Between going to Budapest to visit Rod Dreher and dodging the riots in Dublin, I've been a bit busy lately -- and I'm preparing to go back to the USA at Christmas. Thus, I'm late in posting a link to this, but Rod Dreher gave me a generous write-up on his Substack blog, and I'm quite chuffed:
https://roddreher.substack.com/p/the-last-who-remember
I've finished the book and am searching for an agent and publisher, so I'll keep you posted.
.jpg)
I'm writing about it at the moment, and will be doing an interview -- details to come soon.
Photo: Irish Independent.
Sourdough is a kind of bread made with naturally-occurring yeasts and lactobacilli bacteria, already floating in the air all around you. Because the lactobacilli create lactic acid, it has a slightly sour taste compared to breads made quickly with dried yeast powder from the store.
The preparation of sourdough begins with a starter of flour and water, which can be a solid, liquid or somewhere in-between. The starter carries the yeast and bacteria, and when you mix the starter with the rest of the dough you are giving the micro-organisms much more food, enabling them to spread throughout the dough. The bacteria and yeast have a symbiotic relationship: the bacteria ferment sugars that the yeast cannot digest, and their by-products are metabolised by yeast, which produces carbon dioxide gas, which leavens the dough.
First take a tablespoon (about 10
millilitres) of flour and a tablespoon of milk and mix them together – exact
quantities aren’t that important. Then you leave it sit out – say, on your
kitchen shelf – and stir it every morning and evening for about a week.
When this gooey, pale mix begins to bubble and smell sour and tangy, it has
become sourdough starter. If it smells pongy, it pulled the wrong kind of
bacteria out of the air, and needs to be thrown out -- there’s really no way to
ensure either result or predict ahead of time.
I added some organic grape peels to the mix; the grape’s sugar is food for the
yeast, and grapes are often covered in yeast themselves – that is the powdery
coating you see on the surface of grapes, one reason ancient people so easily
discovered they could make the juice into wine.
Once you have a good batch of starter going, you keep feeding it a little bit
every day. Keep it at room temperature – say, 20-25 degrees -- and take out a
portion every week or so to make the bread. Some people keep their starter in
their refrigerator, where it ferments more slowly and only needs to be fed once
a week.
Sourdough needs to be stickier and wetter than other doughs – the wetter the
better. Generally it should double in size within six hours of each “feeding,”
and it should be full of bubbles. One tip I got from the Prairie Homestead
blogger was that “if you place a teaspoon of the starter in a cup of cool
water, it should float on top of the water.”
To make the bread itself, you bake it as you would bread in general, except
that instead of a packet of yeast you use some of the starter – don’t use it
all, of course. I use about half a cup of starter – 120 ml -- to about 300 ml
lukewarm water, and then add a teaspoon-and-a-third of salt, or about eight ml.
I then mix in 720 ml of flour; I use about 20 per cent rye flour to about 80
per cent wheat. I mash it together until it’s somewhat stiff, form it into a
ball, and let it sit in the bowl for about 30 minutes.
When this is done, I stretch and fold the dough a few times, cover it with a clean dish towel and I let it rise overnight until it’s doubled in size. The next morning fold it over a few times and let it rise for about three hours, or until it’s doubled.
Preheat the oven to 230 degrees Centigrade. Sprinkle cornmeal in the bottom of a baking pan lined with parchment and place the loaf into the pan. If you have a Dutch oven, bake it for about 20 minutes with the lid on, and about 30 minutes without. Wait until it’s cool before slicing into it.
These figures and this recipe are meant
to be approximations; people have different tastes, different kinds of bacteria
and yeast in their homes, different room temperatures, and different luck. Some
bread-makers advise novices to get someone else’s sourdough starter first, in
order to see what one should taste and smell like. Some “proof” the starter
before making bread dough; that is, mixing it with three parts flour to two
parts starter, letting it rise about an hour, and then mixing in the rest of the
dough. Sourdough does have more of a learning curve than most kinds of bread,
so it takes a lot more tries to get it right, and of course every culture of
sourdough has its own rules. That's part of the fun; you get to feel your way along your own path.
Most of the clothes we wear today are made of oil, or coal, or gas, mixed with chemicals and turned into mylon or rayon or some other synthetic. They will not decay as natural fibres do, and when bits of them come out in the wash – almost every wash – they flood into the sea. Scientists recently said they expected the ocean to soon have more plastic per weight than fish, and we have no idea what effects it will have on life there as it disintegrates into chemicals.
Once, though, Ireland made its own clothes, giving thousands of people useful work – raising sheep, of course, but also growing flax to turn into linen. Flax – ‘lint,’ they called it – made linen cloth and canvas, string and rope. It was “a money-making crop because there was very little work with it,” said Davy McCrory, but that was just to grow it.
Turning it into linen was a long and complicated process that involved uprooting the plants, removing the seeds (“rippling”), soaking them (“retting”) in a bath (“dam”) until the outer husk rots, drying them again, smacking the stalks to remove the rest of the husk (“scotching”), and combing them (“heckling”). The end result was long yellow fibres of flax that became linen cloth and canvas, and a lot of short loose ones called “tow” – the reason long blonde hair is called “flaxen” and blonde children are called “towheads.”
Flax had to be pulled out of the ground rather than cut, and here too neighbours assembled to help. “You went to the neighbour to their pulling and they come to you, so that you had eight or nine men to attend and to pull it, all in one day,” said Annie McKillop. Then the plants went into the dam to be soaked so all but the fibres rotted away, and “oh the smell was wild altogether,” Francis Quinn said.
“It was the custom for the farmer whose flax was being dressed to call at the mill with a bottle of whiskey, for all the workers to share a drop on breaks,” Maurice McAleese said. “If this custom was not upheld, that farmer could count on his flax being treated with less care than the rest. The workers took two breaks, at 10 am and 3 pm, for a snack, shot of whiskey, and a smoke.” (Back Through the Fields, 112)
Women handled the scotching and heckling, said Martin Keaveny, “but scotching wasn’t all work for them! They did a bit of match-making as well, planning who would make suitable partners. There was a party atmosphere and a singsong.” It also seems to have been an opportunity for community organising; flax workers had a reputation for being political independents who talked back to public speakers, something we still call “heckling.” (Growing Up with Ireland, 24)
“It was the custom for the farmer whose flax was being dressed to call at the mill with a bottle of whiskey, for all the workers to share a drop on breaks,” Maurice McAleese said. “If this custom was not upheld, that farmer could count on his flax being treated with less care than the rest.” (Back Through the Fields, 112)
Once the linen was taken to market, “it was taken to the linen halls in Ballymena,” Harry Hume said, where cloth buyers had strict standards and long experience examined them carefully. “The buyers came along and pulled out the flax and they knew by the fibre whether it had been properly retted in the dam, or properly scotched, or dried or hadn’t been dried properly and hadn’t heated in a pile or anything.”
In our time, we have become accustomed to clothes just showing up in stores, made by slaves somewhere and travelling around a planet for us. We have become so used to cheap fabric that we have stopped mending clothes when they have holes. And we have become accustomed to widespread rural unemployment. All these problems, though, could solve each other if we brought back some of the industries that sustained small farmers and villages across Ireland for hundreds of years. We would also have clothes that did not make us dependent on Middle Eastern nations where the oil is found, or Third-World dictatorships where the clothes are made. We could clothe ourselves again.
