This food stuff meme consists of a bag of sourdough starter goo, and instructions on how to turn it into a cake or bread.
There are slightly different recipe/instructions with the various versions of this meme.
It has been called "Amish friendship bread" "Herman" or even "Padre prayer bread", all names I dislike Simply calling it "Friendship cake/bread" is IMO much more acceptable, though it also sets off warning bells that it is a meme.
Here are some articles on this food stuff meme, yes, an edible meme... I'll insert the odd comment here and there.
POSTED FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2008
JEREMY: Ten days ago, my wife received a gift of "Amish Friendship Bread" from a friend. I know it was ten days ago, because the gift wasn't actually bread - it was a ziplocked bag of a disgusting milky white substance along with ten days of instructions on how to make the bread. Frankly, it's my belief that such a disgusting looking gift would only be acceptable from a friend, but that's just my opinion.
Anyway, the Amish Friendship Bread works like this. Most of the days you just work the mixture around in the bag (i.e. keep yourself busy while waiting). On one day in the middle you're supposed to add stuff to the mix - flour and milk and things like that. After ten days, you do two things. First, you create "starter bags" using your mixture and other ingredients and distribute them to several of your friends. Then you use the rest of the mixture to make bread for yourself. It was said in the instructions that only the Amish know how to make an original starter bag, but I would wager that (had I cared) it would have been pretty easy to calculate what exactly goes into a starter, given that only a percentage of the original remains with each passing.
Regardless, the whole process essentially amounts to a meme, only instead of social media, this one is in the form of a recipe and food. Eat one, and pass several on. If you don't pass them on, you have to eat them all, which is incentive to get rid of the extra.
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Ocean Elf: I didn't provide a direct link to the blog entry because I didn't like the title or this guy's pathetic attempt at humour with this whole "The Amish are planning to take over the world!" thing, or his lack of enthusiasm to point out this isn't really Amish chain mail at all, but a food chain letter that some doofus somewhere decided it might catch on if they called it "Amish friendship bread", and claim that only the Amish knew how to make the starter, which is balderdash anyway.
Okay, on to the next article. --
Sister Mary Martha: "Amish I Wouldn't Wish This on My Worst Enemy Bread".
Have any of you ever had this stuff? The "Amish Friendship Bread" experience? Because it's not just bread. The bread is actually very delicious. Too delicious. The bread isn't the thing. The "friendship" is the thing.
It starts with an overly enthusiastic "friend" who thinks giving you the stuff is just the most lovely gesture on the planet.
I don't see how. It's more like a gypsy curse.
You don't just get the bread. You get the privilege of the bread and a bowl of goo. The bowl of goo is active with yeast or something. It's "alive". You have to tend it, adding something to it and stirring it, once a day every day for something like nine days, time that could be better spent on a novena not involving a bowl of goo. The bowl of goo is like "The Blob". It grows.
Then it makes something like 4 loaves of this delicious bread. It's so rich that you really only need to eat a slice a month, unless you throw a lot of tea parties.
This is where the "friendship" part comes in. You have to give away the other 3 loaves. You really do have to. It's that, or throw it out. You can't possible eat it all.
And the piece de resistance: you have more goo left over. It has multiplied! and you have to give that away too.
It's a chain letter of bread.
It's a nightmare.
When we got ours, we didn't know. Sister St. Aloysius was delighted with the concept and tended the goo faithfully for a few days. Her enthusiasm began to wane around the time she started to forget about tending it. Suddenly, she'd get this startled haunted look, late in the evening and whisper, "the batter!"
"Batter?" I'm thinking. "Did I leave some kid on the playground?"
We enjoyed the bread. But when it came time to pass on the "love" it was a lot like this song "The Thing".
Everyone on our block was already hip to "Amish Friendship Bread" and said, "Get out of here with that ___ _____ ____, and don't come back no more!"
And the whole thing just keeps multiplying! It's a horror movie of bread.
Delicious bread.
and now this:
One of my friends gave me prayer bread..er...a bowl of goo to add ingredients to, stir, and prayer over once a day for 10 or so days. This lady is a sweetheart, but I just got the directions today (it's day 5 and I am only half way through!) and see that I am to add stuff to it so I can give 4 other friends a bowl of goo to do the same process.
I really don't want to do it. In fact, I want to toss it in the trash and never look back. I love to bake, but this recipe doesn't strike me as being a delicious bread. It's The Blessed Bread of Padre Pio. I've had Amish friendship bread and it is WONDERFUL! This one has sugar, eggs, flour, cooking oil, and baking powder. It's probably tasty, but the Amish bread is a little like cinnamon roll heaven!
I feel bad for complaining, I just don't want to do it which makes me feel worse. In addition, I have so much to do that this is really not on my list of priorities and I might forget about it. What happens if I miss a step? Better yet, what happens if she finds out I didn't make it?
I feel like I have to just suck it up and make it since I don't want to hurt her feelings, but there is no way I would pass this on to my other busy mom friends who would probably feel the same way I do now. Advice?
My advice is to follow your heart. Chuck it in the trash. It may be tempting to lie to your friend about why you didn't make it by telling her the cat licked it or something like that. While the real reason you don't want to lie is that it is a sin, the fact is that if you tell her the cat licked it, she'll jump at the chance to give you a new batch.
Try not to judge her. It's the best thing that can happen to her, to give you a new batch, because she has a lot of goo to get rid of every couple of weeks and this way she won't have to go looking for new marks.
Just tell her you failed to tend it and it died. Tell her it happened quickly because you failed right away to tend it because you have such a busy schedule. And don't tell her you "forgot" to tend it. That would be a lie, too. If she tries to foist more on you, tell her you don't like to go around murdering batter.
There is a more important issue, however, that must be addressed. There is no such thing as Padre Pio Prayer Bread. It comes with a note that says it is Vatican approved. I can tell you something else the note says that proves that the bread has nothing whatsoever to do with Padre Pio or the Vatican. The note says that if you pray each day while tending the goo, you and your family will have good luck.
There is no such thing as luck in the teachings of the Catholic Church. "Luck" is a superstition and this chain letter of bread is exactly that. It might be a good idea to let your friend the Gyspy in on that fact as well.
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Ocean Elf: Nailed it!
And that is exactly why this meme stinks, besides being annoying, demanding and potentially wasteful if you just want out of it. Making bogus religious claims is a mockery and a sham.
I don't care for the "Amish friendship bread" either. It just turns out as some sort of chocolate cinnamon loaf. Sure, a lot of people would consider that delectable, but I don't care much for that combo. I'll take a freshly made warm, gooey Cinnabon over friendship bread any time! Nomnomnom!
In 2011, the food meme was back again, this time it was a friendship chain letter cake called "Herman". *Cringe*
Next article:
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From the Guardian
A friendship cake called Herman Herman is getting everywhere. Has the friendship cake revival come knocking on your kitchen door?
Lizzie Enfield
Wed 30 Nov 2011 09.50 GMT First published on Wed 30 Nov 2011 09.50 GMT
Herman the friendship cake
*Sacreligious tripe removed*
Lizzie Enfield: I have been busy propagating loaves, well, cakes actually. Herman cakes, to be precise.
For anyone not yet initiated into the ritual of Herman cake creation, it is the culinary equivalent of a chain letter. Someone presents you with a jar of yeasty mix and a set of instructions on when to add sugar, flour and sift or stir it. Ten days on, you divide the mixture into five, pass four jars onto friends and, with the rest, bake yourself a very yeasty and sugary but surprisingly tasty cake.
My introduction was through a friend of my daughter. She arrived on the doorstep one morning bearing a jam jar and a note, which I stuck on the sideboard and promptly forgot about. A little while later, sitting in my kitchen, alone, I heard a loud, alarming, slurping sound, as if an invisible Homer Simpson was sitting with me, sucking through a straw. It happened again. I got up and looked around, half expecting to find a frog had come in from the garden (it sometimes happens). Then I discovered the embryonic Herman was frothing away on the side, making human masticating sounds.
The instructions that came with "him" tell me this is because "he" needs more space. Already Herman is no longer just a pot of yeast. He's a living, breathing part of the family, and as soon as my daughter comes home from school he must be moved to a more spacious home – that's a bowl to you and me. And, he must be stirred and engaged in rather one-sided conversation over the next few days until he's ready for his first meal (milk, flour and sugar) on Day Four.
He's quite an undemanding, if slightly yeasty smelling, charge. Four days of stirring and chatting later, he wants the same meal again, before being divided and potted, ready to spread a little happiness to several other families. Finally, you add more flour and sugar, eggs, cinnamon and apples and stick him in the oven. There's been so much chatting that this feels a little like turning the pet rabbit into stew. But I'm not sentimental and Herman lives on, through his four babies, I'm hungry and he's delicious.
The name Herman is taken from the Amish sweet, cinnamon-flavoured bread and the cakes have their origins in the sourdough products made by the early American pioneers. Airborne yeast was used to ferment a mixture of flour sugar and water, and then used to make pancakes, bread and cakes. What was left of original starter leavening mixture was then passed around the community for others to cook with.
These days Herman cakes are a luxury gimmick rather than a necessity and in this form they have been around for several decades. My mother remembers making and passing on Hermans before the war. I missed out on them when I was at school, though I was busy giving away the ferment needed to make real ginger beer. I can still recall the act of daring carried out by my sister when we discovered that everyone at school already had a ginger beer "plant." She began pouring the leftover mixture of yeasty, ginger, lemon and sugar down the drain, announcing with conviction "It might be live but it's not really a person."
Try shrugging off the live element to some of today's sourdough fanatics, for whom tracing the origins of the starter is almost as much a part of the process as making the bread. One online sourdough addict recently posted, with glee, that he'd got some starter from Sweden which originated in Calabria, in the south of Italy, several generations ago and smuggled it back through Birmingham airport.
Gardeners will tell you these bread makers are only doing what they've been doing for years; propagating food and passing it on. One of my neighbours does it with seedlings, handing out baby plants to the rest of the street in the hope we nurture and grow more mini tomato plants. I never quite dare tell him our garden is a strip of Astroturf and my fingers are positively ungreen. I just give him some windfall apples and hope it's a fair exchange.
The current Herman revival is gathering momentum with the help of internet chat forums and comes at a time when we are being encouraged to waste less and share more.
In essence, Herman cakes are a quirky fun way of doing something we're out of the habit of doing - sharing surpass food within the community rather than putting stuff in giant freezers or throwing it away. "Yuk," says my son, pausing mid Herman mouthful when we muse that this cake may have been started several years and many miles away. "It must be well past its sell by date."
"There is no sell by date," I tell him, which is part of the appeal. In these times of almost impenetrable packaging and obsessive food hygiene there's added pleasure to be had from eating something that has been through many hands and possibly several generations, and survived to continue the tale.
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Ocean Elf: I do not like the idea of referring to some food stuff as a he or a she That's creepy. Talking to it as if it was alive is out of the question...! I would feel like a moron.
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northantset.co.uk, Monday 14 May 2012
sunny nunney: remember chain letters? I don’t mean the terrible 1980s gameshow hosted by the likes of Jeremy Beadle and Andrew O’Connor, I mean the actual chain letters that you used to get in the post. Were there times when you got a lovely handwritten letter through the door, only to discover that it was from a cousin you hadn’t seen in about 15 years telling you that if you sent it on to at least a dozen other people then you would be blessed with good luck? Chain letters used to fill us with fear – we knew that nothing bad would happen if we didn’t respond to them in the correct manner but we still did. There would end up being a last-minute dash to the post office to get them all sent out on time in a last-ditch hope to secure that potential fortune that could be round the corner.
These days of course we get chain emails that require us forwarding them on to a dozen other people. Not as expensive or time-consuming as sending letters, but equally as irritating. Someone has to have been the person who started it at some point. I hope they’re proud of themselves!
Last week I learned about a new development in the world of chain letters – one that involves eggs, sugar and a couple of cooking apples. Wifey and I were sat at home on Sunday afternoon watching the football when there was a knock on the door. We opened it to find our next-door neighbour stood there clutching a plastic tub with something gooey inside that was, for want of a better term, bubbling. It looked like it could have been a specimen from Dr Frankenstein’s lab… so what was it? A ‘Friendship Cake’. So here’s the idea – a friend or family member gives you a bit of batter, you spend ten days stirring it and adding various ingredients and then, on the final day, you split it in to four. One of the quarters you keep for yourself, add more ingredients to and then bake and the other three you pass on yourself, thus continuing the chain. The cake contains yeast so, regardless of how long it has been passed from pillar to post, it should never go off.
Here’s the good news – it tasted delicious. I was cynical, but we invited the very neighbours who gave it to us over to try some and we all loved it. What’s the downside? It takes a lot less than ten days to pop to the shop, buy a cake and eat it – and it doesn’t look as scary on the work surface! Sponsored Links
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Posted September 1, 2012
Linda: Meet Herman, the cake
A few weeks ago there was a knock at the door on Saturday afternoon….who could it be? Too late for the postman, no guests expected….I sent lovely husband to find out, just in case it was a salesperson ;o
It was the next door neighbour with a plastic tub and a piece of paper and muttering something about Herman…..husband, I believe, looked bemused so she said ‘give it to Linda she will know what Herman is’ and thrust the box and paper into his hands.
And so it came to pass that we were the recipients of a Herman the German Friendship Cake sourdough starter. The chain letter of baking.
Herman’s care program
I had seen mention of Herman by a few other bloggers over the last year and not being a cake baker or eater was rather hoping he wouldn’t land in my kitchen. But land he had.
In common with most chain letters the friendship element is somewhat undermined by the way in which you feel compelled to do as the letter asks or feel guilty for breaking the chain. A sort of low grade emotional blackmail that I hope doesn’t exist in real friendships! In the case of Herman the the emotional pull comes from the fact that you might apparently kill him if you don’t look after him:
‘You cannot put me in the fridge or I will die. If I stop bubbling, I’m dead’
Oh good, not so much as a gift more a kind of burden. Apparently you also have to do everything on the exact right day or it won’t work.
That said it does feel quite nice to be given something by the neighbours in a world were we mostly only say hello in passing.
Ocean Elf: I'd rather get nothing than get any kind of meme from a neighbour. And this whole Herman setup, with the instructions making as if the cake is the one instructing the recipient on how to make it really rubs me the wrong way.
Linda:: Probably if you have read much of my blog or if you happen to know me then you’ll know I’m not one to follow a recipe without making tweaks. And so it was with Herman.
I decided it would be sort of fun to see if he worked and also fun to see if he would still work if I broke some of the rules. After all I know from my bread baking that you don’t kill sourdough by putting it in the fridge you just slow it down and you don’t kill it if you don’t quite feed it to program and if it looks like its breathing its last you can usually revive it.
So I sort of followed the instructions but as day 10 (the day to bake the cake) was going to fall on a work day when I was with a client I mashed it up a bit and just extending the process so that I could make the cake at the weekend. I also knew that on day 9 I was unlikely to see anyone to share the starter with (plus I wasn’t sure I wanted to oblige a further 3 people to make a cake) so the surfeit of Herman starter is in the fridge and he looks a little listless but he sure isn’t dead.
Finished cake
The cake mix seemed a little dry so I added some extra milk when mixing it, possibly a mistake as the resulting cake although cooked through was so moist and soft it fell apart when you tried to slice it. I baked for the longer time as most people seemed to think this gave a better result. Taste wise it was really good a little on the sweet side for me (look at all that sugar in the instructions). As ever we only got about half way through before we forgot about it only to find it a week later alive and kicking with mould.
Ocean Elf: EWW!
Linda:: Verdict:
– if you like cake and you want to experiment with sourdough this is an easy way to start
– if you like the idea of sharing cake mix with neighbours then you’ll love this
– don’t believe the emotional blackmail of Herman dying – he won’t and you don’t have to pass him on, breaking the chain is never a diaster
You can find more about Herman here should you want to start your own, or receive one and need to find out more.
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