( Originally appeared in the ENJ)
Twenty-eight years ago, it entered my head
that I should sober up and get on with living. The hangovers had stretched from
a few hours into days and what was left of my mind stubbornly refused to let me
suicide by any means quicker than drinking myself to death. With a sigh of resignation,
I looked about for something to live for. Having spent the past twelve years as
a drunk, I hadn’t much recent experience outside of that scene so I considered
the time before alcohol. The twelve years of schooling offered little beyond
frustration and anger so I jumped beyond them to my preschool years. What in
those dim memories could be conjured to inspire a new run at life?
The fragrance of Mom’s homemade bread filled
my head. My mouth watered. I knew I had a starting point. Not a reason to live,
but a goal to focus on while I rebuilt a life mostly wasted at that time. I
would attempt to recreate the white bread Mom had enchanted a five year old
with. (Years later I would realize the god Yeast, has long influenced my life.
First, as a major facilitator of bread, then the creator of alcohol, and back
to bread again.)
I had a mission. Decades later, I have not built
Mom’s bread. It eventually penetrated my addled pate, via a dozen bread books
covering all aspects of bread from grain fields to glazes, that a couple of
things were no longer available to me. Whatever flour Mom had used, the wheat
for it is no longer grown. The milk certainly isn’t the same. (Cream graced the
upper portion of the bottles she poured the sweet liquid from, nothing like the
thin, chalky joke called “whole milk” today.) Perhaps even the yeast strains
had been tweaked. And the butter I use was, in her kitchen, some brand of long forgotten
margarine.
Disasters (in my eyes) followed me from bread
book to bread book. I finally gave up on Mom’s bread and turned to artisan
breads at librarian Sue’s suggestion. Which was a leap of frustration more than
of faith. Most people who attempt bread building can make an acceptable white
bread. Though many home bakers I’ve talked to pale at the thought of working
with wet, gooey dough that can take days to build and often flops at the moment
before entering an oven. Sue, being on a bread-building path herself, took to
sharing her efforts and inspired me to reconsider just what I wanted from bread.
For ten years, I played with recipes, getting
close to something I actually liked, though each loaf was found lacking in one quality
or another. Then in October of this year, everything came together. Breads
began to turn out close to perfection. Especially breads I don’t like, but
others find delightful. It seemed I could do nothing wrong even when I screwed
up a recipe or tweaked it by switching flours, mixed building methods because
of scheduling,
or (even more likely to end badly) adjusted ingredient amounts and time tables
to get what I wanted when I wanted it! I had reached a wall and
passed through it, or over it.
The Mad One has been my harshest, most earnest
critic. No other individual has sampled more of the breads I’ve built, nor
urged me onward, nor chastised me more often. The last breads I presented to
her eager, but skeptical eyes, were at once tore into chunks to be devoured
alone, dipped in some sauce, swiped through a gravy, eaten with cheese, savored
with sips of wine.
Staring at me over a handful of bread, she
allowed, “This is real bread. All the breads you have brought me these
last weeks have been real bread. Now you have to decide. Are you going
to continue playing or are you going to get serious and take the next step?”
I stare back at her. The next step is
commercial of course. I considered the breads good enough, but wondered if it
was ego or fact. Fact, according to the Mad One.
“Stop experimenting and focus on several
breads, each for a different purpose. Perfect them so you can make them with
little effort. You’ve made some good cake, add another desert or two and you
have the basis of a business. Emmitsburg is the wrong town for such a business
though. You will have to move. Sophia would be a good place to open a bakery.
My sister says the bread there is horrible now. The old ways of doing things
are being lost to the European Union.”
I don’t see myself in Bulgaria, but I never saw artisan
breads on the horizon, or the Mad One either. Nor did I see a developing wheat
allergy that leaves me groggy, sinuses clogged, eyes burning and cramps in the
intestines after only a few mouthfuls of bread.
I’ve new goals I struggle toward. Making an income
from bread is not one of them. (I’ve stood on a farm and watched tons of
commercial artisan breads be unwrapped, ground and fed to pigs and cows. Why
would I put my heart and energy into making pig food?) No, I’ll work at
perfecting the recipes I’ve gotten good at and gift them to people I know will appreciate
them.
I would like to try building breads in a
kitchen with commercial equipment someday, before the allergy gets so bad I
have to remove myself from a floury environment. (Perhaps I’ll even offer them
at some future bake sale.) Gods, I hope the Mad One understands. I’ve seen her
challenge dragons and the dragons back down! Maybe I can teach her to make
bread, if she hangs around another twenty-eight years?
There is a goal worth working toward. I now
have flour from Europe to use in the recipes the Mad One and I favor
most. She tells me she has no talent for bread building, just a passion for
eating it. That’s all I started with, a passion so great I set aside much else
I could have more profitably pursued. She wants me to teach her so she can
teach her mom, who (of course) makes the best breads in the Mad One’s life. But
not like the ones I build.
Sadly, the Mad One’s mom will not always be there
to build such memorable breads. The Mad One, stubborn as she can be, will
learn the recipes and techniques from me so she can go home and learn more from
her mother. Knowing I’ve passed something valuable on to someone else seems the
best way for me to proceed. Perhaps someone not on the Mad One’s horizon will
learn bread building from her.