Customer Reviews

Going With the Grain: A Wandering Bread Lover Takes a Bite Out of Life

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was really looking forward to reading this book. I'm a serious home bread baker and assumed the author must be a baker too. Not so. Her style is witty and and an easy read, but as the book went on I found the chapters less about bread and more about the author's adventures. The recipes she included are mostly unusable. There is a factual error in one of her statements, that ever since Tuscans started omitting salt from their bread several hundred years ago, Italians have been making saltless bread ever since. NOT true! The recipe for French bread after all the rhapsodizing on artisanal French breads was for one made in a bread machine. Please ! The sections on Morocco and Jordan were outstanding, and those on the Wonder bread factory and the US military's Frankenbread were terrific contrasts.

This isn't just another travel book with a gimmick: as Seligson points out, bread is central to almost every culture in the world, so observing how people make their distinctive form of bread tells us a great deal about their approach to life in general. The author is curious, a good observer, and respectful of the people she visits; so not only are her stories fascinating, but she's able to take us into situations where tourists are rarely welcome. I was favorably impressed with her chapter on horno bread: when it turns out that the pueblos aren't eager to welcome yet one more travel writer, she respects their wishes and adopts a low-key approach rather than becoming invasive (or writing a whiny "my bad experiences with the Indians" piece, which seems to be a far too common practice!). (I should add that horno bread varies widely: the loaf she tried was uninteresting, but I recently got a loaf from San Felipe pueblo that's right up there with the boutique farm breads.) As a native of the San Francisco Bay Area, I was sorry that Seligson didn't explore sourdough in more depth, although, as she notes briefly, commercial starters have taken their toll (so it's not just cranky old age that makes me insist that "it doesn't taste as good as it used to"!). But that's just a quibble; in general, the book is fun to read and surprisingly informative, and I recommend it highly.

Susan Seligson does a wonderful job of capturing two fun genres in one book-travel and food history. Going with the Grain is a bread lover's delight. The book is not about recipes although there are a few scattered here and there. Instead, Seligson uses bread as a quirky tour guide to take us all around the world. "In Arabic, the word for bread and life is the same, aysh" Seligson explains.

Going with the Grain takes us to Morocco, Saratoga Springs, NY, India, Ireland and many more places. The common thread running through all these travelogues is of course the bread Seligson seeks out in each adventure. Often times even the bread is only an incidental player in her travel tales (bread recipes it seems are a closely guarded secret in many places). Never mind. We warm up to Seligson's descriptions anyway and watch her chat away with the locals enviously.

Seligson is sometimes a little too eager to point out that she is not another shutter-happy tourist. While she disdains fellow Americans who drops names at the slightest excuse, she refers to herself as a "self-respecting subscriber of the New York Review of Books." Her language sometimes tries too hard to be funny. Sentences such as: "He can feel your pain" (get it!?) serve mostly just to annoy. I also felt that the narrative could have been well supplemented with the inclusion of photographs. It would have been nice for example to see pictures of the Pueblo horno ovens or the Ballymaloe in Ireland.

Despite these points, Seligson comes across as a warm person with a genuine interest in lives lived all around the world. I also appreciated the segments on the Wonder Bread factory and the army bread project in Natick, Massachusetts, aspects of bread not everyone would have spent the time researching.

Going with the Grain is a delicious romp all over the world. Be it a baguette, soda bread, matzo, or roti, Seligson proves that the stuff made with flour and water is but one more thing that the peoples of the world share.

What a joyful, exuberant book this is. Seligson is compassionate, funny, self-effacing, inciteful and fearless. Unless you're humor impaired you'll laugh throughout while this intrepid reporter hops around the globe showing us how diverse cultures worship the ancient tradition of bread making.
Her writing is filled with fine-honed, priceless gems. I love this book!

I enjoyed the first chapter of the book which was what I expected the book to be about i.e. bread in one global country. As each chapter went by, the book became less about bread and more about the author forcing her personality on the reader. It was a limited collection of travelogues, many in the USA, with bread as the intended link between chapters. If you want to read a second rate travel book with something about bread in each chapter this is the book for you. If you want to read a well thought out book on comparitive breads around the world look elswhere.

I had to keep reading tidbits to my wife, for fear she would steal the book away from me when I put it down. In reading Susan Seligson's book, "Going with the Grain", I learned a lot more about bread, than I thought I would be interested in. If someone would have suggested reading a book on bread, I would have turned it down," another cook book". I love cookbooks, but this is no cookbook. Although I have tried a few of the recipes at the end of each chapter, that were quite successful.
I love traveling, and have been to a number of the countries that Susan traveled to. I felt drawn into every location, by her descriptive and exhilarating style, and intrigued by the people she came in contact with. Each chapter would bring me to a very different culture, with people and their cuisines as diverse from each other, as their breads were.
Susan seems to have her own unique way of getting herself in and out of interesting situations. This makes for some very fun and upbeat reading. You really want to know what she will be up to next. I thoroughly enjoyed this delightful book.

A delightful read. You learn the about the different cultures and bread. Descriptions are great and not hard to see with your minds eye.

this is about traveling and looking for bread to eat, that's it just looking for bread to eat and where was the next shop to buy it.

GOING WITH THE GRAIN . NOT ACTUALLY WHAT I THOUGHT I WAS BUYING,STRICTLY A BOOK OF RECIPES ,BUT BETTER...THIS IS ABOUT HER TRAVELS AND DISCOVERY OF DIFFERENT BREADS OF FOREIGN LANDS.THE RECIPES ARE GOOD AND SO IS THE TRAVEL.RECOMMEND IT.TOOK IT ON VACATION AND IT KEPT ME READING,SO IT HAD TO BE GOOD . BY THE WAY,THE VACATION WAS A CRUISE TO THE CARRIBEAN . NUFF SAID.
ANNIE IN TEXAS

The book is not so much about bread itself but about the author's experiences in various cultures around the world, all connected by the common theme of bread baking. But that is not what bothered me. In fact she is privileged to have many fascinating cultural experiences which could have made for informative and entertaining reading. Unfortunately this was overshadowed for me by her constant stream of critical and demeaning comments about those who were kind enough to be her hosts. She refers more than once to the native food as "slop" and at one point suggests that her host is "in our room sniffing our underwear" while she and her companion are out exploring. Perhaps such comments are intended to be funny but I found them rude and tasteless. I envied the author's experiences but felt sorry for those who showed kindness to her only to be humiliated by her graceless criticism.