SC - Trenchers Oh my!

[Elaine Koogler]

> > Good observation.  Outside of the Egyptian bakery re-creation which was done
> What archeologist? What scrutiny? How does the individual archeologist or the 
> scrutinizing group make this observation more valid than the author's 
> viewpoint by itself? Inquiring minds need to know.......

It isn't the author's 'viewpoint' at question here, but, in the case of
the re-creation of the Gaza baking, the method. The team working on that
experiment included the amateur breadbaker who is also a professional
pathologist, the archaelogist who had done the original excavation of the
Gaza bakeries (which was very handy as they were not allowed to use the
extant bakeries themselves but had to re-create the setup from the
archaelogical descriptions), and staff from the National Geographic
Society, which was funding the project.

It was performed using flour which had been treated to remove existing
organisms (though the flour was from grains that had been grown in the US,
not in Egypt), and the starter was created in Gaza, using the native Gaza
organisms (though one can wonder how much the native yeasts in the
environment have changed through the centuries). The baking was performed
using the team's best interpretation of wall frescos depicting baking and
the baking equipment. Baking equipment was constructed to the specs
provided by the archaeologist by a local craftsman using local materials.
Etc.

On the other hand, Wood tends to speak of the cultures he sells as
hundreds, perhaps thousands of years old, but of course he has no
documentation as to when the specific starter cultures he is marketing
were first captured in a starter. For most readers, this is not a problem.
Cooks interested in authenticity in their re-creation, however, would have
to be aware that even yeasts mutate and evolve, andthat the cultures in
his collection were collected from donors in modern times, and there is no
documentation about how long each culture has been in cultivation.

- -- 
Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      jenne at tulgey.browser.net
disclaimer: i speak for no-one and no-one speaks for me.
"I do my job. I refuse to be responsible for other people's managerial 
hallucinations." -- Lady Jemina Starker