Wednesday, March 26, 1997
Ezekiel bread rises in De Leon
By KEN ELLSWORTH
DE LEON - "Call for the doctor, the doctor said, 'Give
that baby Ezekiel bread.' "
OK, the words don't have the same ring to them as in the old
"Shortnin' Bread" song, but Lynne Carlson, the manager
of the De Leon Chamber of Commerce, likes to bake bread and she
calls her favorite bread "Ezekiel bread." She says the
bread is "fully nutritious," so it reminded me of what
the doctor in the song said shortnin' bread could do for an ailing
baby.
When I met Carlson last week she gave me a bite of Ezekiel
bread, which I had never heard of. It tasted good.
I doubt many people are out there baking Ezekiel bread, but
baking Ezekiel bread is one of the things Carlson does when she
is not helping in her husband's auto parts store, promoting De
Leon, or trying to attract new businesses to come to town, all
of which she seems to do pretty well.
Ezekiel bread, she said, comes from a very old recipe to say
the least. The recipe is, to be almost precise, some 2,500 years
old. Ezekiel, an Old Testament prophet who also prophesied "rising
bones," got the recipe, or at least the ingredients for his
bread, according to the Bible book of Ezekiel (chapter four),
directly from God. Ezekiel, then in exile in Babylonia, was to
eat the bread for sustenance while lying 190 days on his left
side in atonement for Israel's iniquity and, then, another 40
days on his right side for the iniquities of Judah.
These things are, of course, mysterious to mere laypersons.
Anyway, God told Ezekiel to use six different sorts of grains
as ingredients for this life-sustaining bread. The grains were
wheat, barley, legumes, lentils, millet, and spelt. Ezekiel got
his baking instructions directly from God, too. God told Ezekiel
to bake the six grains in fire kindled from human dung. Ezekiel
complained about the human dung, though, so God relented and told
the much relieved Ezekiel that it would be OK if Ezekiel just
used ordinary dung.
The Scripture did not specify teaspoons or cups, or other possible
ingredients, like milk, sugar, and yeast, so Carlson had to figure
out those things for herself when she went to make her own Ezekiel
bread. She even did quite a lot of research into ancient bread
making in Biblical times and found out how yeast and other things
were made.
I asked Carlson if she went so far as to use dung in her search
for authenticity.
"Of course not," she said, laughing. "I bake
it in the oven."
I asked her if she used the yeast made from grapes like she
had learned people had done in her research of Biblical times.
"No," she said. She bought her yeast at the store.
Nevertheless, Ezekiel bread is not an easy thing to make, even
if you do know six of the ingredients, Carlson said, because you
do not know the other possible ingredients used, and you do not
know the measurements or the proportions of the six grains.
For her first batch of bread, Carlson assumed the six grains
were to be mixed in equal measure, and baked it that way.
"But, when I first started doing it, it just didn't taste
very good," Carlson said.
So, Carlson tried again and experimented a bit and added a
little there and took away a little here. Now she has it down
and feels she even has a marketable product. She has even started
production.
You can buy the brown, round loaves of Ezekiel bread from her.
Each loaf is about 10 inches or so in diameter and stands about
4-5 inches high. Carlson wraps each purchased loaf in a brown
paper wrapper that is folded in such a way that a little paper
handle is created on top of the bag. In that way you can carry
the loaf handily like it is a little purse.
Carlson is optimistic, too. She has invested in a flour grinding
machine that can grind up 300 pounds of Ezekiel bread grains in
just one hour.
I asked Carlson where she got the idea for Ezekiel bread.
She told me a long version of the story, but the short version
was this: "You'll think I'm crazy," she said. "But
I believe it was God that gave it to me."
This column covers the cities and communities of this part
of West Texas. To contact Ken Ellsworth, call (800) 588-6397 or
(915) 673-4271, Ext. 381, or write to P.O. Box 30, Abilene, TX
79604.
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Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps Publications
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