There's more to caraway than meets the eye
In my increasingly desperate efforts to come up with recipes to bake with the Bread of Heron bread group at the Heron Corn Mill, I decided this week that I would have a go at the Deli Rye recipe from the Staff of Life bread book (page 48).
If you don't know this loaf, you really need to get out more. It has been the highlight of many a visit to Kendal, but its strong flavour has always proved elusive. There is rye flour in there, some texture due to the cracked wheat, and there are caraway seeds in the mix certainly. But what is the flavour? It's so strong, but is it a herb? A spice? I could never put my finger on it.
It turns out that the overriding flavour of the loaf is in fact completely due to the a amount of caraway seeds. I was so surprised at how much caraway the recipe needed that I phoned the shop to check it wasn't a misprint. But the finished loaf doesn't even seem to taste of caraway seeds!
Just so you get the idea what a massive shot of caraway this loaf is delivering, consider this. My favourite Bellina wholemeal bread includes 5 g of caraway seed with 500 g of flour. And for nearly 30 years I was not allowed to make this bread at home because the flavour of the caraway is too strong for some people's tastes. (You know who you are!)
The Deli Rye recipe includes 25 g of caraway seed with 600 g of flour - that's 4 times as much caraway (weight for weight) as I include in the wholemeal bread.
I was quite excited to find that I had recreated the taste of the Staff of Life loaf fairly accurately, and as a result rather a lot of the loaf was eaten while it was still warm, in a great rush of enthusiasm - like you do. I haven't quite worked out yet if the caraway seeds were responsible for an attack of heartburn later on in the afternoon! Maybe I will have to try baking it again and see if it behaves more sociably when it has had time to cool down properly.
It really is an experience though!
In the interests of balance, here is a review of the Deli Rye loaf from Peter Gordon in the Guardian in 2007, when the price was only a little lower than 10 years later -
Staff of Life Bakery deli rye, 800g, £2.50
Not your typical rye bread. Good for rye-bread beginners. I don't personally like it.
1 star
It takes all sorts, I suppose!
Subliminal snakes
You never quite know what is going to come up in conversation when you are baking. This is one of the greatest pleasures about Bread of Heron - the serendipitous nature of the chit chat that goes on while we bake.
This week the word "threshold" came up, with the suggestion that it refers to the barn doors, with upper and lower halves which can open separately. We have a door like this in the shepherd's hut. I know these as "stable doors", which makes sense as you might be quite happy to have an 'orse's 'ead sticking out of the top half, while wishing to preempt any tendency to bolting by keeping the bottom half securely closed.
Here's a fine fellow whose upper moiety has the freedom of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, while his lower person is restrained within the perimeter of his personal stable space.
The idea about "threshold" was that the bottom half of such a pair of stable doors could be closed, and the top half opened. A farm cart could be backed up to the door, and corn (in the general sense of cereal crops) could be delivered over the top of the bottom door, and thence onto the floor of the barn. The bottom half of the door would then keep the grain in.
This all seemed quite plausible and really rather a satisfactory derivation for the word. You thresh grain on a threshing floor, and the door holds it back.
But then the doubts set in. The etymology doesn't feel right. This kind of thing comes back to haunt you in the middle of the night - especially when you have had too many caraway seeds - and nags away at the back of your mind until the only thing to do is look it up in the great treasury of words, the OED.
The OED has a noun "thresh", which is either a threshing implement or a rush (a Scottish usage - OED abbreviation "Sc" stands for "Scottish", not "scarce" as I originally thought!). But there is no sign of a noun "thresh" meaning something you could hold behind a door. This meaning of threshold may be an urban myth. (See number 4 in this list of myths.)
The most natural way to understand "thresh" is as a verb meaning to tread or stamp, either on your corn or on somebody's front door step, or threshold.
The OED entry for "threshold" (scroll down to the bottom of this blog) suggests that the meaning of the "hold" part of the word threshold is unclear. It also appears as "wald" or "wood", which to me suggests it is describing the material of which the threshold is made, rather than what the barn door might be doing to the grain behind it.
Googling "threshing" is quite fun. Look at these wonderful German gents having a fine time doing the threshing equivalent of Morris dancing. That reminds me of the day my daughter (as a little girl) came home and excitedly told her mum she had "seen Maurice, dancing outside the post office".
The rhythm of the German threshers is a little similar to the rhythm of these very brave rice cake pounders.
No roundup of threshing would be complete without some yaks.
So?
If "thresh" isn't what comes in from the farm, and "hold" isn't what a barn door does to it, what exactly does threshold mean?
According to the OED, the simple meaning is -
The piece of timber or stone which lies below the bottom of a door, and has to be crossed in entering a house; the sill of a doorway; hence, the entrance to a house or building.
There are all sorts of ritual / ceremonial / superstitious significances listed in the OED examples. But this thousand years old one is what really caught my eye -
Ofer þa duru, & under þone þerxwold.
"Over the door and under the threshold". What is that about? Maybe it's refering to some sort of a custom of marking the importance of the entrance to your home. The OED supplies a clue about what might go over the door -
The horse-shoe's nail'd (each threshold's guard).
More spooky is "under the threshold". What would you put under the threshold? According to owlcation.com -
The house snake tradition evolved in Scandinavia where it became customary to bury the body of a snake under the threshold for good luck in the home.
But where do these subliminal snakes come in? The OED has a thousand year old reference to "limen" as an equivalent word for threshold. So something that you are only subliminally aware of is something that is below the threshold of your consciousness. Best place for a snake!
******* End of blog - what follows is only intended for word nerds *******
threshold, n.
Etymology: Old English þerscold , -wold , þerxold , -wold , þrexold, -wold = Old Norse þreskjǫldr , -kǫldr , nominative plural þreskeldir , modern Icelandic þröskuldr , Norwegian, Swedish tröskel , Danish (dør)tærskel ; compare Old High German driscûfli neuter, Middle High German drischuvel , durschufel , German dialect drischaufel , etc. The first element is generally identified with (? in its original sense ‘to tread, trample’), the forms of which it generally follows; but the second is doubtful, and has in English, as in other languages, undergone many popular transformations.(Show Less)
2. transf. and
fig.
c. In technical language, a lower limit.
