gave back in nutrition, in part because it was so hard to gather wild wheat seeds.

Professor Dorian Fuller at the Institute of Archaeology in London, a co-author of the report, said that the bakers might have intended the bread for religious ceremonies, which would justify the extra work. After all, the bread was in a well-made stone building with flat floors, built-in hearths, and other fragments of food from the long-ago feast. Dr. Fuller said, "This discovery . . . reveals that people . . . had begun to consume food for social, cultural, and potentially ideological reasons."

Dr. Fuller's hypothesis finds strands of support in other wheat-related discoveries in the Middle East. People had been cooking and eating wheat at least 23,000 years before the present, and nearly 10,000 years before the bread at Shubayqa 1. The earliest evidence so far (new discoveries are made every year) is from the Ohalo II site, about 23,000 years ago, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Charred seeds of emmer (another ancient form of wheat) were found in a settlement that contained six huts, six open air hearths, and a grave.

Three thousand years after Shubayqa 1, the first fields of cultivated grains were einkorn and emmer  discovered near the temples at Gobekli Tepe in southeast Turkey. Archaeologists there hypothesized that the hunter-gatherers who built them started planting wheat so that they could be close to their places of celebration and burials.

A modern version of Australian Aboriginal seed bread, from Gurandgi Munjie group.

Scanning electron microscopes allowed researchers to analyze 24 fragments of the several hundred pieces of bread. Most of them (75%) were made only from einkorn, further supporting the idea that the people of the area valued wheat above other grains. The gluten-rich seeds would make flatbreads that were 1/4 inch-thick, more delicate and perhaps better-tasting than those  made of oats, barley and ground tubers from sedges.

                                        Flat bread -- naan (TWC, 5-19-2012)

This bread was baked near the end of the Upper Paleolithic era, which started about 50,000 years ago and ended with the beginning of agriculture around 10,000 years ago. It suggests that the Paleo diet may need some revision.  How long now, until a recipe comes out for the "real" Paleo bread, and people can return to enjoying the food of their ancestors?

               The Shubayqa 1 site, with oven where researchers discovered ancient bread.

From Kangaroo grass to wheat: Europe arrives in Australia

                      Wild emu at the edge of the New South Wales Outback (TWC).

Gifts of bread

Aboriginal stories credit Captain James Cook with bringing bread to Australia.  The stories tell about all of things that the mythical "Cook" brought: clothes, axes, animals, and bread and flour. Even though few tribes encountered  him in person, they still have Cook tales. The Rembarrnga people of Arnhem Land, where he never ventured, tell of the "real" Captain Cook, their ancestor law-man from millions of years ago. When that Captain Cook is killed, the story teller says that people tried to make him another way, and many "Captain Cooks" (i.e., white settlers) arrived.

              Captain Cook statue in Sydney, Australia (March 4, 2018) (TWC)

Cook's first expedition on the Endeavor in 1770 spent nearly two months in Queensland repairing the ship after it ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef.  Percy Mumbulla (an Aboriginal living in New South Wales) tells how Cook arrived at an island there in a large ship.  He gave Mumbulla's ancestors clothes and hard biscuits. After he left, the ancestors threw the gifts into the sea.  In his journals, Cook confirmed Mumbulla's report, saying that the Aboriginals saw the gifts as things "they had no manner of use for."

Chloe Grant and Rosie Runaway of Queensland tell a second story of Cook's arrival bearing bread:  "Captain Cook and his group seemed to stand up out of the sea with the white skin of ancestral spirits, returning to their descendants. Captain Cook arrived first offering a pipe and tobacco to smoke (which was dismissed as a 'burning thing... stuck in his mouth'), then boiling a billy of tea (which was dismissed as scalding 'dirty water'), next baking flour on the coals (which was rejected as smelling 'stale' and thrown away untasted), finally boiling beef  (which smelled well, and tasted okay, once the salty skin was wiped off). Captain Cook and group then left, sailing away to the north, leaving Chloe Grant and Rosie Runaway's predecessors "beating the ground with their fists, fearfully sorry to see the spirits of their ancestors depart in this way."

Growing wheat

The English soon returned to Australia in force. In 1788, England now bereft of American colonies to which it could ship criminals, landed a boatload of convicts at Botany Bay (Sydney).  Within a few months of their arrival, the prisoners turned farmers began to grow wheat. It took  several years of hunger while they learned how to farm, found decent soil, and tried planting new varieties of grain, but by 1799, the colony cultivated 6,000 acres of wheat.

                          A harvested field in New South Wales, February 2018 (TWC).

 As was the case around the world,  wheat culture in Australia evolved significantly during the 19th century. Early Australian farmers trying to clear ground and plant wheat lacked any sort of sophisticated equipment. Until the first plows arrived in 1797, the convicts and settlers used hoes and spades. The farmable areas near the coasts of the continent were forested, and often hilly. After cutting the trees, farmers hitched teams of oxen to wooden plows. An innovative farmer by the name of Mullens drove spikes into a V-shaped log, which his horse dragged along the plowed soil. The cultivator loosened the dirt and dropped the seeds in behind it. Iron plows didn't arrive until the 1850s.

A few years later, the Australian government paid Richard Bruyer Smith 500 pounds sterling for his invention of the "stump-jump" plow. Smith's plow went along as usual until it came to a stump or rock, at which point a hinge mechanism allowed the share and mould board to lift over the obstacle and come down on the other side. A new Australian wheat variety, "Federation," greatly increased production after 1903 when it was first marketed. New seeds, new machines, and the networks of railroads that were largely in place by the 1880s made wheat farming possible on a large scale.

                        Wheat sheaves, around 1884 - 1917, Sydney, Australia.



Cooking and eating wheat

     During the second half of the 1800s, English in Australia might well have turned to Eliza Acton's The English Bread Book for their bread recipes.

The English and other settlers adapted to their new environs. Occasionally they ate indigenous foods prepared in the same ways that the Aboriginals were accustomed to use them. Far more often than not, they substituted local foods in their own recipes because they couldn't get the ingredients that they usually ate. They cooked parrots instead of pigeons into soups, and prepared kangaroo meat as if it was beef or mutton.  Mrs. Lance Rawson's Antipodean Cookbook from 1895 gave recipes for flying fox (tastes like pork), bandicoots, and iguanas (tastes like chicken),  preparing them all using English techniques and seasonings.

                  Flying fox, Sydney Centennial Parklands, 2/10/2018 [TWC]

The indigenous peoples also adapted. They continued to prepare their traditional foods, often using English ingredients -- flour, sugar, the new meats such as mutton, beef, and pork -- to make their traditional dishes. More often, they substituted English foods for their own. The English foods tasted better to them, were far easier to get, and were recommended (or at times, required) by the English who ruled over them. Some English paid indigenous people who were working for them in English foods, including flour.

That's one part of the story.  In addition, it's also true that the English brought domesticated animals such as sheep and cattle and sent them out to graze  on the Aboriginal lands. Some of the grazed areas had been fields of murnong (yam-daisy tubers) that the Aboriginals managed by judicious use of fire to keep down pests and fertilize the soil. The English took over the grain fields and grass lands that the Aboriginals cultivated and used them for their own crops. Because many of the Aboriginal populations were decimated by Old World diseases, or by deliberate killings, they didn't have the ability to resist, or to continue to cultivate their own foods. English foods were all that were available in many places.

Damper

                   Classic damper, cooked in campfire ashes (which would be brushed off   before eating) [From 2012, in Yandeyarra, Wendy Wood)]

One new shared food was the flatbread called damper. People have made flatbreads with ground seeds and tubers  and water for thousands of years. They have cooked them buried in ashes or over hot coals. The English brought hard tack, a basic form of dried flatbread, to Australia. Once there, they created damper from the same ingredients that they used in hardtack, but prepared  it differently. William Bond, a baker in Sydney's Pitt Street, gets credit for baking the bread in the oven's ashes, "damping" them around the dough.

A 1946 recipe emphasized the kneading process for damper, which is strikingly different from hardtack. "Take 1 lb of flour, water and a pinch of salt. Mix it into a stiff dough and knead for at least one hour, not continuously, but the longer it is kneaded the better the damper. Press with the hands into a flat cake and cook it in at least a foot of hot ashes" (Bill Beatty, in the Sydney Morning Herald). Hard tack or ship's biscuit is not kneaded, merely mixed until the dough holds together, then flattened very thin, and baked for a long time at a low temperature until it dries out completely.

The Aboriginals claimed damper as their own as well. Before the English arrived, they made flatbreads by grinding Spinifex seeds, miller, Kangaroo grass, Bunya nuts, cattail tubers, and other local plants. mixing them with water, and baking the dough in ashes of a campfire. Today, as is shown in the next post, ground seeds and nuts are often mixed with wheat flour to take advantage of the fact that it has gluten and thus will rise when leavened.  In a bit of reverse cultural appropriation, the English version of damper is sometimes credited to the Aboriginals, as in this snack characterized as "Damper and Dip: An Aboriginal Tradition."

Australian damper with kangaroo (buffalo can be used instead) curry dip, Maria Rodale

The next post describes wheat in Australia's present, from damper to ramen to Aussie pies. The first post in the series is Who Invented Bread? at this link.

Who invented bread? The Australian contribution

                             Bread from Fire Island Rustic Bakeshop, Anchorage [TWC]

"Aboriginals' foods , , ,  the land is our mother . . ."  my attention was wandering from the guide's  talk about how indigenous peoples used the native Australian plants. His lecture on respect for mother earth became a background drone as we walked through the lush palms and pines of Melbourne's Royal Botanical Gardens. Then he caught my attention: "This is the bunya nut, which we ground for bread in Queensland  . . ." Bread? I care about bread, even if the rest of the lecture was not so compelling.

                                Bunya cone ready to harvest (Queensland).

Before Aboriginals set foot in Australia, dinosaurs ate bunya nuts. For millions of years after that, other animals feasted on them.  When the Aboriginals arrived 50,000 or so years ago, they began to grind bunya nuts  into flour, mix the flour with water, and bake the  flattened dough in hot coals.

Aboriginal clans and tribes traveled hundreds of miles to harvest and share bunya nuts, sometimes from trees that belonged to a single family and were passed from father to son. The last of the traditional festivals happened in 1902 (some sources say 1887). Much of the history may come from a colonist's account published in 1904 of her father's acquaintance with Aboriginals in Queensland during the middle 1800s. Families revived the traditional feasts in 2007. Today, bunya flour appears in breads, gnocchi, and pancakes, among other dishes.

The Aboriginals had bread, and I wanted to know more. I thought of bread as a Middle Eastern invention. How could it have gotten to Australia before the arrival of Dutch explorers in the early 1600s, and the first English settlement in 1788?

Recent discoveries of grindstones suggest that the Australian Aboriginal peoples made bread 50,000 years ago, and not just from bunya nuts. Most of the Aboriginal breads were made from grains (i.e., grass seeds), and from smaller seeds  or roots and tubers of other plants.

         Aboriginal grindstone image, Australian Museum (Stuart Humphries)

Some Aboriginal groups say that the creator of the bread seeds was Ngurlu, the crested pigeon, who collected them and left them for people. The Aboriginals picked up the seeds, ground them between stones,  mixed the flour with water, flattened balls of dough into disks, and baked them in hot ashes. Ngurlu is associated specifically with spinifex seeds, but also more generally with other seeds used for bread. Based on this, and the fact that grindstones elsewhere date from only about 36,000 years ago, some argue that the Aboriginals invented bread.

                                                        Crested pigeon, Sydney, Australia [TWC]

Or was it people in Mozambique who invented bread 100,000 years ago?  Starch grains on stone tools found in caves there suggests that their inhabitants were grinding sorghum and other grass seeds around 105,000 years ago. Skeptics contend that the other technologies needed to harvest seeds and turn them into digestible food did not yet exist, so it is unlikely that people were eating the sorghum. Our present knowledge can't settle the question one way or the other.

Other gndstones with starch seeds (oats, and other grains) date from about 36,000 years ago. Stones  found in Italy, Russia, and the Czech Republic from 33,000 to 30,000 years ago also demonstrate that people were grinding seeds in many places, and that bread itself is much older than agriculture.

We may not have a definitive answer in our lifetimes, but we do know that grinding seeds, nuts, and roots releases much more nourishment than eating them whole. Mixing the dry flour or paste with water makes the seeds even more edible, and flattening the ball of dough to a thin disk allows it to bake all of the way through in the ashes, maximizing the usefulness and tastiness. People have done this for tens of thousands of years.

There might be connections among all of these stories. How did Ngurlu's people get to Australia?  At the present, it looks as if modern humans, Homo sapiens, began to migrate out of Africa about 70,000 years ago. This lends more credence to the possibility that the people who were grinding seeds in Mozambique 100,000 years ago took their technologies with them when they left home. Australian Aboriginals, who are more closely related to Africans than to Asians or  Europeans, probably migrated through Asia soon after leaving Africa -- perhaps discovering seeds and roots to grind for bread along the way.

The small group of people who arrived in northern Australia  moved south over the next thousand years, setting fires to burn the forests and make the land and plants more habitable for themselves. The change in landscape, and hunting by the new occupants drove giant mammals like huge wombats and marsupial lions, to extinction. The fires changed the landscape from forests that thrived in the low-water environment to desert throughout most of the interior. Some of  the remaining plants, including spinifex, millet, and kangaroo grass, provided seeds for making bread.

                               "Seed Dreaming," painting by Angela Nangala Parlinjirri

The Aboriginals were still baking  bush bread and seedcakes when Captain James Cook first set foot on their shores in 1777, and when the first prison ship dropped people off to create a colony at Botany Bay in 1788 (now part of Sydney). The story of the transition from bush bread to damper (the English name for unleavened bread baked in the ashes) is in the next post.

Great Harvest Bread -- An Anchorage delight

Anchorage has its share of excellent bakeries, among them Great Harvest Bread. It has the distinction of being a national franchise, with local owners Dirk Sisson and Barbara Hood bringing to fruition the high standards set across the country. Dirk spent an hour recently showing me around and describing the care and attention they pay to every aspect of their work.

Outside their bakery and store/cafe sits a bale of straw with pumpkins for the season. Inside, racks of the day's breads, and courteous staff people cutting samples to be topped with butter or honey greet customers.

Dirk and Barbara support local artists and writers, and this month their show focuses on intriguing photos by Bob Eastaugh and collages by Suzanne Dvorak.  

Bob Eastaugh photo.

Suzanne Dvorak collage.

Customers can get their breads or pastries to go, or relax in the cafe section.

Great Harvest bakes more than fifty types of bread and rolls, along with cookies, quick breads muffins, scones, pound cake, and more. Their home page lists what's fresh each day.

What makes Great Harvest unique? Besides their consistent high quality, and the great variety, their insistence on freshness adds depth to their food. They grind their own whole wheat flour fresh each day, using a hammermill set in one of the back rooms of the bakery. The wheat comes from Montana fields, blended to assure uniform performance from the grain in each batch. Dirk says that they grind only enough to use within a few days so that the oils in the kernels have no chance to grow stale or rancid.

Bins of white flour, and fresh-ground wheat flour ready for mixing. The copper pipes in the center of the bins of whole wheat flour draw away the heat created in the grinding process so that the flour stays cool enough for making dough.

Like most bakeries, even those featuring small-batch artisan loaves, Dirk uses both bakers' yeast, and his own sourdough, depending on the needs of the bread. The lower shelf of the cart holds his fermenting dough, each one marked to show where it is in the three-day process of developing as a sourdough.

This temperature probe is one of the most essential tools for good bread, Dirk says. Bread-making is a mix of science -- the exact proportions of flours, liquids, yeast, salt, sugars (Great Harvest uses small amounts of honey in their breads, in part to encourage the yeast to grow, and in part for flavor), and art -- every change in temperature of the room, moisture in the batch of flour and in the air, and a dozen other factors will change how the dough grows (develops). Dirk suggests using the temperature probe about five minutes before the estimated baking time is finished. There are various ideas about the temperature for a loaf of bread; if you are baking, check the recommendations in your recipe.

One interesting point was the order that Dirk uses to mix the dough. Because flours can vary so much in their moisture content, he measures the water first and puts that into the mixing tub. Then he adds about three-quarters of the flour specified in the recipe and begins to mix. Within a short while, he can tell by the way the dough is coming together whether it needs more flour. He adds the flour  slowly, to make sure that the dough doesn't end up too wet or dry. If the dough is a little "harder,"  than usual, he bakes it at a slightly lower temperature, but for about the same amount of time.

 Bakers test the loaves daily, and record  how long the bread was kneaded, how long the dough took to rise, how long the bread spent in the oven, and more. Standard, detailed measurements are described for each of the qualities that Great Harvest expects from its bread.

We talked for a while about the protein content of wheats. Very high-protein wheats are often considered the best for breads, but they may not have as much taste, or may be missing other desirable qualities. Mills often blend flours so that a lower-protein tastier grain combined with a higher-protein wheat gives the baker the optimum combination for reliably rising bread that is also delicious

Finished loaves cooling on racks.

Dirk Sisson and the beautiful breads that he and Barbara have been baking since 1994.

A densely-seeded loaf.

The Little Red Hen and Monsanto

I feel obliged to note that this is a parody, and in no way reflects any actual experience with Monsanto. Just for the record, at this time (April 2, 1014  2014) Monsanto has not released any GMO wheat, although it is discussing the possibility of doing so in the next few years.

                                       Red hen, Anchorage, May 24, 2013. [Photo, TW Carns]

Once upon a time a Little Red Hen found some grains of wheat while she was scratching in the barn yard, and decided to make bread. She asked her friends the donkey, the pig and the dog, “Who would like to eat some delicious warm bread?” The donkey, the pig, and the dog all said, “Oh yeah! We’d love some warm delicious bread.”

The Little Red Hen said, “Who will help me grow this wheat to make the bread?” And the donkey, and the pig, and the dog all said, “We are soooo busy! Not us.” But the gentleman from Monsanto who had just spread the grains of wheat in front of the Little Red Hen said, “That just happens to be Round-up Ready (Trademarked) wheat that we’ve been wanting to test. Will you be so kind as to try it out for us?” So the Little Red Hen said “Sure, why not?”

                        Southwest Michigan winter wheat field, mid-April 2013 [Photo, M. Glueckert]

The Little Red Hen planted the Monsanto wheat in her carefully-tilled field and watched it sprout and grow bright and green Then came the day to pull the weeds that had grown equally bright and green in among the wheat stalks. The Little Red Hen said, “Who will help me weed the wheat?” The donkey, and the pig, and the dog all said, “That is not the sort of work we are cut out to do.” But the Monsanto gentleman said, “Spray a little Roundup (Trademarked) and the weeds will go away.” So the Little Red Hen bought some Round-up from Monsanto, sprayed her wheat, and the weeds shriveled away as advertised.

     Southwest Michigan wheat field, June 21, 2013 [Photo, M. Glueckert]

The grain waxed golden, and the Little Red Hen said, “Who will help me harvest this wheat?” The donkey, and the pig, and the dog all said, “That’s character-building work, and as you can see, we are already bursting with character. We do not need to help harvest.” The Monsanto gentleman said, “I can put you in touch with some harvesters,” and he did. They came, cut the wheat, and gave it to the Little Red Hen, who paid them well for their work. 

The Little Red Hen had to grind the wheat into flour, and she knew better than to ask the donkey, the pig, and the dog to help. So she took it to a mill where they removed the vitamin-rich bran and germ (which they sold to health food stores), and added in vitamins and minerals, as required by the FDA. They brought the fine white flour to the Little Red Hen in artisanal sacks, charging her a very reasonable amount extra for the nice packaging.

           
                                                             Flour sack image.

The Little Red Hen said, “It’s time to make this flour into bread. Who will help me?” The donkey, and the pig, and the dog all said, “We probably shouldn’t help because we might get it wrong.” The gentleman from Monsanto said, “We have friends who will make your flour into bread.” The Little Red Hen turned over all of her flour to the recommended bakers who put it into a monstrous large kneading machine with mono- and di-glycerides, sodium stearol lactylate, calcium sulfate (aka gypsum), and high fructose corn syrup (among other ingredients). They shaped it, and proofed it, and baked it before giving it to the Little Red Hen after she paid her baking fee.

                                              Bread, May 12, 2013. [Photo, TW Carns]

Along came the donkey, the pig, and the dog, and said, “Let us help you eat that bread. There’s way too much for you.” But the Monsanto gentleman came along and said, “No way. Little Red Hen invited me to dinner. She is going to cook bread pudding with mountain oysters, and we’re going to eat it all ourselves.” And they did.

                                         Savory bread pudding (minus the Rocky Mountain oysters).

                                      Red hen, Susanne and Thomas's, July 2011. [Photo, TW Carns]

Sicilian wheat, a smattering of tastes

The Sicilian flag shows Medusa's head, with ears of wheat alternating with the three legs that some say represent the three corners of Sicily. One source says that the Gorgons (Medusa was one of three) represented the destructive aspect of Athena. Perseus cut off her head and presented it to Athena who wore it on her shield. Thus the presence of Medusa on the Sicilian flag shows Athena's protection of  the island.

The three legs show up in symbolism elsewhere in Europe and throughout the world, so  they may represent other qualities as well. In 1082, the Normans who invaded Sicily took the three legged-symbol back to the Isle of Man, which then used it (just the legs) for its own symbol. Another interpretation of the three legs is that they represent the Greek name for Sicily, trinakrias, Sicily adopted the flag in 1282; its red represents Palermo, and  the yellow stands for Corleone, the two major cities of the time on the island.




Wheat has been one of the glories of Sicily since its Greek days, and possibly before. A couple of years ago, a friend guest-blogged here about Gold from Sicily. Since that  time, I've had the good fortune to visit Sicily and see a bit of that history and present day myself. Although we went in September and missed seeing the wheat fields in their glory, we had ample chance to sample Sicilian cuisine. From pastas to pizzas, from elaborate cakes, to memorials of martyrs, to daily breads, we saw and tasted wheat in many forms. Here are a few.



Pastry shop in Catania, with elaborate cakes.


Cannoli, with pistachio and strawberry jam decor.



Baker in small shop near the waterfront, Catania.



Breads for sale at the Catania market, September 18, 2013.



Pizza for lunch in Ortygia (Siracusa), from Cafe Professore, eaten outdoors on a square (September 18).


Cafe Professore -- everything you could want in an Italian cafe on a hot day -- a shady spot on the square, good pizza, cold drinks, gelato, and air conditioning inside for a brief respite from the sun's heat.


Ruins of the temple to Apollo, just down the street from the Cafe Professore.


Sfinciuni, the Sicilian version of pizza (recipe and more detail here). Alice at the Hotel Trieste sent us to a bakery nearby to get this. This one is stuffed with broccoli, and a bit of onion and mushroom.


The wrapping paper for the sfinciuni.


Bread for dinner in Catania, September 18.



Spaghetti with cherry tomatoes and basil, Catania, September 18.


The house wine, at Vineria i Picasso.