From American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes
“Did Henry David Thoreau Invent Raisin Bread?” (Lapham’s Quarterly Tumblr)
“We must have our bread.”: A letter by Thoreau to Harrison Blake (Monadnock Valley Press)
Previous Story of the Week selections
• “A Walk to Wachusett,” Henry David Thoreau
• “Cookery: Meat Department,” Harriet Beecher Stowe
• “Bill of Fare on the Plains,” Annie D. Tallent
• “The Eating-Houses,” George G. Foster
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| “Walden Pond from Emerson’s Cliff,” hand-colored lantern slide created c. 1917 from a photograph taken in 1899 by Herbert Wendell Gleason (1855–1937). Courtesy of the William Munroe Special Collections at the Concord Free Public Library. |
Even bread—one of the most basic and elemental parts of an everyday diet, as the proverb would have it—he realized he could simplify. A well-puffed loaf, it was conventionally believed, was the only healthy and wholesome kind. But Thoreau challenges his readers to see such claims for what they may be—propaganda for costly yeast and wheat flour—and to consider the moral superiority of an unleavened bread made of rough-ground, native corn. His notes on watermelon likewise affirm his underlying credo: “Our diet . . . must answer to the season.”
A major spiritual ancestor of many today who look for locally grown, organic foods, Thoreau seems not, however, to have been especially motivated by a concern for flavor—for the better taste of natural fare. To critics who questioned his austerities, he had a simple answer: “I can live on board nails.”
Thoreau began his stay at Walden Pond on July 4, 1845, a week shy of his 28th birthday, and remained for over two years, until September 6, 1847. The section in Walden on bread follows his famous admission that, during his first months of self-sustenance, he spent under $9.00 (about $350 in today’s dollars) on food he was unable to raise or gather himself. He itemized “the expense of food for eight months, namely, from July 4th to March 1st, the time when these estimates were made,” and he divided the list into two groups, foodstuffs that proved essential or appreciated and those that “failed,” which appear to be items he regretted or were not worth the expense:
Rice, .......... $ 1.73½“Yes, I did eat $8.74, all told,” he concluded, “but I should not thus unblushingly publish my guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were equally guilty with myself, and that their deeds would look no better in print.”
Molasses, .......... 1.73 Cheapest form of the saccharine.
Rye meal, .......... 1.04¾
Indian meal, .......... 0.99¾ Cheaper than rye.
Pork, .......... 0.22
All experiments which failed:
Flour, .......... 0.88 Costs more than Indian meal [cornmeal], both money and trouble.
Sugar, .......... 0.80
Lard, .......... 0.65
Apples, .......... 0.25
Dried apple, .......... 0.22
Sweet potatoes, .......... 0.10
One pumpkin, .......... 0.06
One watermelon, .......... 0.02
Salt, .......... 0.03
Bread
I learned from my two years’ experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food, even in this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength. I have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory on several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane (Portulaca oleracea) which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. I give the Latin on account of the savoriness of the trivial name. And pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of ears of green sweet-corn boiled, with the addition of salt? Even the little variety which I used was a yielding to the demands of appetite, and not of health. Yet men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries; and I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drinking water only.
The reader will perceive that I am treating the subject rather from an economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not venture to put my abstemiousness to the test unless he has a well-stocked larder.
Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine hoe-cakes, which I baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle or the end of a stick of timber sawed off in building my house; but it was wont to get smoked and to have a piny flavor. I tried flour also; but have at last found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most convenient and agreeable. In cold weather it was no little amusement to bake several small loaves of this in succession, tending and turning them as carefully as an Egyptian his hatching eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I ripened, and they had to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which I kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths. I made a study of the ancient and indispensable art of bread-making, consulting such authorities as offered, going back to the primitive days and first invention of the unleavened kind, when from the wildness of nuts and meats men first reached the mildness and refinement of this diet, and travelling gradually down in my studies through that accidental souring of the dough which, it is supposed, taught the leavening process, and through the various fermentations thereafter, till I came to “good, sweet, wholesome bread,” the staff of life. Leaven, which some deem the soul of bread, the spiritus which fills its cellular tissue, which is religiously preserved like the vestal fire,— some precious bottle-full, I suppose, first brought over in the Mayflower, did the business for America, and its influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, in cerealian billows over the land,— this seed I regularly and faithfully procured from the village, till at length one morning I forgot the rules, and scalded my yeast; by which accident I discovered that even this was not indispensable,— for my discoveries were not by the synthetic but analytic process,— and I have gladly omitted it since, though most housewives earnestly assured me that safe and wholesome bread without yeast might not be, and elderly people prophesied a speedy decay of the vital forces. Yet I find it not to be an essential ingredient, and after going without it for a year am still in the land of the living; and I am glad to escape the trivialness of carrying a bottle-full in my pocket, which would sometimes pop and discharge its contents to my discomfiture.
It is simpler and more respectable to omit it. Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances. Neither did I put any sal soda, or other acid or alkali, into my bread. It would seem that I made it according to the recipe which Marcus Porcius Cato gave about two centuries before Christ. “Panem depsticium sic facito. Manus mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam in mortarium indito, aquæ paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre. Ubi bene subegeris, defingito, coquitoque sub testu.” Which I take to mean— “Make kneaded bread thus. Wash your hands and trough well. Put the meal into the trough, add water gradually, and knead it thoroughly. When you have kneaded it well, mould it, and bake it under a cover,” that is, in a baking-kettle. Not a word about leaven. But I did not always use this staff of life. At one time, owing to the emptiness of my purse, I saw none of it for more than a month.
Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in this land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and fluctuating markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and independence that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any. For the most part the farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the grain of his own producing, and buys flour, which is at least no more wholesome, at a greater cost, at the store. I saw that I could easily raise my bushel or two of rye and Indian corn, for the former will grow on the poorest land, and the latter does not require the best, and grind them in a hand-mill, and so do without rice and pork; and if I must have some concentrated sweet, I found by experiment that I could make a very good molasses either of pumpkins or beets, and I knew that I needed only to set out a few maples to obtain it more easily still, and while these were growing I could use various substitutes beside those which I have named, “For,” as the Forefathers sang,—
“we can make liquor to sweeten our lips
Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips.”
Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain this might be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, or, if I did without it altogether, I should probably drink the less water. I do not learn that the Indians ever troubled themselves to go after it.
Thus I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was concerned, and having a shelter already, it would only remain to get clothing and fuel. The pantaloons which I now wear were woven in a farmer’s family,— thank Heaven there is so much virtue still in man; for I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer;— and in a new country fuel is an encumbrance. As for a habitat, if I were not permitted still to squat, I might purchase one acre at the same price for which the land I cultivated was sold— namely, eight dollars and eight cents. But as it was, I considered that I enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it.
There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once,— for the root is faith,— I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails. If they cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have to say. For my part, I am glad to hear of experiments of this kind being tried; as that a young man tried for a fortnight to live on hard, raw corn on the ear, using his teeth for all mortar. The squirrel tribe tried the same and succeeded. The human race is interested in these experiments, though a few old women who are incapacitated for them, or who own their thirds in mills, may be alarmed.
Originally published in Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 1854.