Does anyone bake bread anymore? Yes. But if college students don't do that anymore, that may be the most positive thing I have heard about college students nowadays.

In my college days – late '70's, early '80's – I loved homemade bread. Indeed that was the only bread I ate. I baked it myself, or – when I was living in a co-op – a housemate made it. I remember it as excellent, and maybe it was, or maybe that was the influence of vegetarians. We had a few, and were never permitted to forget it. One was actually a great guy: the best last memory I have of anyone is of him, whom I left on Highway 6 north of Bryan, Texas in June 1979, to hitchhike to Alaska; as I'd swung back to town, he'd already flagged a ride. But the rest? Loud, angry, selfish, and boring, they somehow declined the descriptor "gay," even though it was still available at the time; but this was their only act of forbearance. As tiny a minority as they were, they always demanded and got things their way. To this day I have no idea why we let them. Maybe homemade bread made it seem all worthwhile. I am not unaware of the circular logic here.

Besides great textbooks, I took from my undergraduate days a love of baking. So besotted was I that when, early in graduate school, I moved into a cottage on the outskirts of San Antonio, the first thing I did was set up bread dough. Only after I formed the loaves and got them ready for the oven did I discover the cottage had no oven! Totally undiscouraged, I re-formed the dough and figured out how to bake it in a cast-iron skillet on an electric range. Came out great!

I made pizzas that way too. One afternoon there was a power outage, and I built a tripod out of limestone chunks and raised a fire from cedar branches and baked my skillet pizza on that. That's how we rolled in the Texas Hill Country.

Years later, in an apartment in Brazil, I again had no oven, but the kitchen came with a gas range and a big aluminum kettle and in that I baked. Pizza, and breakfast rolls.

Still more years later, 1992 specifically, I was teaching an undergraduate nutrition course and – because I insisted on doing it my way – enthusiastically described baking but helpfully added, "I don't, y'know, chant to the rising dough." I also used the phrase that is the title of this piece, which friends who'd gone to a different college back in the early '80's had clued me to. My students grinned. Evidently the college experience was still full of people who did so chant, and believed their products were, bricks or not, mystical and virtuous ones.

For I suspect they all along were exactly that. Bricks, I mean, not mystical or virtuous. When did I start to suspect that? I can't say for sure, but I think it was around 2000, or whenever the retired professor I was looking after got a Mixmaster, and quietly took over breadmaking. Her bread was, and still is, so much better. I like fluffy bread. Hand-kneaded bread just isn't that. We, Western Civ I mean, got rid of hand-kneading for exactly the right reasons.

That same professor gifted me not long ago with a cookbook, Savory Baking From The Mediterranean. I've tried a few recipes. They have not been great. Right after my last Turkey trip, I decided to try pide. Unlike what I've always got in Turkey, it proved a textile. Of course it could've been just me screwing up, but I have made a number of breads from this book and the non-Middle Eastern ones have more or less come out. I should've been wary of the pide recipe: why should a bread that ends up a half-inch high require three hours of proofing? The authoress is Lebanese. I think Middle Easterners are used to B.S.'ing everyone, indeed expect everyone to just go along with it. Well, I'm not going along with it. Just as I feel I've earned a lifetime exemption from ever having to be nice to vegetarians, so I claim one against Middle Easterners.

(3/21/15)