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Staff of LifeMay 30, 2010 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:
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.
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