Is it a book to excite the tribe of sourdough bakers that lockdown’s spare time has created? Absolutely. Slow Rise will be welcomed by the new bread geeks. And though the stories aren’t especially useful, they will resonate for the man (in particular) who is looking for complexity while he sets about making a simple loaf of bread.
Penn, it turns out, is an engaging storyteller and early on, offers a kind of Sapiens-with-wheat, albeit one that doesn’t go back quite so far. Still: bread is life, life is bread. The intimate details of grain types might be a new kind of dull, but as Penn whips through the ways bread has shaped centuries of life, it is broadly fascinating, and while he makes plain the astounding influence bread has had on civilisation as we know it – “[it] is kneaded into economics, politics, human biology and religion… It’s story is the story of humanity” – remains charmingly awed by the rather less impressive: “You can grow wheat on an allotment? This was a thunderbolt.”
