2020 Essays

Bread as Mediating Material: Tactile Memory and Touch

Le Pouésard, Emma Marie

This essay addresses the role of materials not as physical ingredients or tools but as mediators between familiar and unfamiliar processes, taking bread and baking in the manuscript as a case study. References to bread in entries that do not employ this food use the familiar activity of baking to elucidate unfamiliar technical processes, such as when making stucco, to “knead it as if you wanted to make bread” (fol. 29r). The author-practitioner turns assumed tactile memories in his reader into descriptive devices and implies the primacy of touch in craft practice. Current neuroscientific research argues that touch is the most sensitive of the senses and is strongly linked to memory-making; this might help explain the prominence of tactile descriptions in craft and technical writing. The use of familiar materials and processes as mediators in written accounts enables craftspeople recording procedural and embodied knowledge to bridge the gap between experience and words.