the good old days

I really like “friendship bread.” I think it’s delicious. My mother had a starter of this when I was growing up, and we ate it for years. After a while, we got a bit tired of it (and got more busy, as my brother and I went through adolescence), and gave up. Now, fifteen years later, I got a chance to get another starter. Great, I thought, I can have this again! Fits in well with my fairly-new tendency to make things from scratch, and it means I’ll have a delicious cakey bread every ten days but not too often.

I was a bit surprised to see the starter offered as “Amish friendship bread” — when we had our batch, it wasn’t called Amish. I have no clue how that mythology started, since one ingredient for the bread itself is a box of instant pudding (how very non-modern). And I was infuriated to read this at the end of the instruction page…

If you lose your starter you will have to get another one from a friend! ONLY THE AMISH know the SECRET INGREDIENT to making a new starter, so keep yours going!

That is pathetic. It’s intuitively obvious what the SECRET INGREDIENT is — something that replicates itself ad nauseum, since otherwise it would be diluted out of the solution. So, the SECRET INGREDIENT is alive. So, it is good ol’ yeast. (Duh, right?) I was amused for a while by the possibility that perhaps this was homeopathic Amish friendship bread, and the SECRET INGREDIENT was somehow made more powerful by dilution…

How sad is it that baking has become a mysterious art? I have a lot of respect for the Amish and Mennonite ability to cope, even thrive, without most modern technologies. But they aren’t keepers of some secret magic. Two generations ago, every woman knew how to bake; today, it’s all about pre-mixed tricks. Yeast was once as normal an ingredient as flour, but today it’s become a mysterious unknown additive.

There is, of course, the distinct possibility that I am taking this much too seriously. Wikipedia, that most credulous of online sources, disputes the Amish mythology behind friendship bread. My Sister’s Kitchen blog has a great post about “AFB” which debunks the myths (such as “NO METAL!”) and, in the comments, has a long list of variations (chocolate, ZOMG!), suggestions, and tricks.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 9:51 am and is filed under food, load of hooey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.