Adam came home the other day with a recipe he wanted to try from the Scholastic Magazine thing his second grade class gets every week. This was the Presidents’ Day issue, so the recipe was for a colonial style cracker bread, apparently the same one served in some famous colonial style restaurant. I have to admit that I was sort of swept up in the romance of making colonial bread; I imagined us cooking in front of a cavernous hearth like the one Jenn and I had seen just a few weeks earlier at Paul Revere’s House in Boston. I was excited to get to work.
Several hours and a floor full of floury crumb scraps later, I had learned this: a thing can be a good recipe for cracker bread, and a thing can be a good reading comprehension exercise for second graders– but it cannot be both.
I expected to make something rustic and romantic that looked a little like this:
What we ended up with were waxy, tasteless, fatty, rock-hard little painwafers, like lembas bread for masochists.
I would not serve this to George Washington. I would not serve it to the Continental Army. I wouldn’t even serve it to Benedict Arnold, or to General Cornwallis and his dogs. This shit is nasty.
Next time, I’m sticking to Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, and to hell with patriotism.
Len Schiff: In Verse Operations 