A post about bread lovers-- literally....

Are you ready for some peak 1970s earth mother madness? If so, thank S.S. from the delightful A Book of Cookrye blog for mentioning Bread Sculpture: The Edible Art (Ann Wiseman, 1975) in the comments many months ago, plus providing a link to a few pages of this book in Awful Library Books.

This is just the type of thing I love: An insistence that bread making is nearly innate and something that home cooks will want to do frequently! Food converted into kitschy craft projects that will take hours to construct and minutes to devour! Instructions on how to use common kitchen implements to make bread features! (Did you know that a garlic press can make hair, and the edge of a spoon can make dove feathers?) A random story about a woman in Maine who gathered day-old bread from neighbors so she could somehow recycle part of it into fresh bread and feed the rest of it to the raccoons on her back porch! And I haven't even gotten around to mentioning the mermaid with (whole clove?) nipples right on the cover!

When I checked the mermaid recipe, it didn't say what the nipples were actually made of, so I'll just hope my guess is right.

The tail is supposed to be decorated with dill or herbs according to the instructions, but this doesn't seem to happen on the cover photo. It's weird that they'd make the presentation less dramatic for the cover. The even bigger disappointment about the cover photo, though, is that the color is off.

The mermaid is supposed to be green! Made with spinach dough! There's nothing quite so alluring as bread that looks like it's moldy as soon as you take it out of the oven. Well, unless the "moldy" bread also has nipples.

Yes, I'm making fun of these recipes, but I have to admit, as someone who used to make "mouse" dinner rolls with half-almond ears and raisin eyes, I kind of want to try turning bread baking into an arts and crafts project, especially if it involves making weird-colored dough... 

Even if that weird-colored dough is full of the sugared dirt most commonly known as "beets."

Hell, if I can cut a "mouth" into hot bread so I can cram it full of nut teeth as the finishing touch to a griffin, I am ALL IN. The version of myself who has the leisure, patience, and skill to do this bullshit is one of my favorite imaginary people.

But then again, this is from the '70s, so it's not all fanciful cryptids. There's also the imperative to "Catch-Her-in-the-Rye" (probably without asking ahead of time how she feels about that possibility).

And then the breads have to entangle their chunky legs in such a way to ensure that the bread dick-and-balls are fully on display because what is the point of making naked man bread otherwise?

Though you can, theoretically, "Arrange them in any position"-- even those that might obscure the dude's junk. (Yeah, just try sculpting them to make the sign of the two-headed trumpet fish and let me know how it turns out.)

I suddenly feel way less all-in on the bread sculptures, especially when I start contemplating the fact that fully nude and 1970s-accurate lovers should probably have bready pubic hair... At least I know that I could make it by sending dough through a clean garlic press, and with that, I'm OUT! I think I'll enjoy my bread in boring, non-sculpted form.