Those of you who remember Bookkake’s last adventure in the kitchen, where we cooked a monstrous egg in contraceptive sheaths, will know we have a taste for the outlandish.
We’ve recently started baking, and the physical pleasures of breadmaking are immediately obvious, even to the amateur: kneading the gooey dough until it becomes a springy, living mass, letting it rise quietly and joyfully for an hour or two, before cooking and the satisfied consumption. This week’s recipe is taken from Elizabeth’s David classic English Bread and Yeast Cookery, although the presentation is ours.
Even we are prepared to admit that this week’s escapades shade dangerously into juvenilia. But we have our justifications. It is, after all, Eastertide.
Bread has a central role in the Easter celebrations: the hot cross bun (which the early Protestants tried to ban as overly Papist), Italian cakes of anise and candied fruits, French plaits, Greek Tsoureki, and of course, the bread which represents the body of the risen Lord.
Easter’s pre-Christian origins in the festivals of Ēostre, Attis/Osiris and Adonis are filled with images of fertility and rebirth that have survived and been incorporated into our modern rituals: the hare and the egg, the fiery equinox, the risen dough. Fecundity and carnal pleasure.
Source: Only in France… at Metacafe
The French word “baguette” literally means stick or rod: “baguette magique” is the Magician’s wand, itself a stand-in for the phallus. Bread’s growth and engorgement is the ultimate foodie metaphor for arousal, and latterly, gestation: the bun in the oven which results.
In a twist worthy of Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands, Artist Toi Sennhauser completes the circle of fertility with her own particular breakfast loaf, ingredients: “flour, water, salt, baker’s yeast, vaginal yeast, current STD test (neg)”. Not even Lucian and Gray thought of that. I wonder whether it would work with brewing?
