I was away from my computer yesterday. I have received interesting comments and will be posting them later this morning.

The Democrats in Congress are committing “party-cide” by going ahead with the hugely unpopular transformation of American health care. Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, at Newsmax, write to Congress:

Civil rights, Social Security, women’s suffrage — all of Majority Leader Harry Reid’s metaphors — were popular and had broad approving majorities. This bill has the opposite: a nation paralyzed with fear for what you are about to do to its health care.

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As mentioned by Gail Aggen in the previous post, the industrial-grade pizza you find in your local supplier is a bastardization of the real thing. Italian bread, whether it be rustic pane Toscano, foccaccia, pizza, casatiello, ciabatta, or coccodrillo, carries a long and exalted tradition. It is the greatest bread, if not the greatest edible, in the history of the world.

The Romans learned to bake bread from the Greeks, who brought their immense dynamism to the art and worshipped bread through Demeter, the goddess of grain and abundance. In the Roman Empire, bread baking reached its zenith in the time of Augustus. In 25 B.C., there were 329 public bakeries in the city of Rome alone, according to Carol Field, a genius when it comes to Italian carbohydrates.

Field, in her wonderful book The Italian Baker, writes:

The big central bread market in Rome boasted round breads; breads notched into eight sections, which were easy to break off into individual pieces; breads shaped like keys, cubes, or braids; breads that looked like mushrooms; and breads that looked like wreaths. There was a bread for each social class – senators’ bread, knights’ bread, citizens’, people’s, and peasants’ bread. White bread was already a status symbol, even though some writers knew that darker, coarser loaves were healthier and gave sustenance to hard-working peasants and farmers. The rich ate siligo,the finest wheat flour, which was so white that the women of Rome powdered their faces with it. Pliny noted that “in some places bread is named after the dishes eaten with it, such as oyster bread, in others from its special delicacy, as cake bread, in others from the short time spent making it, as hasty bread, and also from the method of baking, as oven bread, or tin loaf, or baking pan bread.”

It is surprisingly easy to reenact the ancient traditions of Italian bread making in one’s own home. One doesn’t need a wood-fired oven or a fancy commercial mixer. One doesn’t need enormous wooden boards or the arm muscles of a 16th century peasant. One needs, at bare minimum, flour, salt, yeast and olive oil. I have made enormous loaves of peasant Italian bread that would look at home in a bakery on a side street in Tuscany, a place I have never visited beyond the confines of my own kitchen. They were a cinch. I used no fancy equipment to knead the dough beyond that with which God endowed me. I am very fond of kneading dough. It is a great form of release and if I were a psychotherapist I would write my clients’ prescriptions for bread recipes. I like throwing a wet Italian dough against the table. It does not mind in the least.

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