Pastry is Bread Transfigured

“Paradox is the only basket large enough to hold truth. It is the very simplicity of bread which provides the foundation for all the complexities that man has wrought with flour. The violin is an astonishingly plain piece of business, carried beyond itself by craftsmanship: Stradivarius, Guarnerius, and Amati have gone down in history because they went to the inordinate bother of perfecting the ordinary. Unfortunately, we do not know the names of the first cooks who fiddled with the elastic properties of flour long enough to invent pastry, but their care is just as much a monument to the true work of man. We were meant to lift the world with loving eyes and hands; pastry is bread transfigured by concern” (Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, p. 155).