were not by the synthetic
but analytic process--and I have gladly omitted it since, though most
housewives earnestly assured me that safe and wholesome bread without
yeast might not be, and elderly people prophesied a speedy decay of the
vital forces. Yet I find it not to be an essential ingredient, and after
going without it for a year am still in the land of the living; and I
am glad to escape the trivialness of carrying a bottleful in my pocket,
which would sometimes pop and discharge its contents to my discomfiture.
It is simpler and more respectable to omit it. Man is an animal who
more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances.
Neither did I put any sal-soda, or other acid or alkali, into my bread.
It would seem that I made it according to the recipe which Marcus
Porcius Cato gave about two centuries before Christ. "Panem depsticium
sic facito. Manus mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam in mortarium
indito, aquae paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre. Ubi bene subegeris,
defingito, coquitoque sub testu." Which I take to mean,--"Make kneaded
bread thus. Wash your hands and trough well. Put the meal into the
trough, add water gradually, and knead it thoroughly. When you have
kneaded it well, mould it, and bake it under a cover," that is, in a
baking kettle. Not a word about leaven. But I did not always use this
staff of life. At one time, owing to the emptiness of my purse, I saw
none of it for more than a month.

Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in this
land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and fluctuating
markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and independence
that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, and
hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any. For the
most part the farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the grain of his own
producing, and buys flour, which is at least no more wholesome, at a
greater cost, at the store. I saw that I could easily raise my bushel
or two of rye and Indian corn, for the former will grow on the poorest
land, and the latter does not require the best, and grind them in a
hand-mill, and so do without rice and pork; and if I must have some
concentrated sweet, I found by experiment that I could make a very good
molasses either of pumpkins or beets, and I knew that I needed only to
set out a few maples to obtain it more easily still, and while these
were growing I c