Kabul 19-7-03 Wrong demos, right bread
19 Jul 2003
[1308w]
You may also find
this account of baking in central Sudan interesting.
............
Turns out I was wrong. The demo wasn't against the US and Pakistan. Week before last there was a super demo in which the Pakistani embassy was looted from top to bottom - I know this is true because I met a man who wants to go to Islamabad, left his passport with the embassy and now is an undocumented alien. British passports may well have some resale value.
Last week the demo was by the Jamiyat party, but it was a demonstration generally in favour of human rights, freedom for women and democracy. My informant works at the US embassy and says he saw the banners. He says he thinks the organisers were the intellectual wing of Jamiyat. The theological wing is the leader, Mr Rabbani. He's not in the government because he was against doing any deals at the Bonn conference two years ago. He was outmanouevered by the military wing who now occupy some important posts in the government. Marshal Fahim, the minister of defence is the most prominent of these. Then at the far end of the spectrum from Rabbani there are a few odd ministers who aren't fundamentalist theocrats and don't have private armies. And these are the ones behind the demo.
At least, I think that's right.
Well, one thing I do know about is bread. So stick to what you know. I went down to the bread shop on the corner to see how it was done, and they welcomed me in very kindly, though we had hardly a word of any language in common. I missed the bit where they mixed the dough - I must go back for that tomorrow. But the baking is the fun bit.
Dough gets mixed at ground level in the back of the shop; in the front, visible from the street, is a raised platform about eight feet on a side, made of dried earth. There's a hole in the middle, towards the front, about a foot and a half across. This hole is the aperture of a much larger bottle-shaped cavity inside the body of the primordial mud. This cavity is maybe deep enough for a small man to stand up in, and perhaps wide enough for his ten year old son to lie down. But neither of them would be there at present because it's an oven and there is a fire in the bottom, of good dry wood that gives scarcely any smoke - what there is goes up from the aperture to a hole in the roof.
There are five people at work on this platform with heat coming out of the oven and mingling with the heat beating down through the haze on this already basting day. As far as I can see, there is a bit of a hierarchy, the upper classes being closer to the place where the platform gives way to a fly screen with a break in it (making it remarkably useless as a fly screen) through which people buy bread. At the back of the platform, a youth and a small boy face each other across a long board made of three planks worn smooth with use. The small boy has a big tray next to him. The tray has pats of dough, each maybe six ounces.
As I say, I didn't see how they mixed it, but it looks quite wet - the pats of dough lie flat. They're covered with a cloth to keep the flies off. The small boy pulls them out and dusts them with flour - there's no flour bowl but there's a lot of it about - and flattens them out to a five inch disk. You'd think he'd do a pizza thrower twirl, but it's mostly squishing and moulding on the board.
He tosses his teaplate disk of dough to the other end of the board and his older brother expands its circumference a bit further and gives it a bit of bulge at the rim. When it's six or seven inches round he links his hands together by crossing his thumbs - as you would to make a shadow puppet butterfly - and crooks his fingers and then moves his hands across the disk, jabbing it rapidly with his finger tips. Then he turns the disk through ninety degrees and does it again. So now the disk is a bit wider still and has a loose checkerboard pattern of bumps and depressions.
Next the two men closer to the serving hatch come into action. They too sit cross legged opposite one another but instead of the dough board they have the mouth of the oven between them. First into action is the man I take to be the highest caste operator. He has one-and-a-half skilful jobs to do; and he was the one who took charge of saying hello to me and beckoning me in. At the start of his shift he has wrapped himself in cloth, first coiling a strip round his right hand, like a boxer putting on bandages, then wrapping a much larger handkerchief all the way round his forehead and once again round his nose and mouth, tying it at the back, so all you can see is his eyes.
Now he has a big padded board in his right hand, a couple of feet long and six or seven inches wide. He has a bowl of water from which he splashes the padded board. Then he takes the checkered pat of dough and slaps it onto the board, pulling it out into a long pointed ellipse. Now the dough is stretched thin and some holes may appear. When it's properly spread over the padded board he swoops forward and lunges the board down into the oven and slaps the big strip of dough against the inside wall, where it sticks. Presumably the water between the dough and the board stops the dough being more stuck to the board than to the wall. Anyhow the dough stays in the oven stuck to the underside of the roof, and the bread guy gets out as quick as he can.
After a while he's got a dozen or so strips of dough stuck inside the oven (of course one can't very easily see them all, but you know they're there) and now his partner comes into action. This man has two iron rods each a yard or so long, one with a two pronged fork at the end, the other shaped like a spatula. He uses these to grab the first of the strips of dough the top guy put in, pulling it out, twirling it round and throwing down in front of the serving hatch. Of course this works fine for the bread on the opposite side of the oven from him, but those underneath him he can't see. These ones are left for the high skill operator who has his own iron rods. In fact I'm not sure he doesn't have just a single rod, which would make him a truly high skill craftsman
Then finally at the front of the shop, where the bread ends up, is an old friendly guy with two wall eyes who takes the money and hands out the bread which people take away wrapped in cloths they brought for the purpose.
The whole thing is a masterpiece of low-tech mass production - every move as economical as you could wish, all done with good humour and panache.
It's lovely bread when you get it fresh but it quite soon goes dry and crunchy and uninteresting. The flour is coarse, though not wholemeal, and the bread has a rough texture like edible sandpaper. It's just the thing for dipping in stewed onion or yoghourt, or wrapping round kebabs. To you madam, three Afghanis. That's a lot of skill and flour for fourpence.
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