Beard on Bread

By Caroline Cummins

April 16, 2007

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Title

• Beard on Bread

Author

• James Beard

Publisher

• Knopf

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In the late 1960s and early 1970s, bread was big. Young city slickers were heading back to the land and shunning the processed foods of their post-war childhood. Out with the Wonder Bread, in with the . . . well, something that didn’t come sliced in a bag, at least. Judith Jones, the Knopf editor who had shepherded Julia Child to cookbook-writing fame, approached James Beard, Mr. All-American Cooking, and asked him to write a book on bread.

Beard, who had literally learned bread baking at his mother’s elbow, was happy to oblige, and the result (published in 1973) was a yeasty classic, offering straightforward recipes for everything from “Basic White Bread” (your very own Wonder Bread, as it were) to challah and crumpets.

Easy (most recipes are under a page long) and earthy (Karl Stuecklen’s brown-ink drawings are sublimely innocent), the book is still a great bread-baking introduction, its small stature just right for propping behind the bread board. Slenderness aside, Beard on Bread remains a microcosm of Beard himself: doughy, resilient, and forgiving.

Caroline Cummins is the managing editor of Culinate.