Alexander’s breathless, witty memoir is a joy to read. It’s equal parts fact and fun as he visits a yeast factory, enrolls in a bread-baking seminar in Paris, and wins second place in the New York State Fair bread competition, Category 02, Yeast Breads. He also peppers his narrative with insights into the historical significance of the staff of life.
Like Powell, Alexander’s mission is about more than food. We get a hint of this when, en route to France, he tries to get sourdough starter (which looks suspiciously like plastic explosive) past an airport security checkpoint. He explains that an order of monks in France needs to learn how to make bread and that he has been asked to teach them. He is on “a mission from God.’’
Alexander’s tongue-in-cheek embrace of the spirituality of his mission is reflected in his use of the monastery’s schedule of daily rituals as names for his chapters: Vigils, Lauds, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline.
The genesis of Alexander’s project springs organically from his life. A technology director by day, on nights and weekends he plays master gardener and baker to wife Anne and their children, Zach and Katie. He longs for a simpler way of life and favors the solace of the kitchen.
“Bread baking is as homey, as removed from technology, factories, and engines, as you can get,’’ Alexander writes. He is a self-proclaimed “charter subscriber to the school of thought that ‘true’ bread, the stuff of peasants, has only four ingredients: flour, water, yeast, and salt.’’ Despite his distaste for social situations, Alexander is wildly entertaining on the page, dropping clever one-liners in the form of footnotes and parenthetical afterthoughts throughout.
