>>Hah. Kelley. I beg
>
>god! i love it when people do that! what are you wearing joanna. :)
Golly, whud I do...?
>>to differ. I've made excellent bread (having learned
>>to knead and bake from my mother who learned it from her mother) without
>>having the slightest idea wtf was going in the dough.
>
>
>your gram (like mine) can tell you about why bread isn't rising well on a
>particular day: she might blab on about the humidity, the age of the
>flour, she might scold you for not using unbleached, for not getting liquid
>hot enough or getting it too hot, or for forgetting the salt, etc.
Oh, THAT sort of stuff, well, yes, we all absorb those lessons while we're learning how to knead.
>as such she's using knowledge passed on to her from others which she has
>probably altered along the way from her own experiments and from talking to
>others. carrol's point that we can't learn from others is b.s. on that
>point. should have fleshed it out. you're right to call me on it. still,
>what i'm saying is what carrol said we can't do here: we learn how to do
>things from other people. and that is every bit as much a part as praxis
>as kneading the bread to learn how to do it. theory and practice are
>*interrelated* existing in a complex relationship to one another. they
>aren't reducible to one another and that is what i hear carrol doing.
I didn't hear that in what Carrol wrote.
>>There may be theories about this or that but if we're ignorant of them and
>>procede regardless, don't you think it's a bit of a stretch to say we're
>>"using" theory?
>
>i was going along with carrol's analogy to point out why it's not so that
>bread making is only something you can do by just doing it. you learn from
>the collective experiences of others. some recorded (someday i'm going to
>write the definitive guide to the cookbook genre. cookbooks are literature,
>damn it. including those dang "fund raiser" cookbooks. i've got the
>world's best! query joanna, are your fave pages sticky? heh. when i
>scout garage sales etc i look for the cookbooks that have lots of sticky
>pages. :) [1]
I heard from Carrol that it would be easier to learn breadmaking standing next to someone demonstrating than from illustrations in a cookbook.
>carrol was, himself, using theory rather loosely and, coz i'm a bitch
>stickler for a definition of theory (ask ken), i decided to leave it alone
>else we would have really gone off on a tangent. what we are doing in this
>list debate is not theory, though theories are being loosely deployed (at
>different levels: substantive v. meta theory, for ex).
So, is there a difference between doing theory and using it?
>ps, apologies for lighting into you a while back. meant to write at the
>time. got busy and it zipped right out of the noggin. but, better late
>than never. ha ha. somehow my mother doesn't deal with that one when it
>comes to birthday cards.
As we say down here, no'orries (no worries, no prob).
cheers, Jo
www.overlookhouse.com