I will knead you into a lovely full moon

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    “Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.” So said Archimedes once. I wish I could say, in the same vein: “Give me some wheat flour and a rolling pin, and I will move hearts.

        Water, salt and little else besides - just mix everything until well combined. Knead the dough into the desirable consistency, and then turn it into lovely shapes and sizes before baking these into anything you can name. Just like clay in the hands of a skilled potter, you can give your creativity free reign and shape, size, flavor up and color the dough, baking it into something beyond anyone’s wildest culinary fancy.
Our love affair with wheat is said to have started between 12,000 and 10,000 BCE. It was in the Fertile Crescent, where Mesopotamian, Assyrian, and Egyptian farmers first began cultivating wheat. Obviously, the bread we now eat took millennia to develop into what it is today. The loaves our ancestors baked were definitely harder, less refined, and coarse, but most likely also much healthier, for the ancient ones ate flour far less removed from the original, wisely preferring not to cater to the taste buds alone.
Baked in the fire of maternal love, my mom used to place before me three full moons to fuel my day’s labor. Evenly rounded paper-thin, well-raised pita bread, straight from the chapatti stone. The steam soon found a hole to escape through, and the pita bread deflated adjusting itself to the serving dish. The virtual taste of that aromatic odor in itself was rousingly appetizing. It would always remind me of the hymn lyrics that ran something like “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; anyone who eats of this bread shall live forever”.
It is a fact that man cannot live by bread alone. So my practical and pragmatic prayer for you, in the words of Nelson Mandela, is: “Let there be work, bread, water and salt for all.” However, I tend to smile in remembrance of Omar Khayyam: “A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou”.

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