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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.

I finished Six Thousand Years of Bread last weekend and since have been trying to figure out how to describe it. It is an exceptional book, unlike any I have encountered before, and reminding me more of works by Emile Durkheim or Claude Levi-Strauss than books by Peter Reinhart or James Beard. It is neither a cookbook nor just a history book; the back cover suggests it be shelved under "Cooking/Literature" but "Cooking/Anthropology" or "Cooking/Religion" would be more appropriate.

According to the foreword, H. E. Jacob was Austrian Jew who fled to New York in 1939 after spending a year in a Nazi work camp. His manuscript for this book, which he had been working on for over ten years (and claimed to have examined over 4000 works in researching), was also smuggled out of Europe. Jacob finished researching it in New York, where it was first published in English in 1944.

Although it went out of print fairly quickly, Six Thousand Years of Bread became a cult classic for bakers. In the 1990's, with the renewed interest in artisan breads, The Lyons Press began reprinting the book, and it appears to have become a part of the canon for serious bread people.

Six Thousand Years of Bread is not an easy read. And it isn't just about bread the way of a lot of recent "histories of the mundane" are just about nutmeg, salt, or the pencil. Topics covered include the role of magic in Egyptian religion versus Christianity and how it affected each culture's understanding of fermentation; how the Elusian cult of Demeter prefigured the Christian Eucharist; how ignorance of basic agronomy was a critical factor in onset the Dark Ages; how corn's short growing cycle was critical to the settlement of the American West by European colonists; how the French Revolution was largely triggered by a wheat shortage; and how the victories in both the American Civil War and World War I can largely be attributed to superior access to and distribution of grain. Fascinating stuff, but something that requires more mental energy to read than your typical baking book.

Although not a religious person, I find the mythological and ritual aspects of bread baking to be fascinating. Having worked in a bakery run by Orthodox monks, I have a hard time viewing the production of bread as a pure material transition. Though fully explained by today's science, the experience of conjuring life out of inert ingredients is better expressed in myth than equation. This book records the various ways humans have tried to enshrine that experience in folklore better than any other book I have come across.

One should be warned that this book is unabashedly Eurocentric. When it was written this was an accepted feature of most scholarship; references to "primitive peoples" or "women's role as nurturers" were not cause for alarm. I don't think the Eurocentrism in any way diminishes how outstanding this book is, but obviously if it were written today some things would be written differently. The reader should accept that this book is a product of its time and not be surprised when they run across things that would not fly today: it was a different era. Allowing such concerns to get in one's way would be to miss out on enjoying a remarkable work of scholarship.