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Winner of the 2005 James Beard Award for best baking book, Maggie Glezer's A Blessing of Bread: The Many Rich Traditions of Jewish Bread Baking Around the World is a significant work of scholarship. Is it one for you to add to your collection? Click "Read More" for my take on it.


This is by far the most thorough book on Jewish baking traditions I've ever seen. If this is a particular interest of yours or a tradition that you participate in, then this is a no brainer: you need this book. It is a major scholastic accomplishment, as much a work of anthropology and oral history as it is a baking book, and worthy of the accolades that it received this year. Buy it today.

For someone like me, who read Gershom Sholem and some of the Talmud in college but grew up in an area with little overt Jewish culture, this book is less essential. As I mentioned in my review of her previous book, Artisan Baking Across America, Glezer tends to emphasis the anthropological over the instructive, preferring authenticity over simplicity. The bagel recipe she includes in this book is insanely complicated, requiring mail-ordered ingredients, a special food processor (stand mixers aren't good enough), and custom built baking utensils. If you are already an accomplished bagel baker this recipe may be the one that will push your bagels over the top from good to world class, but if you are trying to bake bagels for the first time this is not to recipe to take on.

My own interest in baking books is still primarily as a source of instruction, and on that level this book is of less value. That said, the shaping instructions at the beginning are quite nice, even for amateurs. If you are interested in elaborate braiding techniques, this book has merit.

I suspect that, once the buzz around this book has died down and I can find a copy used or in paperback, I'll probably pick up a copy. There is a lot to explore here: Glezer certainly deserves credit for exposing the breadth of the Jewish baking experience. Challah and bagels are what most gentiles think of when they think of Jewish baking, but Glezer shows us how much broader we should think. Jews in the Diaspora have incorporated the flavors and styles of many other traditions, from Middle Eastern flat breads to North African spiced breads to Central Asian crackers. All of these have been adapted to be expressions of the Jewish religious experience, an interplay of the sacred and the day-to-day, which Glezer makes clear, continues to this day.

North African and Central Asian baking traditions are areas I have not explored; I probably wouldn't know how to begin exploring them even if I wanted to. This book offers a decent introduction to those traditions.

Cornbread is one of those things that people get attached to. REALLY attached to. There are dozens of cornbread recipes, and for each one there is someone who swears that that recipe is the best. No amount of discussion will convince them that the recipe their mother and grandmother made isn't the greatest cornbread in the world.

I'm not going to take sides here: leave it to other people to argue about whether Northern or Southern cornbread is real cornbread, or whether you should add sugar to cornbread. What I will do is introduce you to an extremely simple corn bread recipe and then explain how versatile cornbread can be. Once you have this basic cornbread recipe down there are no end of recipes you can derive from it.

Maize
It is well known that corn (also known as maize) is a grain first cultivated in America. What is less commonly known is that to this day scientists are puzzled by the origins of corn. Through genetic testing botanist have determined that corn is a teosinte (part of the Zea family of grasses) and was first cultivated in southern Mexico over 7,000 years ago. What they do not know is what inspired the domestication of corn. None of the surviving relatives of maize have anything resembling edible kernels, so it is believed that it took generations of breeding before an edible ear was developed. None of the intermediate species between the inedible grasses and the edible maize we are all familiar with have survived.

The Varieties of Cornbread

As I stated above, there are literally hundreds of cornbread recipes. Some include a mixtures of wheat flour and corn meal, others are made up purely of corn meal. Some include sugar, some include buttermilk, and others include whole pieces of corn.

The recipe below is as generic as possible: it produces an extremely simple, tasty loaf just waiting for your personalization. Some ideas of things you can do once you've got the basic loaf down:

• Southern style cornbread typically has more corn meal in it, even to the full exclusion of wheat flour. Try that or try the opposite: make a quick bread with only 20% of the grain being corn.
• Southern cooks also swear that buttermilk is essential to authentic Southern cornbread, as is the omission of sugar.
• Other fats than vegetable oil may be added. Butter or animal fats, such as bacon drippings, are most commonly used.
• Any number of things may be added into the loaf for flavor. Diced chili peppers are common, as are whole corn kernels. Meats, such as crumbled bacon bits, are also common.
• With an increase in the sugar you can make delightful blueberry cornbread muffins.
• Corn meal can also be substituted for a portion of the wheat flour in yeasted breads. I'd suggest beginning with no more than 20% of the flour being corn meal. If it turns out OK but leaves you craving more corn, bump it up the next time.
• Different grinds of corn are available. Standard corn meal is medium ground, but finely ground corn flour or coarse corn grits (often labeled as polenta) are also available and can be used to modify the texture of your loaf.
• White corn meal, blue corn meal, and yellow corn meal each produce different looking/tasting loaves.
• Bake it, steam it, fry it. Try them all.

Basic Corn Bread

1 cup corn meal
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1/3 vegetable oil
1 egg

Preheat the oven to 400.

Combine dry ingredients in one bowl, wet ingredients in another. Combine the two and mix until just blended. Pour into greased pan. Use and 8 x 8 pan if you like it fairly (2 to 3 inches) thick or 13 x 9 pan if you like it thin. I used a 13 x 9 pan for the loaf pictured here, which produced a 1 inch thick loaf.

Bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Remove and serve while still warm.

My family loves cornbread slathered with honey butter, which is just a mixture of 1 part honey and 2 parts softened butter.

This cornbread does not keep terribly well. A richer recipe probably would keep better, but I suggest eating this bread in the first 48 hours or else reusing it in another recipe, like stuffing or bread pudding (both of which it is excellent in).

Do you have a favorite cornbread recipe or other ideas for ways to modify this recipe? Please comment and share your ideas!