Authors: William Alexander
Although it wasn’t warm in the car, I kept the windows closed and the air conditioner running the entire trip so that the crust wouldn’t wilt in the endless cloud I was driving inside. Glancing at the loaf in the passenger seat from time to time, my only companion on this long, dark journey, I thought of Tom Hanks’s soccer ball in
Cast Away.
Except this
boule
wasn’t round. Hoping to impress the judges, I’d tried a variation on my peasant bread, making a large loaf leavened only with the wild yeast in the
levain,
which made it a true
pain au levain.
That meant using more
levain
to compensate for the absence of commercial yeast. Somehow I’d screwed up
the baker’s percentage (perhaps not correctly accounting for the water already in the
levain
), and the dough for this two-and-a-half-pound
boule
had come out way too wet. As a result, when I flipped it onto the baker’s peel before sliding it into the oven, it flattened out almost into a pancake. I quickly slashed the moving target as best I could, then jammed it into the oven, where the hot baking stone stabilized the slithering mass into something resembling a flying saucer. I modified the label for the entry, turning my
pain au levain
into a
pain au levain miche,
hoping to salvage some of the 30 points awarded for appearance.
I had already written off the 20 points awarded for texture because the judges apparently had a strong, preconceived notion of what bread texture should be, the contest rules stating that “the texture should be moderately fine, even-grained.” In other words, the very opposite of what I’d spent the past six months trying to achieve.
Zach came in a few minutes later, surprised to smell bread baking at ten o’clock at night. I explained that I wanted the loaf to be fresh for the fair tomorrow.
“Tomorrow’s the fair?” Sensing my gloom, he broke into the theme song from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical
State Fair
,
*
cracking me up. “That’s better,” he said. “Be happy! You’re going to the fair!”
——————————————
After four hours of driving, I finally reached the fairgrounds, and after two wrong turns, followed by an illegal U-turn in front of a state trooper (who gave me a break when he saw the loaf riding in the passenger seat), I found the culinary arts competition
building and dropped the bread off a little after nine thirty. The woman who took it told me the judging would be completed by noon. I parked and, with several hours to kill, went to See the Fair, my first state fair ever. There was so much to see!
I saw lots of cows (spring calf, spring heifer, summer heifer, fall calf, winter yearling, spring yearling) being judged in a ring, teenagers leading the bovines around on a leash, which I found somehow touching and reassuring. They seemed like good kids, and I was thankful that there were still teenagers in this country, full of innocence and wonder, whose idea of a good time was leading a cow around a ring. Which made the following announcement all the more chilling.
“Attention: The ice man is here.”
“The iceman cometh!” I exclaimed out loud. Two women sitting in the bleachers next to me turned and looked quizzically. I decided I’d seen enough cows and excused myself.
I headed back to the culinary arts building, hoping that I could discreetly observe the judges at work. They hadn’t yet arrived, so I went back out to See the Fair.
I saw pigeons (archangel, parlor tumbler, American saddle muff tumbler, nun, jacobin, Lahore, frillback, Indian fantail, flying tippler, Chinese owl, American show racer, flying-type homer, show type king, damascene, swallow, Modena, English pouter, pigmy pouter, almond roller, bellneck roller, baldhead roller, show roller).
I saw geese (Toulouse, Emden, African, Sebastapol, American buff, pilgrim, Pomeranian, brown China, white China, Canada, and Egyptian, Roman tuft ed, African, Toulouse, and frizzle—“clean-legged only”).
I saw Modern Game bantams (birchen, black, black-breasted red, blue, self blue, brown red, golden duckwing, lemon blue, red pyle, silver duckwing, wheaten, white, and AOV) and Old
English Game bantams (black, black-breasted red, blue, brassy back, brown red, crele, ginger red, mille fleur, and red pyle).
I saw rabbits that weighed fifty pounds, rabbits with erect ears, and rabbits with huge floppy ears; ducks (a chocolate Muscovy, which sounded as if it were already cooked); chickens (rosecomb, Japanese, American, Cornish, silkie, bearded, Brahma, Andalusian, and a category called “Other”).
My favorite barn was the one with the sheep. The competition was about to begin, and everywhere you looked, sheep were being groomed and shaved, washed, vacuumed, and combed, giving the barn the expectant air of backstage at the Miss America pageant.
It was only eleven o’clock, but I was getting hungry (After all, I’d had breakfast at four thirty), so I headed for the food midway, hoping to find something interesting. I saw fried dough (more stands than I could count), fried curlicue fries, fried corn dogs, fried funnel cakes, fried onions, fried chicken, fried mushrooms, fried cauliflower, fried zucchini, and even fried pickles. Any food that wasn’t fried was frozen. I saw Sno-Cones, Sno-Kones, and snow cones, plus their haute cuisine cousin, shaved ice. I saw smoothies, ice cream, the Colossal Sundae Center (where their slogan, I imagine, is “Quantity, not quality”), and something called Dippin’ Dots (“ice cream of the future”). I hadn’t even covered a quarter of the food court yet. There were rows and rows of trailers selling food. It seemed that half the fairgrounds was given over to food. Yet not a sandwich to be found anywhere.
After eventually succumbing to the siren call of the deep fryer and “authentic” Belgian
fr ites
(if only!), I headed back to the culinary arts building. It was almost high noon. The tables laid out to display the baked goods were empty. A sign greeted me:
BREAD RESULTS WILL BE POSTED AT
3:00.
Three o’clock! I had hoped to be on the road by one. The
judges, all matronly-looking woman, were behind soundproof glass, tasting, drinking water, and scribbling notes. I went back to See the Fair.
I saw a log cabin, a luthier, a weaver, two youth dance troupes, and a man I judged to be eighty-five making natural brooms by hand, his head bouncing like a bobble-head doll as he worked the foot-powered mechanism. I bought a hand broom from him and wondered who would be doing this five years from now. Of course, I couldn’t very well ask
him.
I’d always associated the word
fairgrounds
with ground, so I had been surprised to see that this fair was set in concrete, concentrating and reflecting the searing ninety-three-degree heat. With more time to kill, I went to the super-air-conditioned New York State dairy-production pavilion, where I learned that fudge is a dairy food (“butter in every bite”) and downed a refreshing cold milkshake while studying an impressive life-size sculpture,
in butter,
of two boys in overalls, leaning over a rail fence, looking at their cow.
Three o’clock. Finally. A small group had gathered in the culinary arts building, but the judges were still compiling their results behind the soundproof glass. I had expected that all the entries would be displayed, with ribbons on the winners, as the geese and jams had been, but that wasn’t the case for the bread competition. Only the first-prize winners were on display, in a fogged refrigerated case, the kind where Greek diners keep their over-the-top-gorgeous but inedible deserts. My loaf was not in the case.
A judge emerged and I handed in my receipt. She couldn’t even find my folder. This was getting humiliating. I was getting ready to leave when it turned up. “Here it is,” she said, pulling out a red ribbon. “You won second place.”
Holy smokes! I studied my scorecard. I’d received 25 out of a
possible 30 points for appearance (“One side dropped”). They awarded me 15 out of 20 points for creativity, but only 20 of 30 points for flavor. This puzzled me, as flavor was the one thing I thought I had going for me, my long, room-temperature fermentations drawing out plenty of yeasty flavor. Perhaps they didn’t care for the tangy taste of the
levain,
or like Katie they favored something lighter. Say, croissants.
The score that really had me upset, however, was for texture. I’d earned a perfect score, with the added note, “It’s what it’s supposed to be.” No, it’s not! It’s too tight, too moist, even when I get some holes. How could they give me a perfect score on crumb! Several of the judges were still around, and I wanted to take issue with their verdict, but realizing the absurdity of such an argument, I took my red ribbon and drove home, having won second prize in the New York State Fair bread competition, Category 02, Yeast Breads.
It had been a good day. I had won a prize and Seen the Fair, but the strangest sight still awaited me, as I left Syracuse at seventy miles an hour.
I saw a pink high-heeled shoe flying across the road, bouncing crazily in the slipstream of the cars. I wanted to close my eyes and sleep. I’d seen enough for one day.
None is a time to pray for perseverance, to pray for the strength to continue bearing fruit as one reaches one’s prime and needs to keep going.
Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.
—
Deuteronomy 25:4
Weight: 205 pounds
Bread bookshelf weight: 44 pounds
“Wheat-eater, wheat-eater, wheat-eater,
wheat
!”
I glanced at the numbers on the clock radio, glowing dimly in the dawn—5:30—pulled the pillow over my head, and tried to go back to sleep.
“Wheat-eater, wheat-eater, wheat-eater,
wheat
!”
“Tell that damned bird to pipe down,” I moaned. Then I realized what its call—one I had never heard before—was saying.
“Wheat-eater, wheat-eater, wheat-eater,
wheat
!”
I bolted upright. Today was harvest day!
The previous October, Anne and I had planted four beds of winter wheat. For nine long months I had waited for this day, watching over my crop like a nervous mother-to-be, rejoicing at its germination when the first sprouts cautiously peeked through the soil, missing it in its childhood when it disappeared under a blanket of snow, then celebrating its return in the spring. For nine long months I’d protected it against the neighbor’s cats, shooed away grasshoppers, and deterred greedy crows as it grew to maturity, turning from grassy green to bread-crust gold.
Growing winter wheat is a horticultural act of faith, if there ever was one. You’d think one ought to be able to grow a grain of wheat in less time than it takes to make a human baby, yet the gestation period is almost precisely the same. As is, remarkably, the number of chromosomes. Wheat contains one of the most complex genomic structures in the plant world, with forty-two chromosomes, only four fewer than humans.
The wheat had “died off” in the winter, going dormant. Then, in the first days of spring, despite looking deader than a bale of straw on a Halloween hayride, it had reawakened the very same week as its swanky suburban cousin ryegrass, and by late spring it had grown to a straight, strong, three-foot-high stalk.
Of grass, not grain. Even in May there was nothing to suggest that this stalk of grass might turn into something remotely edible. The wait for it to form seed heads and change from green to golden seemed endless. But three weeks ago, startling in its suddenness, it had almost magically become recognizable wheat. A week after that, the proud wheat heads bowed to the earth, each stalk curling over in a graceful arc, a biological mechanism that protects it from rain, for as the wheat approaches ripeness, a good soaking could cause it to sprout uselessly on the stalk rather than fall to the ground and sprout in the earth.
It was a touching gesture, the swollen, almost voluptuous seed head bending over to face the very earth it had sprung from, bowing as if offering its head in sacrifice to its master so that others might gain nourishment—and life.
I was only too happy to oblige. First I had to be sure it was ripe. I brought a seed head over to Erle Zuill, a local seventy-five-year-old farmer, for a look. The very first thing out of his mouth made my blood run cold.
“Are you sure this is wheat?”
He ran his fingers over the threads that were coming out of the seed head. “It looks more like barley. I’ve never seen threads like this on wheat.”
Oh my God! What had I done? My mind started racing. I was sure the packet had said wheat—wasn’t I?—but the seed company could’ve made a packing error.
“Of course, the last time I harvested wheat was fifty years ago,” Erle added. Erle or anyone else in the county, I thought. Later on, I would learn that some classes of wheat, including the soft red winter wheat that he might have planted back then, are “beardless,” lacking those long threads.
I relaxed a bit as he rubbed his aged, coarse farmer’s hands together vigorously, opened them, and blew. The chaff drift ed away with his breath, leaving a small palmful of wheat berries, a little smaller than popcorn kernels, behind.
“It’s ripe for sure.”
That’s what I was waiting to hear.
Harvesting grain, the act that turned
Homo sapiens
from nomadic hunters and gatherers to village, then town, and finally city dwellers. Once our ancestors had learned to cultivate grain some ten thousand years ago, they could put down their own roots and stay in one place. And create pottery. And houses. And societies and schools and arts and writing and buildings. Thus in a sense the grain I was about to harvest was a direct and necessary antecedent to the magnificent Empire State Building, sixty miles to the south. As my knowledge of harvesting was based in whole on the same Flemish art that had filled my head when I planted the wheat, I had a similarly romantic vision of how the process would go. Stooped over, grabbing handfuls of wheat in my left hand, I’d swing the curved sickle in a graceful arc with my right, cleanly cutting the stalks off a few
inches above the earth. The Good Wife would follow behind, gathering the wheat into sheaves, tying them, and laying them in the field, where the Happy Children, laughing and making a game of the work, would gather them up and bring them to the barn.