Recent newspaper reports suggest that people walking past “pleasant ambient odors (e.g., pastries)” are more likely to point out that someone (an experimental stooge) has dropped a glove than people walking past “places with no odor”. One report summed this up as:

The smell of freshly baked bread doesn’t just make you hungry. It makes you kinder.

I’m not sure that the science merits that conclusion. I tracked the research down to a paper in The Journal of Social Psychology, The Sweet Smell of … Implicit Helping: Effects of Pleasant Ambient Fragrance on Spontaneous Help in Shopping Malls but as it is behind a paywall, I’m not going to investigate further. Except to note that the author, Nicolas Guéguen, seems to have happened on a rich seam of experimental approaches. The sweet smell of… courtship: Effects of pleasant ambient fragrance on women’s receptivity to a man’s courtship request investigated another aspect of social behaviour.

18–25 year old women walking alone in a shopping mall were approached by an attractive 20 year old male-confederate who solicited them for their phone number. The women were solicited as they were walking in areas with pleasant ambient odors (e.g., pastries) or with no odor. It was found that women agreed more often to the confederate’s courtship solicitation in the pleasant smelling areas.

I’m amazed the newspapers didn’t latch onto that one.

NPR last week had a report on the extra-special bread people bake to celebrate Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. I didn’t know that there are special shapes reserved for the New Year challah — round, for the cycle of the year — and that the bread is even sweeter. More to the point, I didn’t know that challah originally referred not to the whole loaf, but to a small portion that the baker removed and gave to the priests as an offering. These days, few bakers do that. But they do take a moment to reflect while holding the small piece of dough.
That’s a nice idea.

I caught the tail end of the Food Programme’s podcast on sourdough as I was working on a ripe biga, built from a genuine Tuscan pasta madre that I am assured has been going strong for more than a century. So I’m clearly part of the “major revival” of sourdough, which is “experiencing a renaissance”. Except that I’ve been baking sourdoughs for at least 20 years, when I first made my own starter. So there’s the problem that everyone has, when they listen to or watch a programme about something they actually know about. Most of it is bizarrely banal, but buried in there are plump raisins of new information.

One such was that San Francisco sourdough probably has nothing to do with those pesky goldrush miners. Erica J. Peters, independent food historian, explained that the ‘49ers were far too busy digging for gold, and far too close to civilisation, to bother with sourdough bread. It was the Yukon goldrush, 50 years later, that required miners to keep their precious starter warm and cosy tucked inside their clothes. Peters also attacked the story that Louise Boudin, of the Boudin Bakery, canonical home of San Francisco sourdough, saved a bucket of starter culture from the fire that followed the 1906 earthquake, which destroyed the bakery.

As a historian, I tend to think when the story is so adorable you can’t rely on it.

Does that mean it is or is not reliable? No idea.

As for banal, presenter Sheila Dillon seemed amazed that even though the bacterium is found in sourdoughs around the world, it is called Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis. She is briefed, I imagine. And the instructions on the programme website for how to make your own starter are not, in my view, very useful.

Not to quibble too much, it was a good programme (and there’s a longer write-up here). I found the explanations of how the yeast and the bacteria work together really good. And Andrew Whitley’s musings on the sourdough revival — simplicity is not as fashionable as complicated — struck a chord too, even though I think sourdough is in many ways simpler than yeast.

While I don’t believe a bit of it, I do like the stories that religions tell us. For example, I had no idea before this morning that September 14th is the day on which the Greek Orthodox church celebrates the discovery of the true cross. And what does that have to do with bread? It’s all down to the royal herb basil.

Aglaia – of Aglaia’s table – explained all in a recent blogpost. It was basil that indicated to St Helena and her son Constantine which among many was the true cross. And it is basil, according to Aglaia and her late mother-in-law, that makes bread rise.

Greek women believe that bread rises by divine intervention. If you tell them that a batter of flour and water will ferment from the various airborne microorganisms if left for a few days, they refuse to believe it. They are certain that only the direct power of God can turn a mere flour batter into a leavening medium. This is the reason why prozymi –the natural sourdough starter used in traditional baking– is usually made on September 14, or near the end of Holy Week, preceding Easter.

Aglaia experimented with different flowers in her flour and water. Some did make a difference, but not basil. Which matters not a bit.