 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
BreadApril 04, 2007 Yesterday I baked bread for the third time since I moved. A rather impressive (if I do say so myself) three-strand challah accompanied me to the last DVD night of the off-season chez Shabazian. The hosts provide the DVD and the state-of-the-art screen, the guests provide the food, and the wine appears from somewhere. (I have standing permission to filch beer from the fridge.) The challah elicited comments like "You made that? No way!" and -- after several people wondered aloud what had happened to their bread machines -- some astonishment that I don't own and have never used a bread machine and don't intend to acquire one now. No one noted, out loud at least, that I was about 45 minutes late, so I didn't get to explain that I'd closed at my barn then driven home to get the bread, which was fresh out of the oven when I left for the barn and which I didn't want to transport unwrapped in Uhura's cab, spanking clean though it was a week ago last Sunday. The Shabazians live maybe a mile and a half from my barn, and that trip home added about 15 miles to the journey. One of the magical properties of bread is that it makes you do things like that, and another is that it enhances your halo so no one realizes how rude you are when you show up as everyone's tucking into the food. Several people at the party, including the hosts, met me during my ovenless period and are now visibly and audibly revising their opinion of me as someone who's handy in a barn but hapless in a kitchen. I'm revising my opinion of myself as someone whose usual contribution to potlucks is beer, chips, and the occasional salad. It's not that I ever completely stopped thinking of myself as a bread baker, but the longer one doesn't do something, the more tenuous the sobriquet gets. Writers who don't write become the objects of skepticism and pity, New Englanders who live elsewhere become nostalgic and crotchety, and we won't even get into the concept of "single lesbian," which is worse than oxymoronic for many people: it doesn't compute, isn't on the radar, can't be imagined. Ask if they have the same trouble with "single straight person" and they look at you so blankly that you realize that this might take all day and you just don't have the time. Especially since experience strongly suggests that you could take two hours today to explain, discuss, and answer questions and tomorrow you'd get the same blank look. Once upon a very long time ago I thought that the best cure for homophobia was to meet gay people who didn't fit one's nastiest stereotype of gay people -- and likewise for racism, sexism, and most other social diseases -- but this is not true. Once the nasty stereotype takes root in the psyche, every gay person one meets who doesn't fit the stereotype is an exception, that good ol' "exception that proves the rule." So I've learned to save my breath. My current delusion is that the best cure for homophobia (etc.) is to hang around with people who don't encourage overt manifestations thereof. Positive qualities tend to die out if they get no uptake or other encouragement; why not the negative ones? My bread baking didn't get much encouragement for four and a half years, but I never stopped thinking of myself as a once and future bread baker. I may not have had an oven, or a proper kitchen, but I had both sourdough starter and yeast in the refrigerator: a small jar of Fleischmann's that someone gave me and about two-thirds of a big bag of Red Star that I bought at Cronig's. Habeo yeast; ergo bread baker sum. My first bread in the new place was a sourdough. For the second, onion-walnut (one of my all-time favorites), I used two scant tablespoons of the Red Star yeast. The risings took forever, and the eventual loaves, though tasty, had a close, heavy texture more typical of rye bread. Yeast doesn't retain its magic forever. For the challah I used two of the packets that Wendy gave me for a housewarming present: the risings went faster and the texture is perfect. With regret, I have tossed the yeast that is way, way past its prime. I never used it, but it served its purpose. It kept the bread baker alive.
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact Copyright ©
Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved. |
||||