i've been meaning to update this blog for some time now. i have several half-finished posts lurking in the wings that i haven't gotten around to finishing. but now i'm sitting at my desk and i'm taking advantage of my self-mandated lunch hour to actually create a stage-ready post.
before i was born, my family lived in a tiny little town in southern utah. it's right on the border of arizona, a little hitching post in the middle of nowhere. my siblings grew up across the street from my father's parents in a house my great-grandfather helped build. my mother made bread every week and my father hunted. they ate venison from the deer he shot, pork and bacon from the pigs in the pen out back, t-bone steaks from the cows in the pasture, tomatoes and potatoes from my grandfather's award-winning garden, sun-warmed apricots from my grandmother's trees.
four days after i was born, my father got a new job. we moved to suburbia and haven't returned to rural life since. my father never hunted after i was born, never fished. tomatoes and potatoes came from the grocery store, apricots came from jars gathered from my grandmother's cellar during our summer visits. my mother made bread maybe three times a year, even less as we got older.
for my siblings, when they were young, home-baked bread was normal, dull. marshmallowy wonderbread was an exotic treat. for me, home-baked bread was the food equivalent of el dorado.
at my grandmother's house, where there was home made bread for most of my childhood, i tore slices into pieces and poured milk over them, sometimes with a sprinkle of sugar. when my mother baked her rare loaves, she would bake them six at a time. two would be gone in a matter of minutes as we all carved off pieces to slather with margarine and gobble up still-hot. sometimes she would save a loaf-worth of dough and cut it into pieces that she would roll out into flat, uneven blobs and fry in butter on a skillet. (these were usually served with plain boiled navy beans, the abhorred staple of my childhood.) other times, she would roll out a huge rectangle of dough and sprinkle it with cinnamon, sugar, and raisins, roll it up in a log, and snip off slices with a strand of dental floss. these were baked into plump cinnamon rolls and drizzled with glaze. during one particularly horrid blizzard in our part of pennsylvania, when we were cold from playing in the snow and my mother impatient for comfort, the unbaked rolls were flattened out and fried in that same way, gliding across a buttered skillet.
now that i've moved out on my own, i've rediscovered bread. it happened on a whim, a way for my sister and me to blow off steam after a particularly hellish week. now, it's a habit. a sort of therapy. on weekends, i dust off my mother's old recipe, the same recipe my grandmother used. i've whittled the recipe down to make only one loaf and adapted it for my tastes-- more whole wheat flour, less white flour. more yeast, a dash more salt, half honey instead of all white sugar. i don't subscribe to the no-knead method. the kneading is the point of it for me-- those minutes spent turning a mess of flour into something smooth and round and purposeful. i was talking about bread with someone and he said, in a halting, second-guessing way, "this... sounds weird, but bread dough feels kind of like... like a person." i laughed and said it was, indeed, weird. but it's true. when bread dough is kneaded it becomes as solid as a person's arm, smooth as a cheek. it's warm-- water added at just above body temperature and kept there by the heat of the baker's hands. i like kneading. i turn on some music, roll up my sleeves, and get to it. i don't think of anything else, really-- just the bread, the music. it's comfortable. comforting.
making bread is connected with so many other people, so many memories, that it's no wonder that i look forward to my weekend baking session. it's why i-- who grow impatient when it takes a webpage more than four seconds to load-- am willing to carve out several hours of my weekend just for one loaf of bread.
the first slice, taken from the end, is always torn up into a bowl with milk poured over, sometimes with a sprinkle of sugar.
