Thursday October 8

25 quiz points for anyone writing out why the harvest moon is so bright. Leave your response on my desk before the bell rings.

Continue to work on your essays. Any questions? See me or send an e-mail.

In class: let them eat bread. Sensory exploration.

Please read the following; then eat the bread- slowly, appreciating all its sensual components: the coloring, shadows, texture. Close your eyes and move on to the taste- nibble, chew, let the dough yield. What is revealed to you? Respond in approximately 25 words.

Excerpt from Muriel Barbery’s Gourmet Rhapsody

We would buy it carefully wrapped in newspaper, at a little shop outside the city walls before we climbed back in the car. I would look at it out of the corner of my eye; I was still too dazed to make the most of its presence, but I was reassured to know it was there, for “afterwards,” for lunch. Strange… That this most visceral memory of bread, coming to me on this day of death, is that of a Moroccan kesra, a lovely, flat round, closer to a cake in consistency than to a baguette, does not fail to leave me pondering. Whatever the case may be, once I was rinsed off and dressed, blissfully awaiting my post-beach stroll through the medina, I would sit down at the table, tear off a first mouthful from the sizeable chunk that my mother handed me, and in the yielding, golden warmth of this food I found once again the consistency of sand, its color and welcoming presence. Bread, beach: two related sources of warmth, two alluring accomplices; every time an entire world of rustic joy invades our perception. It’s a fallacy to claim that what accounts for the nobility of bread is the way it suffices unto itself while accompanying all other dishes. If bread “suffices unto itself,” it is because it is multiple, not because it exists in multiple variants but in its very essence: bread is rich, bread is diverse, bread is a microcosm. Bread contains such stunning diversity; it is akin to a miniature world which reveals its inner workings as it is consumed. You storm it through an initial encounter with the barrier of crust, then yield to wonder the moment you are through, as the fresh soft interior consents. There is such a divide between the crunchy shell—on occasion as hard as stone, at other times mere show, quickly yielding to the charge, and the tenderness of the inner substance which lodges in one’s cheeks with a docile charm—that one is almost at a loss. The fissures in the envelope are like unexpected rural missives: one thinks of a ploughed field, of a peasant in the evening air; the village steeple has just rung seven o’clock; the peasant is wiping his forehead with the lapel of his jacket; his labors done.
Where the crust meets the soft bread, on the other hand, our inner gaze encounters a mill; the dust from the wheat whirls around the millstone, the air is infested with a volatile powder; and the picture changes once again, because your palate has just taken possession of the honeycombed foam, now freed from its yoke, and the labor of the jaw can begin. It is indeed bread, and yet you can eat it like cake; but chewing bread, unlike pastry, or even sweet breakfast rolls, leads to a surprising result, to a …sticky result. As you chew and chew upon the soft interior, a sticky mass is formed, which no air can penetrate: the bread adheres—yes, like glue. If you have never dared to take a mass of soft dough between your teeth and tongue and palate and cheeks, you have never thrilled to the feeling of jubilant ardor that viscosity can convey. It is no longer bread, nor dough, nor cake that we are masticating; it is something like our own self, what our own secret tissues must taste like, as we knead them with our expert mouths, saliva and yeast mingling in ambiguous fraternity.