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May 30, 2010 - View Single Entry

Bread has been an integral part of my adult life, so it's taken a while to work my way around to writing about it for To Be Rather Than to Seem. I started toward it by writing about the classic New England WASP food I grew up on. My writers' group pointed out that the piece came alive when I got to the bread part and that my other culinary memories wanted an essay of their own. So you'll get that one later. At the end, this one points toward another biggie. The writers' workshop referred to was the Feminist Women's Writing Workshop of 1984, a pivotal event in my personal history. Watch this space!

When I left for England in the late summer of 1974, the only unsliced bread I had ever eaten was French. The long skinny loaves came wrapped in plastic, not paper, and we did not call them "baguettes." In the 1950s and '60s, it was easy to grow up in the suburbs and never see a bakery. Bread came from the supermarket, sliced and wrapped.

My family weren't culinary snobs, but we did scorn Wonder Bread and its puffy white ilk. Wonder Bread was supposed to build strong bodies 12 different ways, but we figured the best way was to mash a couple of slices into a ball and play catch with it. The bread my mother brought home, usually Pepperidge Farm, had substance. Even untoasted it stood up to butter, as long as the butter hadn't just come hard from the fridge. It made an excellent grilled cheese. It came in white, but it also came in cinnamon raisin, which was almost like dessert.

In England bakeries were hard to miss. You could often smell them from several shops away. I sublet a room in my landlady's flat on the very outskirts of Brighton/Hove, Sussex, and the tiny neighborhood center, the terminus of the bus line I took into town, included a bakery that made its own bread as well as crumpets, scones, and other treats. The bread came unsliced, though they'd slice it for you if you asked; wholemeal was always available, and it dawned on me that white bread, like other white foods, didn't taste like much, hence the need to dress it with butter, jam or jelly, cheese, or peanut butter. Nothing wrong with the dressings, of course; the revelation was that good bread didn't need them.

By December 1975 I was back in the States with no prospects, nowhere to go, and no idea of how to get there. In this formless land of indecision, I decided that supermarket bread was not worth eating. I would not give up bread; I would make my own. My only bread-making experience was the banana nut quick bread in Joy of Cooking, which was one of the very few baked goods that my mother ever made from scratch. No one in the vicinity made yeast bread, not my parents, my grandmothers, or any of the neighbors, so I taught myself. My guide was a mass-market paperback written by the food editors of Farm Journal. The book was big on margarine, white sugar, and anecdotes about how the hungry, hardworking farmer and his sons appreciated bread baked fresh by the devoted farmwife, but it did a great job of teaching me the basics about yeast, flour, and other key ingredients, and about kneading, proofing, shaping loaves, and baking. I did produce a couple of bricks, but nearly all my early attempts were at least pretty good and were met with acclaim by all the relatives and friends I foisted them off on.

Grandma died in February 1976, my uncle Neville cracked up and committed himself to a psychiatric hospital, and since I was at loose ends it was decided that I should move into Grandma's house and look after it and her dog, a golden Lab named Max. So most of my early forays into bread baking took place in Grandma's big country kitchen, using Grandma's bowls and utensils and kneading my dough on the kitchen table. TV Guide ran a feature on New England cooking that included a recipe for Anadama bread. Mummie sometimes brought Anadama bread home from the grocery store. It came in a yellow-brown wrapper with the bakery logo printed in dark brown -- just like the delivery truck that we often saw parked at the Adams's house when we went to Auburndale, the next town over. Patricia Adams was three or four years ahead of me in school; her father drove for the Anadama Bakery, which I just learned was in Rockport, Massachusetts, and closed in 1972.

Anadama bread may have been the first recipe I ever clipped. The method was more complicated than anything I'd tried from the Farm Journal bread book. First I cooked the cornmeal, water, butter, and dark molasses up in a saucepan till it was thicker than Cream of Wheat. Then I let it cool till it wasn't hot enough to kill the yeast. From there I could proceed as I did with other breads: mixing in flour till the dough was stiff enough to knead, kneading, proofing, punching the dough down and kneading the air out. Then I sliced the dough ball in half, rolled each one out in turn, and rolled it back up into a loaf.

Anadama bread became an instant favorite. I carried that clipping for years till it finally fell apart. Even the copy I typed on my IBM Selectric in the early 1980s is ripped, wrinkled, and so stained with molasses, butter, and Crisco that it looks like 200-year-old parchment.

After I moved to D.C. in May 1977, got a clerical job at the American Red Cross, and immersed myself in the local women's community, potlucks and office parties loomed large in my social life. My first year I lived in a bedsitting room near Dupont Circle and cooked on a hotplate, but eventually I found a girlfriend who lived in a real apartment with a real kitchen. So I baked bread regularly and before long was expected to bring a loaf to potlucks and rolls to holiday dinners. Fresh bread was enough of a novelty that I also brought a cutting board, a bread knife -- and a stick of butter. Margarine was all the rage in those days, especially with the health-conscious and frugal, but if anyone wanted to put it on my bread, she had to do it behind my back.

In the spring of 1978 my girlfriend and I, along with Beverly, who was studying for her master's in African studies at Howard and working for a Catholic education organization, established a group house in D.C.'s Mount Pleasant neighborhood, which was gentrifying but still pretty diverse: Spanish was regularly heard on the streets and in the buses, and many of our neighbors were black. From then until I left Washington, I had housemates, and my housemates actively encouraged my bread habit. Three decades later the evidence is still all around me. My copy of Beard on Bread, stained, dog-eared, and held together with strapping tape, is inscribed:

For Susanna --
an artistic bread maker.
I hope you will enjoy
this book and the recipes
in the years ahead. Happy 1980 birthday!

With love,
Deborah

Deborah, a musician, played the sax and conducted the D.C. Area Feminist Chorus for several years; like me, she made her living as an editor. Beverly gave me the big brown-striped beige bowl that I've been mixing and rising dough in ever since. Beverly also scavenged a table from the Mount Pleasant alleys, steadied its legs with four horizontal dowels, and gave it to me for a kneading table. I've still got it. When I'm not kneading dough, it holds my computer keyboard and mouse, three candles, a photograph of Rhodry Malamutt, and a clutter of office supplies.

Beard on Bread supplanted the Farm Journal book that I'd apprenticed with, which I either lost or tossed around this time. James Beard unabashedly celebrated butter; he used plenty of whole wheat flour and included a useful troubleshooting section, to figure out what went wrong when your bread tasted good but looked funny. My other bread mentor was Floss and Stan Dworkin's Bake Your Own Bread. According to my scrawl on the first page, I acquired this little mass-market paperback in February 1982. Years ago it split down the spine from frequent use, and a few of the pages have to be tucked back in whenever I open it.

Around 1983, a soon-to-be eminent poet who was also the girlfriend of my then housemate gave me a cup of her sourdough starter. She'd got it from friends living on the land in Tennessee. James Beard thought sourdough was overrated, but the Dworkins waxed rhapsodic about it and offered several recipes. The rye, the pumpernickel, and the mostly white bread that tasted like English muffins in loaf form quickly joined my repertoire. The poet was no baker; within a few months her own starter had died, whereupon I replaced it from what she had given me. My starter survived and thrived through many moves and many kitchens. Its death some twenty-five years later was a catalyzing event that I've written about elsewhere. I tried the Dworkins' instructions for starting your own starter. They worked.

The annual Martha's Vineyard Agricultural Society Fair rolled around a few weeks after I landed on the Vineyard in the summer of 1985. The fair's indoor exhibits showcase the agricultural, horticultural, culinary, and creative abilities of residents and visitors; baked goods occupy one end of the hall, along with jams, jellies, pickles, relishes, and summer vegetables that have been put up for winter eating. What better way to declare my intent to become a year-round resident than by entering my yeast breads? I entered one in yeast bread (light) and one in yeast bread (dark). Both won blue ribbons. Maybe I really could hold my own on Martha's Vineyard.

A writer has to know one thing well. Joan Isom, a poet from Tahlequah, Oklahoma, said that at the first writers' workshop I ever attended. She'd heard it from another writer at another workshop. It made immediate sense, but deeper understanding has developed over the years: a writer is always learning new things, but the things she knows well are her most reliable sources of imagery and inspiration. Bread is one of the things I know well. I know it with my hands as they mix and knead and feel when they've kneaded enough; I know it with my finger that tests the risen dough to see if it's ready to bake, with my nose that takes in the smell of baking bread, and with all my gastronomic faculties that revel in the taste of fresh bread -- which I usually manage to postpone tasting till the new loaf has cooled enough to slice without ripping. Words taught me to make bread, but when I make bread words recede and let my senses do the knowing.

When I write, though, what I know about bread helps me communicate what I know about other things, and the knowledge I'm feeling my way toward when I write. I draw in the ingredients, each one distinct, with its own texture, taste, and character. Blended and kneaded they become something else; the dough takes its shape from whatever container I choose for it. Finally heat transforms it yet again, into something nourishing and delicious that can venture out into the world and feed others. Not for nothing is bread a rich source of imagery and metaphor. While my hands work the dough, the images remain fresh.

Laundry List

May 28, 2010 - View Single Entry

A picture perfect laundry day, so it's out there flapping on the line and testifying that we're indeed moving toward summer. Wednesday was hot, too-hot-to-eat hot. Yecchh. Yesterday and today are bright, breezy, and cooler.

Out on the line:

6 pair jeans and other long pants

no shorts (haven't got 'em out yet)

1 sweatshirt

2 turtlenecks

7 T-shirts, only one of which has long sleeves. That's the serious sign that the weather is warming up.

2 barn towels. Why 2? Because Contessa the pistol-packin' mini bit me in the cheek when I was putting out hay last evening. She's tried before but she's never connected. The towel I used to stanch the bleeding with was already pretty filthy, so belatedly I considered hygiene and rummaged through my trunk for a clean one. My washcloth got laundered for the same reason, but it's out on the deck on the drying rack, along with my socks and underwear. The cut on my face is barely noticeable now, but the blood dribbled quite dramatically.

While the wash was washing -- the machines have gone up to summer rates, but though $5.25 is more than the $4 I paid early this month, it's less than the $5.50 they charged last summer -- Travvy and I strolled around the airport and through the terminal. He was friendly and talkative and doing very well -- till we were on our way out of the terminal and he snatched a stretchy charm-type bracelet from a little girl's wrist. He hadn't done this in months and months, but boy did he dig his paws in, with that stubborn "I won't!" puppy look on his face. After about 10 minutes, he gave it up. Fortunately the little girl and her mother were very patient. I thanked them profusely and apologetically.

This is the dog I'm taking off for his first try at Rally Advanced next weekend? It is. My registration's been confirmed, and I just made ferry reservations: going off on the 6 a.m., coming back on the 2:30. Summer rates are in effect: $88 round-trip. Ouch.

Daly Ripples

May 26, 2010 - View Single Entry

Yeah, I'm still here -- riding the whirlwind, it seems, but it's carrying me in the right direction. One thing for sure: when spring officially turns to summer, I'm going to be in a whole different place than I was when winter turned to spring. No, that doesn't mean I'm leaving Martha's Vineyard. Yes, I would consider any plausible opportunity to live somewhere else.

Mary Daly's death at the very beginning of the year prompted me to write about Mary in my bloggery. Mary's death and my blog have been rippling outward. I e-mailed the blog link to women I thought might be interested. One result was that the Women's Review of Books asked if I could turn it into an obituary. Sure, said I. To write an obit, I had to know more about Mary's life, so I read her essay "Sin Big" (published in The New Yorker in 1996) and Outercourse (1992), her personal, political, and philosophical autobiography, both for the first time. The obit wound up looking not much like the blog; it should be out any day now in the May/June WRB. Also available soon will be my next "One Wired Sister" column for the WRB blog, Women = Books. I was going to write about the hidden assumptions of editorial style; Martha, the blog editor, suggested a Daly tie-in; and what emerged was some thoughts on copyediting inspired by reading Mary Daly, whose approach to capitalization and punctuation did not abide by The Chicago Manual of Style.

It looks as though Lise Weil, co-editor of Trivia 10, and several contributors, including me, will be doing a panel at a "Lesbians in the 1970s" conference being held in New York in October. Online discussions about that combined with my two Daly memorials and resulted in an invitation to appear on a radio broadcast in Daly's memory. That happened this afternoon. The co-hosts were in Maine; I was on Martha's Vineyard. It was great fun but too short. There's going to be a sequel next Wednesday, and I've been asked to join in that one too. One of the co-hosts was Carolyn Gage, a playwright and performer whose stunning essay "The Inconvenient Truth about Teena Brandon" is in Trivia 10. We've had some interesting e-mail conversation about Daly, feminism, and recovery -- with more to come, I hope: for so many years my radical feminist self has had no one to talk to, but since the death of my sourdough starter a year ago March and the essay it inspired, She is slowly waking up.

Thanks to my two Daly pieces, the Women's Review of Books realized that I could write about something besides science fiction -- this is good, because I'm not sure I can write well about science fiction anymore -- and assigned me two books about women's music. That's what I set out to write about, but as usual the muses had other ideas so I'll get to that tomorrow.

My Yellow Star

May 17, 2010 - View Single Entry

Over the weekend I got an e-mail from eBay. Mess around on eBay and you'll get plenty of e-mail from them: Your bid has been confirmed, You've been outbid, You won item #13579!, PayPal has received your payment, Seller has a question for you, etc. That's all good, but this one was different. The subject line was "fellowtravellerXX, you're a rising star!" (fellowtraveller, followed by two digits that are not XX, is my eBay user name.) In the body of the e-mail I read:

Congratulations!

You're a Yellow Star!

Congratulations! You've achieved a feedback rating of 10 and that means you've earned a Yellow Star next to your eBay user name.

As soon as I started looking to bid on things (at first they were nearly all fountain pens), I noticed that some items were flagged by a little ribbon and the words "Top-rated Seller." Then I noticed that many sellers had colored stars after their user names: yellow, blue, red, green . . . The stars were followed by numbers, and the highest (at least five digits) were accompanied by shooting stars. Turns out eBay has a rating system, based on the positive feedback sellers get from their buyers -- or buyers from their sellers. Buyers get stars too. I, dba fellowtravellerXX, just got my yellow star, which means I've had positive feedback from 10 of the people I've bought stuff from. At 50 positive feedbacks, the star turns blue; at 100, turquoise; at 500, blue, and so on. The shooting stars start at 10,000. I suspect nearly all the shooting stars indicate sellers. If you've bought 10,000 items on eBay, let alone 25,000 or 100,000 or 1,000,000 (top rating: silver shooting star), you probably need a 12-step program and/or a bankruptcy lawyer.

Yes, this is hokey as hell, but I have to admit I was pleased by the enthusiastic feedback I received from my first transactions, and once my purchases arrived, I was happy to leave positive feedback for the sellers. These are all vendors I wouldn't hesitate to buy from again. The single-digit number after my user name inched up toward 10, and this weekend I got my yellow star.

eBay is huge, but it's made up of thousands, tens of thousands of transactions a day, week after week, month after month. Transactions between one buyer and one seller. One buyer and one seller who probably live in different states, different countries, different hemispheres. (Most of my pens have come from a fellow in Japan whose user name is engeika.) eBay is huge, but it's a classic marketplace, just like the local farmers' market. I want tomatoes, you've got tomatoes; we make a deal. No one at the farmers' market, or on Martha's Vineyard for that matter, is selling fountain pens, dog crates that I can afford, or the two recently purchased books that haven't arrived yet. On eBay, it's pens I want, engeika who has excellent pens at good prices; we make a deal. Several deals. You can get anything you want on eBay, as long as what you want is tangible and legal and you've got the money to pay for it.

At the farmers' market, buyers meet sellers face-to-face and inspect the merchandise up-close and personal. Chances are excellent that buyers and sellers know each other personally, or at least know of each other. On eBay buyers and sellers are usually making deals with people they've never met and never will meet and don't hear scuttlebutt about at the post office or the bar. Prospective buyers can inspect photographs of the goods but not the goods themselves. What keeps the farmers' market, or any market, going is trust between buyer and seller.

That's what the stars are about: trust. Encouraging buyers and sellers to believe that total strangers will deliver as promised and work out any difficulties that may arise. From the eBay message boards, I get the impression that many people take their stars very seriously. With good reason: so do I.

Malvina Gets a Bath

May 11, 2010 - View Single Entry

I know, I know: I've had this car less than two months and I just washed her for the second time. And vacuumed the inside, too, and shook out the blue-and-cream throw that covers Travvy's seat. Someone, maybe my father, gave me this throw years and years ago. I liked it from the first but till now it hasn't found the right use in any of the places I've lived. Turns out it's been waiting for Malvina. The colors are perfect, it covers the seat and then some, it doesn't show dog dirt, and it shakes out easily. It's probably washable too. Giving things away is good, but sometimes keeping them around pays off.

Pretty soon I'll be out with the wax and polish, right? I hope not -- and least not for a while. Not till she needs waxing and polishing, and that's not yet. Meanwhile -- washing Malvina is satisfying. Washing Malvina makes a difference in how she looks. With Uhura in her later years, this was not true, and besides, pickups lose credibility if they're too clean. Also -- true confession time -- although I drove both Tesah Toyota and Uhura Mazda till they died, in the back of my mind is the thought that eventually I'll trade Malvina in before she starts eating money. Like around the time the extended warranty expires and my loan is paid off. See how the consumer economy sucks you in? Car payments are starting to seem normal even though I've only made one of them. If I eventually trade her in, I figure I'll get a better price if she doesn't look like a rent-a-wreck.

Besides, I needed a work break. This started with pre-bath prep, which is to say getting the hoses hooked up so that they (a) reached the car, and (b) sprayed with enough force to rinse the dirt off. There's a faucet on either side of the little building that my apartment is on the second floor of. The longer hose was on the north side, the better hose on the south. The better hose is too short to reach all the way around Malvina. The better hose also has the best nozzle on the property, but it's stuck but good and won't unscrew. I tried the nozzle from Sarah's garden hose on the longer, less flexible hose: even at maximum opening, the force was pretty pathetic. At this point I remembered that I'd gone through all this the last time I set out to wash Malvina, so I did what I'd done then: connect the short hose with the good nozzle to the long hose with no nozzle. I was in business.

Malvina does clean up pretty. I even borrowed Sarah's step-stool so I could wash the moon roof. (I love that moon roof.) The Baileys' three hens poked around the carpets, trash bag, and sundry other stuff I'd taken out so I could vacuum. These hens are totally fearless. Not only do they pay no attention to a salivating Travvy (who was watching intently from his deck), but they ignored my stomping and arm-waving in their general direction. I considered spraying them with the hose but didn't feel quite mean enough. They wandered off on their own.

Once Malvina was dry, I put my round WUMB-FM MEMBER sticker in the lower right corner of the back window. Malvina's first sticker. A Mud sticker is next, once I decide where to put it.