Bean Bread

I have always been fascinated by magic.  Not sleight-of-hand, not the kind of magic that manipulates objects, even if the objects are very big or even human.  That doesn’t interest me.  I like magic that transforms and creates. The kind of magic that can produce The Night Circus.

 It is simply there, when yesterday it was not… Erin Morgenstern

The kind of old magic that could save England.

I reached out my hand, England’s rivers turned and flowed the other way…
I reached out my hand, my enemies’s blood stopt in their veins…
I reached out my hand; thought and memory flew out of my enemies’ heads like a flock of starlings;
My enemies crumpled like empty sacks.
I came to them out of mists and rain;
I came to them in dreams at midnight;
I came to them in a flock of ravens that filled a northern sky at dawn;
When they thought themselves safe I came to them in a cry that broke the silence of a winter wood…  Susannah Clarke

In real life, the closest I come to that kind of magic is baking bread.  Michael Pollan, in his wonderful book Cooked,  describes the cook as an intermediary between nature and nurture.  In his chapter “Air” which focuses on bread, he argues that unlike grilling or pot-cooking, where the ingredients are more or less recognizable in the final product, bread is different.  The end is so much more than the sum of its parts; something entirely new has been created.

I don’t know whether to be proud of myself or sheepish about this, but over the last two days I made bean bread.  I had made a pot of beans and used them in a recipe for which they had to be drained.  I could not bring myself to throw out that bean water, and after an hour or so of reading Pollan on Tuesday evening it struck me that I could use it as the liquid in a batch of bread.  It turns out I’m not the only one to have had that idea, and I adapted a promising recipe from The Fresh Loaf  .  I mixed the dough last night, retarded it in the refrigerator until morning, and have just taken three loaves out of the oven.  They are not my usual free-form loaf, and this was not my usual purist flour-water-salt-and-yeast approach, but hopefully they will make good sandwiches.  Wish me luck.