In the dark, it’s a haunting presence, this island to the southwest off the prow of our property. I often see it in the moonlight, in the early morning hours of a bake day.… Continue reading
This Living Rock Island
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The Gingham Tablecloth at Nick’s
I’ve been thinking of how a sensory experience — an image, a taste, a sound — can trigger a flood of memories, long forgotten, that transport you instantly to another time or place.
How Marcel Proust tastes a madeleine cookie at the beginning of Remembrance of Things Past. He is overtaken with a feeling, “an exquisite pleasure … something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.”… Continue reading
The New Bread Basket
The New Bread Basket by Amy Halloran starts off a little like Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The taste of a simple cookie, a madeleine, inspires a flood of memories for Proust. In Halloran’s case, an oatmeal ganache cookie, a treat from her husband, awakens a taste for flour and all that was entailed in bringing it to the oatmeal ganache cookie.… Continue reading
The Allure of the Tassajara Bread Book
In the summer of 1977, my parents were at their summer cottage in Bamfield, off the west coast of Vancouver Island. My father was out fishing for chinook, my mother was lying in the sun reading.
Christy, my sister, and I were the only ones at the family home in West Vancouver.… Continue reading
Sad Monk, Happy Monk
… Continue readingI am Richard and once was a monk of the Cistercian order at Boxley Abbey, north of Maidstone, Kent. It is now the Year of Our Lord 1389, and I am far from that life of poverty, contemplation, and silence that I lived for most of my years.