Einkorn
Patricia Ezratty
The bible is not a cookbook, but it does contain a recipe: And you, take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and spelt; put them into one vessel, and make bread for yourself.[1] This bread was to be made during the second siege of Jerusalem in 587 BCE—390 days during which the city and The Temple were destroyed, and the Kingdom of Judah exiled. God gave Ezekiel the doomsday recipe as a warning of how bad it would be: when they couldn’t get enough of any one ingredient to make a loaf; when the bread would be cooked atop dung, for lack of fuel; when God would cease to dwell amongst them and would break the staff of bread.
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The town of Boiceville lies in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains on the west side of the Hudson River. The Hudson, as it is commonly called, sits snugly in the valley between the Taconic and Catskill Mountains, named by the American Indians and the Dutch who cheated them, respectively. Beginning at Lake Tear of the Clouds in the Adirondacks and emptying into New York Harbor between Manhattan and New Jersey, the Hudson is all that remains of a massive glacier that pushed as far south as Long Island. The Catskills are a New York State Park, 700,000 acres of protected wild forest.
In the early nineteenth century, the Hudson Valley was the breadbasket of New York City. We moved there in the Fall of 2019 intending to make it our home. The mountains are a beautiful place to make bread.
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In 12,400 BCE in Harrat ash Shaam, located in the Black Desert in Jordan, Einkorn wheat was mixed together with wild barley, oats and Bolboschoenus glaucus—a root tuber—to form the earliest known flatbread. Einkorn, which means “single grain” in German, refers to the single kernel contained within each single spikelet on a wheat plant. In Arabic it is known as qarn wahid alqarn, translated as “single horn”. Einkorn is the first wheat known to humans.
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God is the one who enacts salvation. The Scriptures are clear that the way of unbelief is to trust in self or in other things for salvation.[2]
People created God after they had firmly established themselves in the Fertile Crescent and survival was no longer tied to finding food, but to cultivating their crops. They created the Judeo-Christian God to answer existential questions of origin and purpose, but this was not the first God, nor was it the first to demand devotion and obedience; very quickly, however, it emerged as the only God who could save them.
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A period known as “The Little Ice Age” took place in the Northern Hemisphere between 1300-1850. It was not a real ice age, rather over the course of these five hundred and fifty years, three extremely cold intervals were recorded separated by periods of relative warming. The Black Sea froze over, twice. Added to the cooler temperatures was torrential rain which made planting and cultivating crops impossible, compounded by cattle disease in which numbers of sheep and cattle fell by nearly 80 percent.
Of particular note during this time was the Great Famine, sparked by crop failures in the spring of 1315 which continued into 1317. Millions starved. In Bristol, England, the famine was of such mortality that the living could scarce suffice to bury the dead, horse flesh and dogs flesh was accounted good meat, and some eat their own children.[3]
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Despite being numbered amongst the eight founder crops of the Fertile Crescent—which formed the basis of human agriculture between 10,500 and 7,500 years ago—Einkorn wheat does not share the renown of fellow founders barley, lentils, and chickpeas. Due to its relative difficulty in harvesting, its low yield, and luck with the selective breeding of other strains of wheat, Einkorn was largely abandoned in favor of the more amenable common wheat (Triticum aestivum) that we are familiar with today. Because Einkorn never underwent intense selective breeding, it retained its low-gluten content and high nutritional value, as well as its natural resilience to drought, heat and pests. Einkorn is the only wheat that was never hybridized and as such, it has two sets of chromosomes. Just like a human cell.
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I first learned about Andre Lefort when I began working as a baker at Bread Alone. In 1987 this 4th-generation Parisian oven mason came to Boiceville to build two massive wood burning ovens, which were the heart of the bakery for decades. Lefort’s ovens are known as “white ovens” in wood-fired baking—where the baking chamber is heated by the fire in a separate chamber underneath, keeping it clean from ash, or white. The fire is routed into the upper chamber of the oven via a massive, pivoting cast-iron nozzle known as a gueulard. Gueulard in French means “loudmouth”.
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We found different kinds of quiet in the mountains: of absence; the soft murmur of the woods at 3:00 in the morning; the aftermath of an echo. There is a lonely quiet shared between two people who begin to unknow each other. There is the absolute quiet of a fallen snow blanket, though the snow falling is anything but. The sound of snowflakes rustling against each other is like the sound I imagine atoms make, the ceaseless crackle of life being held together.
You chopped wood for the fireplace. I mowed the lawn. You planted and tended the garden. I foraged chanterelles from our yard. We picked blueberries off bushes and blackberries off brambles. We purchased eggs from a blue cooler and a handwritten note stationed at the end of a gravel driveway that asked for five dollars to be placed in the locked wooden box above it in return.
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Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.” Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”[4]
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Published in 1812 by the Brothers Grimm the little known fairy tale, God’s Bread, tells the story of two sisters, one rich and one poor. The poor sister was a widow with five children that she could not feed, so she asked her rich sister for some bread. The rich sister lied to her and said she had nothing to give. Later the rich husband came home and cut into their bread only to have blood gush out. The rich sister told him what had happened with her sister. But by the time he arrived at the poor sister’s house with food, her three oldest children were dead. She told her brother-in-law, “We no longer need earthly food; God has filled three already, and will hear our prayers as well”.
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As we moved into the 2-bedroom summer cottage I found online, after taking the job at Bread Alone and shortly thereafter buying a car, my husband said to me, “It’s on you now, Patti.” The movers had just left and we were standing amongst the boxes, alone. That was all he said. We weren’t doing great, the mountains were meant to change things for us. I never asked what that sentence meant, though I understood it to mean that I was alone in bearing responsibility for our lives.
My husband was depressed after we moved back to New York from Israel, leaving his loved ones and his home behind. In New York he struggled to find work, to meet people and form connections. He was home with our son as daycare was not an expense we could afford on one salary. I excelled at my work and very quickly rose in the ranks and I relished the feeling of success
The lexicon of my failure at home came about slowly. What should we do today? became an accusation for not making plans. How was your day? a nod to the full life only one of us was living. Are you okay? was a question that no longer needed to be asked, but gave us something to say to each other.
I have always been good at finding practical solutions—I am a doer, a fixer, I do not sit around and wait for other people to take care of things—but I had no idea how to fix us.
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In 2012 the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA)—one of the world’s major wheat gene banks—had to move its headquarters from Aleppo, Syria to Beirut due to ongoing war. In 2015, without access to its seed collections in Aleppo… ICARDA requested seeds it had previously sent to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the so-called ‘doomsday vault’ in the arctic, a repository where gene banks across the world can send duplicate samples of germplasm for safekeeping.[5] This is the first and only instance of seeds ever being removed from the vault.
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“This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live forever.”[6]
Adam was bread first, referred to as challah since God created Adam in the same way one makes bread – mixing water with flour, or in Adam’s case dust from all corners of the earth, to form a dough. Despite this, Adam, from whom all human life on earth descended, can never be saved since Jesus had not yet been born.
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I made an Einkorn Sourdough at the Boiceville bakery—I baked it along with the rest of the specialty breads in Lefort’s ovens on the weekends. Boiceville was the original Bread Alone location, but had been largely idle since the company moved into their new state of the art facility in Lake Katrine. Boiceville continued to operate to serve the community and because those two wood-burning ovens were responsible for Bread Alone’s legacy, despite sitting mostly dormant for nearly a decade. It is best not to forget where you came from.
As an homage, the Einkorn Sourdough was dubbed “Lefort”; it was a high-hydration dough and, as a result, it was sticky and difficult to handle. As with all breads, I learned with time what was required and how the dough behaved. I made small batches for the weekends—around 50-60 kilos of dough—a process that took about five hours from start to finish. Once the dough was mixed I would batch rest it in 50-liter cambros, turning every thirty minutes for two hours, before portioning it out and shaping. It is easy to find myself back at the bench, hands covered in a thin patina of dough as I gently knead and fold until the dough tightens, and my fingers tell me it’s ready.
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Recipe comes from the Latin recipere, which literally means ‘receive!’. Its most common usage refers to a set of instructions for preparing a dish, but recipe can also refer to something which is likely to lead to a particular outcome. As in the saying, a recipe for disaster.
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Platonic and Aristotelian theories of divine madness, ascent to God through beauty, and love of our fellow man were later interpreted by Plotinus and Augustine of Hippo to form the central tenet of Christianity: The Holy Trinity. This predated Jesus’s link with bread, as something we had to consume to be saved, by over 1500 years. In the Middle East, Einkorn cultivation began to decline around 2000 BC, in favor of Emmer wheat, another founder crop. By the time Jesus was born, Einkorn was exclusively grown in cooler climates.
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At a weeklong Christian Sleepaway Camp I attended when I was 9, I mistakenly took Communion. I didn’t think it was such a big deal. My counselor later read to me from 1 Corinthians 11:27-30: So then, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. Everyone ought to examine themselves before they eat of the bread and drink from the cup. For those who eat and drink without discerning the body of Christ eat and drink judgment on themselves. That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep.
30 years later I would think of this moment, and the verse recited to me, a great deal.
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In early March 2020, my family and I were in Israel for a visit and we joked with our friends about the overreaction of the world to the COVID-19 virus. Two weeks later, despite its being early spring, New York entered into a state of hibernation. By the end of the year, 350,831 Americans would die from the disease.
Any social isolation experienced as a result of relocating to a new place was magnified as things began to shut down and interaction was discouraged. I continued to work—six feet away from co-workers, double masked, with new hand-sanitizer stations at every turn—because bread was a necessary commodity and we could not make enough of it to keep up with demand. My husband and son hiked in empty woods and played on empty playgrounds, they spent whole days without seeing another living soul. COVID was yet another kind of quiet, a terrible new kind.
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The Einkorn seeds taken from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault were replenished by ICARDA in 2017, after stabilizing regrowth. But Einkorn wasn’t finished yet; a 2023 article in the Journal Nature discussed a study mapping the complete sequence of the Einkorn grain’s genome. Modern-day bread wheat has lost much of its natural resistance to environmental fluctuation, a worrying fact when we look at the continued increase of the Earth’s temperature. Wheat contains hundreds of thousands of genes and finding which genes are responsible for resilience would require many decades of research. However, by comparing mismatches between the two genomes (that of Einkorn and Triticum aestivum) scientists will be able to narrow down the potential targets for genetic traits that differ between the ancient and modern wheat grains.[7] Traits like tolerance to disease, drought, and heat can be reintroduced; nutritional value can be increased. They are confident that Einkorn will serve to help safeguard a major food source against the perils of climate change and increasingly severe weather.
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During COVID bread became scarce, but the days were long and people had time so they began baking. Social media was filled with sourdough bread; then instead of bread, flour became increasingly hard to find.
When faced with emotional and financial scarcity, our brain naturally reverts to ways it can boost our spirits and stretch our dollars. Baking bread satiates those cravings. We also prioritize instant gratification when the future feels foggy. In chaos, people cling to what they can control, and following a recipe is a process that yields predictable results.[8]
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April 7, 2020, 8:05 PM. The video is not much to look at—the camera rotates, angled up to the dark sky, and aside from the lights of one passing car, and the exteriors of other faraway houses, the only other thing to make out is the silhouettes of leafless trees—but if you stop focusing on something to see, you can hear howling. Some howls are loud, others are high pitched and shorter, perhaps closer to a yip. They come in waves, rounds of howls breaking the otherwise silent night.
I filmed as I stood on the porch with my family howling at the not yet visible full moon, just as our neighbors did on their porches, to mark one month of isolation. I only have one video, though it happened many times afterwards; our entire street participated, and the recurring nature prompted a local newspaper to publish an article about the return of wolf packs to the area. We barely knew our neighbors, and yet we recognized in each other’s howls the same grief and terror and loneliness and the frantic frenzy of hope and need to see and feel and touch.
Contained in my howl was everything that I had already lost and all there was yet to lose. And so under the darkened sky, in the middle of the woods, I allowed myself this moment: I breathed deeply and filled my lungs and let out a desperate feral cry.
I am here, I howled. We can still save this.
[1] Ezekiel 4:9, New Standard Revised Version
[2] Leake, M. (n.d.). What Is Salvation? (Also: Why It’s Needed and How to Get It). Crosswalk.com. https://www.crosswalk.com/faith/spiritual-life/what-is-salvation-also-why-it-s-needed-and-how-to-get-it.html
[3] Jones, Evan T., ed. (30 September 2019). “Bristol Archives 09594/1” (PDF). Bristol Annal. Bristol Record Society. Archived from the original (PDF) on 25 January 2021.
[4] John 6:32–35, New Revised Standard Version
[5] Snyder, D. (2016, May 18). Great Grains: How Ancient Einkorn Became the New “It” Wheat. JSTOR.
[6] John 6:58, New Revised Standard Version
[7] Cutlip, K. (n.d.). The History and Future of Ancient Einkorn Wheat Is Written in Its Genes. College of Agriculture & Natural Resources.
[8] (n.d.). The Science Behind Why Everyone is Suddenly Baking Bread. Association for Psychological Science.
Patricia Ezratty is a baker and food writer originally from New York. She has a degree in Visual Communications from Ohio University and is finishing her MA in Creative Nonfiction Writing at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She currently lives in Tel Aviv with her family, and writes and edits the website for FOODISH, the culinary department of ANU – Museum of the Jewish People.
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