Wholegrain Soda Bread

When the lockdown started in March, a wave of people got to work mixing up sourdough starters and baking bread. I was frequently asked for my sourdough starter recipe and people were confounded, and a bit disappointed, that I didn’t have one. There are five very good bread bakeries within a few blocks of where I live (bakeries stayed open in France during the confinement, as they’re considered essential businesses), and while I was avoiding going out, getting bread from your local bakery is part of the rhythm of life in France. Bread is deeply important and proof of its importance was that the French revolution was spurred on by a lack of flour to make bread. Bread isn’t just “bread.” It can be much more than just something to eat.

I wasn’t making sourdough but I understood the need that people had during the confinement to embrace a project. Working from home, or not working, and having kids (and/or partners and spouses) underfoot 24/7 was a challenge as our lives lost their usual structure and forms. The new rhythm was guided not only by what you were binging on Netflix, but what you were cooking or baking, and many of us spent an inordinate of time thinking about where we could get food, how we’d get it, and what was even available. Romain and I were fortunate to be able to get almost everything we wanted, and it was hard to complain about not being able to get radishes or orange juice or lime (or kettlebells) when we look at how much we, and many of us, did have.

I thought about that largesse quite a bit during the lockdown and decided to go through my kitchen cabinets and drawers and use stuff up. As I began pulling everything out to see what I had, I realized I had way, way too many things, everything from Vietnamese coconut syrup and Irish tomato relish, to Spanish canned cockles and southern grits, and made a concerted effort to use what I had. It was a good reminder that many of us have the luxury to let food sit around for months or years. We work for that privilege but many don’t even have the opportunity to do that.

I shifted the focus of the recipes on my blog (except for the cocktail recipe posts that accompanied my videos), to things like making soup with radish leaves, how to deal with an overload of mint if one has a garden (or one buys too much when he finds it, and sees it starting to go), a one-pan meal made almost entirely of canned goods I had in my pantry, and a cookie recipe that relies on a minimum of butter (which people had trouble getting) which was also low-fat, as many of us were not as active as we usually are; you don’t burn many calories curled up on the sofa propped up with six pillows for hours, watching Dead to Me and Schitt’s Creek. And there was a nourishing soup that elevates the lowly cabbage into something that’s truly superb.

France moved out of lockdown sooner than other places. Neighbors in Italy and Spain were hit hard, too, but people’s eagerness to get outside as the weather turned warmer – and news that the virus is under control in France – took hold as people started slyly headed back outdoors even before the deconfinement was announced in early May. (Sometimes, not so slyly: our neighborhood had two very large block parties with over a hundred people showing up, lugging 6-packs of beer and dancing to rock music in the streets, a week before the confinement orders were lifted.)

When they finally made it official on May 11th, people headed back out into the streets, and I found myself walking around as if it’s just got off a two-month flight. Cafés and restaurants didn’t open until a few weeks later, giving owners a little hope to restart their businesses and recoup some of their staggering losses, although they could only seat customers outside. The amazing temperatures on the first day helped, as the city of Paris gave cafés and restaurants rare permission to do something outside the lines: Owners could set up tables and chairs nearly anywhere they could, on the sidewalks, in squares, and even in parking places in the streets.

A torrential downpour the first evening abruptly put a damper on things. Some joked that a higher power was punishing the country for opening too soon. But it wasn’t a joke to small business owners, especially restaurants and cafés, who continue to be not so optimistic about their future. They’ve had a tough year with a major strike that lasted months, the gilets jaunes protests, then the virus. Even if everything opens back up, it’s almost summer and most residents leave for their month(s)-long vacation, with no tourists in town to pick up the slack. While people around the world adore Paris; the pastry shops, the Eiffel Tower, café terraces, and sun-filled parks, it’s easy to overlook the very difficult situation that businesses face.

Then George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. Romain had told me a few weeks ago to stop watching the U.S. news because the coronavirus situation there didn’t reflect what was happening in France, where we’re currently being told that the virus is barely circulating. (Which may explain why you rarely see anyone practicing social-distancing, and fewer and fewer people wearing masks.) But I like to be informed so read a few U.S. newspapers online and watch international news, including France24, which is a reliable news source from a French perspective, broadcast in four languages.

By the end of last week, I was in another kind of fog. It was hard to explain to Romain what “being in a fog” meant. The U.S. erupted in protest. My Instagram stream became a pastiche of pastry chefs in France showing off pretty spring tarts and pictures of vendors selling cherries, artichokes, and apricots at the markets in Nice and Lyon. But from the other part of the world, pictures were of people marching in the streets protesting injustice, and racism, stunned from seeing in real-time, the incomprehensible death of a man, that became a groundswell for a movement that was long overdue. (A similar case, regarding the death of Adama Traoré in France in 2016, remains unsolved.)

I weighed in on things in my newsletter, remembering the death of activist and ACT UP founder Larry Kramer a few weeks ago. He screamed at me (yes, literally…although he was speaking, and screaming, to a group of twelve of us) and the rest of the world that enormous swaths of people were going to be discriminated against, and at the same time, decimated by AIDS, while our leaders laughed about it. It took years of activism and protests and yelling to get someone to listen.

I don’t have anything rosy to say about food bringing us together at the moment. There are bigger problems right now than “I can’t find shallots.” At the beginning of the lockdown I started a daily Apéro Hour live on Instagram, which developed a regular following, where an especially nice group of people came together daily with me as I made a drink. A number of people told me that the daily interaction was helpful to them, especially those who were confined at home by themselves. (Thank you to those who were on their own and who sent me messages. They were very touching and I appreciate your sentiments and sharing your thoughts.) For me, it was a chance to maintain some regularity in my life. More than a few people were surprised that I did them daily but I felt it important to keep up the regularity of them. Like a sourdough starter, it was my project.

I hit the pause button on them last week as it just didn’t feel right, and most people in the U.S. had called for a week of giving Black voices the mike on social media. I’ve been taking this time just to think about things. Change can happen in the streets, but it also happens in our minds. And I needed time to read and watch other voices come forward, many of which were very moving. The food community has traditionally been pretty tight and while it was wonderful to see so many Black voices in the food media shine, it was discouraging (to say the least) to see how many weren’t allowed to, or weren’t compensated for it when they did. I also watched the video of the 8 minutes and 46 seconds of George Floyd being held down until he stopped breathing. I was paralyzed watching it. It made it hard to fret over something like if Kitchen Sink Chocolate Chip cookies were better with 4 ounces of butter or with 6 ounces of butter.

I dialed down my screen time in favor of real-time discussions. I took a lot of deep breaths. I took a few walks. I stopped sleeping. I had a full-blown panic attack yesterday.

Without my tablet or telephone lit up, I took some time to revise cookbooks on my shelves that I hadn’t looked at in years. I wondered what was going to happen next. I tried to figure out if, and how, I would be able to talk about food now or in the future when there were a lot more important things to discuss. While I was doing that, I opened a bookmarked page of a cookbook I have on breadmaking that I’d always wanted to make something from, but never got around to it.

Nothing we eat is more basic than bread and while the results can be “just a loaf of bread,” the bakers that were feeding their starters and kneading and baking their loaves during the crisis I realize now that we’re onto something, whether they (and now, we…) knew it or not. It can be a lot of work to achieve a positive result, but it’s often not as hard as we think.