When the world crumbles, we retreat to our kitchens to pull ourselves together: tend to your sourdough, the internet coos. Mash some bananas into bread, recycle your pét nat bottles! We are told it is not the loaf itself that saves us, but the process, the act of applying force to butter and sugar, the submission to heat and time, that delivers us back into our bodies. For a few years, I subscribed to this ideology, probably because I needed a spiritual practice and it was convenient that the main ingredient this one required was flour. Then I encountered this line of poetry by patron saint of disenchantment, John Ashbery: “We bake a dozen kinds of muffins every day / yet we are cold and disquieting at heart.” The truth at last. A pastry chef, I was literally baking a dozen iterations of muffins each day and feeling more despondent than ever.

Hildegard von Bingen might have blamed my mistemper on black bile. I became obsessed with her—a 12th-century mystic, abbess, composer, philosopher and perhaps the original “multi-hyphenate,” who offers something less sentimental and more pharmacological to cure a bad mood: “nerve cookies.” Throughout her spectacular oeuvre of medical and theological writings, she describes food as a means of governing the humors, of tempering black bile, that ancient root of melancholia. To control it, she insists, we must eat. I was struck by the sweetness of her prescription: pastry as medicine. No vacuous promises about process restoring me “back to myself,” just a handful of ingredients and their effects: cinnamon and cloves calm and stimulate. Spelt, that “hot, rich, and powerful” grain, “creates a happy mind and puts joy in the human disposition.”