Making Art and Bread With A Message < The Happy Monk Baking Company

Eighty-nine-year-old Peter Schumann (centre) oversees the Bread and Puppet Theatre … and the making of bread to feed his audiences. (*New York Times)*

I often think I came to the baking profession too late in life. It’s been more a retirement project than a life-long calling. I have a thirst for baking knowledge and never satisfied with making just good loaves. They have to be perfect! There is always some detail I’m missing, always some way to make a loaf more delicious, and always some way to be more consistent.

Schumann with rye loaves cooling in his kitchen

And yet, here is an 89-year-old baker and artist, Peter Schumann, who is far beyond bread perfection. His interest in bread is significant but almost secondary to his larger-than-life projects.

Mad genius

On top of being a baker, Schumann’s a mad genius: a musician, painter, sculptor, poet, puppeteer and artistic director of the Vermont-based Bread and Puppet Theater. He and his board of directors and a cast of actors and puppeteers mount an annual series of performances on his property near Glover, Vermont.

I recently stumbled on an article about Schumann and his theatre in a recent issue of the New York Times. 1

And here’s the kicker: many Happy Monk customers have tasted bread from a recipe by Schumann made during his summer run of theatre productions. Last July, we offered a Baker’s Choice loaf called Rustic Peasant Bread.

Intrigued with the flavour, texture and nose

I’d found the recipe a couple of years ago in a book called Southern Ground by Jennifer Lapidus. I like the name of the bread and her own story about it.

“I was intrigued by this bread’s flavour, texture, and nose,” Lapidus writes. “At the time, I had no interest in sifted flour, but the cracked rye gave the sifted flour flavour and texture, and the sifted flour provided structure and crumb to the cracked rye.”

She tinkered with the recipe, and it ended up in her book.

Lifelong education

But Schumann, a German immigrant who came to New York City in the 1960s, came by the bread honestly. It was a staple in the Silesia region of Germany, where he grew up. The area was bombed during the war, and Schumann and his family fled the country.

“To live in a war and be a refugee is a lifelong education,” Schumann says in the Times article. “There’s no equivalent to it in the U.S.” He has maintained his German accent.

He joined the New York anti-war movement and began staging early theatre productions protesting the war in Vietnam. His theatrical schemes grew more extensive and more sophisticated over the years.

On weekends throughout the summer, the Bread and Puppet troupe stages indoor avant-garde performances, an outdoor circus featuring playful political sketches with towering effigy-like figures, a rowdy band, and side shows created by company members on compact stages. Everything takes place on the rambling grounds of his property.

Social commentary

Often, the productions come out of current events or broader social commentaries such as greed, racism and militarism. One show criticizing the provision of arms to Ukraine raised eyebrows among the theatre’s left-wing audience.

Performances have taken to the road over the past few years, including 66 stops last fall with a company of 30 people. Several big-time theatre critics and social commentators have noted his shows, which are experimental collaborative pieces about the joys and ills of living in a conflicted capitalist world.

But Schumann, the Times article states, is uninterested in praise or media attention, focussing more on the myriad other elements of his sprawling enterprise.

As the troupe’s name implies, bread plays a central role in the theatrical offerings. Schumann oversees mixing and baking the same coarse rye bread described by Jennifer Lapidus in her book Carolina Ground.

He bakes the loaves in an outdoor oven on his property. The loaves cool in his kitchen, where they are sliced and then fed to audience members, which can number over a thousand during the August shows.

Sourdough starter hits the road

“We bring the starter for the dough everywhere we perform,” Schumann says.

Like his work, he knows the bread can be challenging to chew, “but hopefully nourishing and worth the trouble.”

Jennifer Lapidus, who now runs a stone-milled flour company in North Carolina, opposed sifted flour on principle, she writes in her book Southern Ground. She believes that all parts of the grain should be used for flavour and nutrition. Sifting out the germ and bran was wasteful.

But she changed her practice when she tasted Schuman’s bread. In her version of the recipe, 75 percent of the grain is retained, allowing an airy rise to the dough and lots of flavour to come through in the taste.

“When I landed on this recipe,” she writes, “I called Peter Schumann and asked if I could name my bread after him. He told me that was a ridiculous idea, as he did not invent the bread.

“It’s called graubrot”

“Peter said it was grey bread or graubrot and that that was what I ought to call it. I was not sure if anyone would want to buy a bread called “grey bread,” so I called it Rustic Peasant bread.”

Lapidus’ version of the bread is the one that Happy Monk customers got to experience last summer.

Peter Schumann’s interest in bread as sustenance and a life-giving force offers a more human back-drop to his larger-than-life theatre spectacles. The subject matter of his stage aspirations is loftier, more socially conscious, and political.

So, bread perfection is less critical to Schumann. The bread he makes is, by all accounts, nourishing and delicious. But it’s also symbolic and central to his theatrical vision and his desire to make the world a better place.

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