Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (37 page)

Symbolically, too, air is not nothing. Air
elevates our food, in every sense, raises it from the earthbound subsistence of gruel to
something so fundamentally transformed as to hint at human and even divine
transcendence. Air lifts food up out of the mud and so lifts us, dignifying both the
food and its eaters. Surely it is no accident that Christ turned to bread to demonstrate
his divinity; bread is partially inspired already, an everyday proof of the possibility
of transcendence.
^*

What other food could do all this symbolic
work and yet still reliably fill human bellies? No wonder long stretches of European
history can be told as the story of bread, or, rather, its two stories: a fight for
access to bread on the part of Europe’s peasantry and working class, and a fight
over the meaning of bread on the part of its elite. For what was the Reformation if not
an extended, centuries-long argument over the proper interpretation of bread? Was it
merely the symbol of Christ or his actual body?

Around the time I felt like I could reliably
bake a voluminous white loaf, I hatched the idea of preparing an entire dinner on the
theme of air, and one Saturday Samin and I got together at my house to cook it. In
addition to a couple of nicely lofted loaves of Tartinian bread that I’d baked, we
made two soufflés, a savory green-garlic one to serve with dinner, and a rose-and-ginger
one for dessert. For the main course we served (what else?) a bird, albeit a flightless
one: chicken. I broke out a bottle of vintage champagne. And Samin made honeycomb candy,
a hard yet weirdly effervescent brittle made by stirring a spoonful of baking soda into
a bubbling pot of caramelizing sugar.

The evening was a spree of retronasal
olfaction, but what made the most lasting impression was the ginger-and-rose soufflé.
There was actually not a speck of ginger or rose in it, just a few drops of essential
oil, one distilled from ginger root and the other from the petals of roses. The recipe
came from an eccentric cookbook titled, simply,
Aroma
, the collaboration of a
chef, Daniel Patterson, and a perfumer, Mandy Aftel. It called for a tremendous number
of egg whites whipped to an airy froth. The albumen proteins in the whites of eggs can
hold air much like gluten does, allowing the cells of gas whipped into it to expand
dramatically when heated. For the base, instead of calling for an equivalent number of
yolks to carry the flavor, or cream, the recipe called for yogurt, which made for a
soufflé (the word of course means “blown”) even more dematerialized than
usual. Its
flavor was powerful yet largely illusory, the result of the
way the essential oils played on the human brain’s difficulty in distinguishing
between information obtained by the sense of taste and that provided by the sense of
smell. Each weightless bite amounted to a little poem of synesthesia—a confusion of the
senses that delighted. It made for a fitting end to an effervescent evening.

By now you will not be surprised to learn
that Gaston Bachelard had a few things to say about the element of air. In a book called
Air and Dreams
, he points out that we categorize many of our emotions by
their relative weight; they make us feel heavier or lighter. Perhaps because uprightness
is the human quality, we imagine human emotions arranged on a vertical scale from ground
to sky. So sadness is weighed down and earthbound, joy is aerial, and the sensation of
freedom defies the bonds of gravity. “Air,” Bachelard writes, “is the
very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy.”

Elation, effervescence, elevation, levity,
inspiration: air words all, alveolated with vowels, leavening the dough of everyday
life.

Not that I
want
to puncture my own
balloon now that it is finally aloft, but I’m afraid I have no choice. As
mentioned, the loaf that I mastered, or nearly so, is a loaf of white bread, and white
bread is … well, problematic. I came to see that I had been bewitched by the
aesthetics of bread, completely losing sight of certain other desirable qualities in a
food, such as nutrition. (Oh, that!) Eating white bread is
a
little
better than eating pure starch, which is itself a
little
better than eating pure sugar, but not by much. I have been dwelling here on the wonders
of gluten, but of course those proteins represent only a fraction of the calories in
white flour—at most maybe 15 percent. The rest, I’m afraid, is starch, which,
beginning on the tongue, our enzymes swiftly translate into glucose—sugar. Americans
obtain a fifth of their calories from wheat—and 95 percent of that is in the form of
nutritionally nearly worthless white flour. I say “nearly” because, ever
since the nutritional vacuousness of white flour became impossible to ignore, early in
the twentieth century, governments have required that millers add back in a handful of
the nutrients (B vitamins, mainly) that they have gone to such great lengths to take
out.

Stand back far enough, and the absurdity of
this enterprise makes you wonder about the sanity of our species. But consider: When
millers mill wheat, they scrupulously sheer off the most nutritious parts of the
seed—the coat of bran and the embryo, or germ, that it protects—and sell that off,
retaining the least nourishing part to feed us. In effect, they’re throwing away
the best 25 percent of the seed: The vitamins and antioxidants, most of the minerals,
and the healthy oils all go to factory farms to feed animals, or to the pharmaceutical
industry, which recovers some of the vitamins from the germ and then sells them back to
us—to help remedy nutritional deficiencies created at least in part by white flour. A
terrific business model, perhaps, but terrible biology.

Surely this qualifies as maladaptive
behavior on our part, and yet humankind has been intent on whitening wheat flour almost
as long as we have been eating bread. But we didn’t get really good at it till the
nineteenth century, with the advent of roller mills that could cleanly scalp
all
the germ and bran from the seed, and the subsequent discovery that, by
exposing milled flour to gusts of chlorine gas, we could whiten it still further by
expunging the last remaining nutrient
from it: the beta-carotene that
tinted flour just slightly yellow. What a triumph!

Before these dubious achievements, the best
millers could do to whiten flour was to sift, or “bolt,” wheat that had
first been crushed on a stone wheel. But the millstone usually smushed the germ into the
endosperm, so people couldn’t avoid eating those nutrients, and bolting could only
catch and remove the biggest, chunkiest bits of the bran, leaving behind a fair amount
of fiber. The result was an off-white flour that was nourishing enough to keep alive all
those people for whom wheat made up the bulk of their diet—which until the last century
or so was most of the population of Europe. Though it looks white, the bread “with
the old soul” in the painting by Émile Friant that inspired Chad Robertson was
almost certainly made with this kind of flour.

The quest for an ever-whiter shade of bread,
which goes all the way back to the Greeks and Romans, is a parable about the folly of
human ingenuity—about how our species can sometimes be too smart for its own good. After
figuring out an ingenious system for transforming an all but nutritionally worthless
grass into a wholesome food, humanity pushed on intrepidly until it had figured out a
way to make that food all but nutritionally worthless yet again!

Here in miniature, I realized, is the whole
checkered history of “food processing.” Our species’ discovery and
development of cooking (in the broadest sense of the word) gave us a handful of
ingenious technologies for rendering plants and animals more nutritious and unlocking
calories unavailable to other creatures. But there eventually came a moment when,
propelled by the logic of human desire and technological progress, we began to
over
process certain foods in such a way as to actually render them
detrimental to our health and well-being. What had been a highly adaptive set of
techniques that contributed substantially to our success as a species turned into a
maladaptive
one—contributing to disease and general ill health and now
actually threatening to shorten human lives. When and where did we pass over, from
processing food to make it healthier to making it less so? To what might be thought of
as “overcooking”? There are a couple of places we could reasonably draw that
line. The refining of pure sugar from cane or beets would certainly be one. But perhaps
the sharpest and clearest line would be the advent of pure white flour (and the bread
made from it) in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The prestige of white flour is ancient and
has several sources, some practical, others sentimental. Whiteness has always symbolized
cleanness, and especially at times when disease has been rife and food frequently
contaminated, the whiteness of flour symbolized its purity. I say
“symbolized” because for most of history it was no guarantee: Unscrupulous
millers routinely whitened their flour by adulterating it with everything from alum and
chalk to pulverized bone. (For centuries both millers and bakers have been regarded with
suspicion, often with good reason. It has always been hard to determine what exactly is
in a bag of flour or a loaf of bread, and easy to pass off ingredients that are cheaper
and less wholesome than wheat flour. This is why, during periods of hunger and political
ferment, millers and bakers were frequent targets of popular wrath, occasionally put in
the stocks and pelted with bad bread.)

Adulterated or not, however, white (or
whitish) flour was generally regarded as healthier than whole grain well into the
nineteenth century. “Coarse flour”—wheat that had simply been ground on a
stone and never sifted—was coarse indeed, and gradually ground down the teeth of the
people who had no choice but to eat the dark bread made from it. Sifted flour was also
thought to be easier and
swifter to digest, and certainly for people
struggling to obtain enough calories, white bread was a superior source of quick energy.
It was also easier to chew, no small thing before modern dentistry.

So the rich demanded the whitest possible
flour, and the poor were left to eat “kaka,” as the French sometimes called
brown bread. Going back to ancient Rome, the shade of the bread you could afford
precisely indicated your social standing; to know one’s place, Juvenal wrote, is
“to know the color of one’s bread.” Some historians and
anthropologists have suggested that the prestige of white flour might also have had a
racist tint to it. Maybe. And yet white rice has enjoyed a similar prestige in Asia,
among nonwhites, so maybe not.

Whitish flour, which before roller mills
could only be obtained by sifting flour through progressively finer meshes of cloth, had
a lot to recommend it. Bran tends to be bitter, so the whiter the flour the sweeter the
bread. White flour also made for a much airier loaf; even the microscopic shards of
milled bran are sharp, and, like millions of tiny knives, they can pierce the strands of
gluten in dough, impairing its ability to hold air and rise. (On the same principle,
some gardeners kill slugs by spreading wheat bran in their path.) Those tiny bran knives
are relatively heavy, too, making it more difficult to leaven a whole-grain loaf. Even
at its best, it will never achieve the exaltation of a loaf made with white flour.

As a solution to these problems, sifting
coarse flour was less than ideal. The multistep process was time consuming and
expensive. It also failed to address what is perhaps the most serious rap against
whole-grain flours: their relatively short shelf life. Whole-grain flour tends to go
“off” within several weeks of being milled, releasing an unmistakable odor
of rancidity. Part of what makes the germ so nutritious—its unsaturated omega-3
fats—also makes it unstable, and prone to oxidization. Sifting might whiten stone-ground
flour, but it
could not remove the perishable germ, which meant that
flour had to be milled frequently and locally. This is why every town used to have its
own mill.

The advent of roller milling in the middle
of the nineteenth century made white flour cheap, stable, and whiter than it had ever
been. For a revolutionary technology, roller milling seems almost obvious, and benign.
The new mills replaced the old millstones with a sequence of steel or porcelain drums
arranged in pairs, each subsequent pair calibrated to have a narrower space between them
than the previous set, in order to grind the flour ever more finely. To begin, the seed
is dropped between a pair of corrugated drums rotating in opposite directions. During
the “first break,” the bran and germ are sheared from the endosperm. Those
parts are sifted out before the now naked endosperm moves on to the next pair of
slightly more closely spaced rollers, and so on, until the starch (or
“farina”) has been pulverized to the desired degree of fineness.