Monthly Archives: March 2019

Plain bread in the dark.

bread, food and cooking, home, ,

This time around I made a rather plain sourdough, which turned out to be even plainer than I wanted. It was all unbleached wheat flour, no seeds or rye or anything exciting. I made a smaller batch that would produce two medium loaves, and originally hoped to get it done in two or three days instead of what’s been happening lately, where my sourdough sponge waits in the cold garage day after day till I can finally be home for a day to finish it.

But it took four days this time. Here’s how it went:

Thursday evening: Mixed the flour, water and starter in a bowl and left it covered on kitchen counter.

Friday: Moved the bowl to the cold garage.

Saturday evening: added yeast, oil, salt and flour.

Sunday: Nothing

Monday morning: Used a little flour to form two loaves, 1# 12 oz. each. Put them in loaf pans into a slightly warmed oven.

Monday morning: The power went out.

Monday all day: The loaves continued to rise slowly and I was assuming we’d have electricity in time to bake them. Nope, that was not to be the case.

Monday evening: I had got a fire going in the wood stove, and began to realize that I’d need to bake the bread using that heat somehow. At first I thought I might put the pans right on the coals, but Mrs. Bread (haha, you would imagine she’d have good advice!) made me realize that it would be too much direct heat for aluminum pans. So I heated the cast iron Dutch oven on the narrow shelf of the stove for a half hour and sort of poured the two proofed loaves into it, and put the lid back on.

I baked it about an hour, which I think was more than necessary. I wasn’t used to a loaf with all white flour, and in the light from the flashlight it looked greenish. Having no heat from above, it didn’t brown much on the top. While the bread baked I fried eggs for my dinner in a cast iron skillet on the other side of the stove.

As soon as the bread was out of the pot, I had to try a slice. Oh, it has the nicest crumb, so “custardy” as they say, and the skin is crispy! Actually, the bottom was burnt, but easily sliced off. The sourness is perfect. But – as soon as I took a bite, I realized that I had not put in the salt!! Aaargh. So, in addition to being baked in an old-fashioned way, it has a rather old-fashioned flavor. I read once that our colonial foremothers who baked bread every day made a plain loaf that would seem terribly bland to our taste, with little to no oil, sugar, or salt. At least mine is tangy. 🙂

Like tintacks clustering.

quotes, reality, , , ,

From G.K. Chesterton:

“It is a very remarkable thing that none of us are really Copernicans in our actual outlook upon things. We are convinced intellectually that we inhabit a small provincial planet, but we do not feel in the least suburban. Men of science have quarreled with the Bible because it is not based upon the true astronomical system, but it is certainly open to the orthodox to say that if it had been it would never have convinced anybody.

“If a single poem or a single story were really transfused with the Copernican idea, the thing would be a nightmare. Can we think of a solemn scene of mountain stillness in which some prophet is standing in a trance, and then realize that the whole scene is whizzing round like a zoetrope at the rate of nineteen miles a second? Could we tolerate the notion of a mighty King delivering a sublime fiat and then remember that for all practical purposes he is hanging head downwards in space? A strange fable might be written of a man who was blessed or cursed with the Copernican eye, and saw all men on the earth like tintacks clustering round a magnet. It would be singular to imagine how very different the speech of an aggressive egoist, announcing the independence and divinity of man, would sound if he were seen hanging on to the planet by his boot soles.”

 

— The Defendant (1901)

In us the dead still belong.

church, death, quotes, , , ,

Today, about a week before our Orthodox beginning of Lent, is Saturday of Souls, or Memorial Saturday. In Divine Liturgy we commemorate all those who have “fallen asleep in the hope of the resurrection and life eternal.” Father Alexander Schmemann writes in Great Lent:

“To understand the meaning of this connection between Lent and the prayer for the dead, one must remember that Christianity is the religion of love. Christ left with his disciples not a doctrine of individual salvation but a new commandment ‘that they love one another,’ and he added: ‘By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.’ Love is thus the foundation, the very life of the Church which is, in the words of St. Ignatius of Antioch, the ‘unity of faith and love.'”

I was able to attend Liturgy this morning, and many things contributed to my great joy in participating. Saturday morning is not an “easy” day to make it to church, and I probably could count on one hand the number of these memorial Saturdays that I have attended over the years. They are celebrated often during Lent, and other dates on the church calendar.

Today many of us had offered our contributions to the list of names of the departed that were read aloud as we all prayed. My dear godmother was present with me this morning, which made me feel more complete 🙂 and it happened to be the exact date that my uncle was killed in a plane crash long before I was born — the uncle I wrote about once here.

Today we were also praying especially for two men who more recently fell asleep in Christ, one just 40 days previous. George and Nikolai, memory eternal! Romanian women brought koliva, one made of barley instead of wheat, and other commemorative foods.

Just to stand in church, to stand in Christ, to stand with my departed loved ones — it was awfully sweet. Because of this reality that Metropolitan Anthony speaks of in Courage to Pray:

“The life of each one of us does not end at death on this earth and birth into heaven. We place a seal on everyone we meet. This responsibility continues after death, and the living are related to the dead for whom they pray. In the dead we no longer belong completely to the world; in us the dead still belong to history. Prayer for the dead is vital; it expresses the totality of our common life.”