Daily Bread 8 comments

By Caroline Langston

Now that we’re past Thanksgiving, we’re thick in the heart of the mega-cooking season, the one time of the year when those of us who ordinarily pass off rotisserie chicken and bagged salad as “dinner” suddenly start aspiring to, if not culinary greatness, then at least culinary novelty.

My good friend Joey in Houston, who is going through a couple of major midlife transitions all at once, relayed a conversation with his siblings about what to make for Thanksgiving dinner: essentially, the talk surrounded how to “upscale” the tater-tot mushroom soup casserole they had all grown up with, but which was now too infra dig for their refined palates.

How much symbolism is packed into that very discussion—the longing for the food from the childhood table, that laudable desire to celebrate as a child with all the old dishes, but with all the snobberies imparted by access to education and travel. (For the record, I share them too.)

I’ll be curious to see what they ultimately came up with, but what’s far more interesting to me is what Joey, a fabulous cook, made for dinner last night. You all have heard it from me here many times before, and it’s indeed a passion of mine: If we can die at any moment (and it happens all the time) we all need to live lives focused more on the everyday celebration. Of course we need feasts, but if we infuse the rituals of everyday life with attention, ritual, and love, we can make even the fasting seasons an occasion of joy.

And because we also need to live lives focused more on everyday confession, I’ll be the first to admit that I often fail at this very task.

Recently, though, on a rainy day when I’d been up all night, alternately nursing the baby and tending to my sick five-year-old son, I decided that it was time to bake some fresh bread.

I’d baked bread many times over the years, but most of the time I’d made fruity, baking-powder quick-beads—popped into the oven, then barely cooled before being trussed with Saran Wrap and ribbon for a hostess gift. If I bothered to make yeast bread, it was because guests were coming over, and—here it comes again—I needed that dinner-table showstopper.

But the weak economy, and the desire to save some money, has gotten me thinking in new and different ways. We had the flour, yeast, milk, and eggs already in the house. Why buy bread if I could just make it? And why bother with a special occasion? Why not just for us?

It was easier than I had remembered: Combine the yeast with warm water, wait five minutes, add the eggs, milk, and flour, spoonful by spoonful, then mix. Then once the dough is firm and no longer sticky, knead it for 10-15 minutes until the dough is glossy and supple. (For the record, I was using the basic white bread recipe in the latest edition of The Joy of Cooking, although I added whole wheat flour to the mix.)

The rain spattered against the side of the house; the children were asleep. I don’t have a mixer, so I put the dough in a large bowl and kneaded it back and forth, until my forehead was damp and I had to use my elbow to swipe back bits of hair that had escaped from the ponytail I’d tied it back in.

And as I kneaded, I tried to think of my kneading as a kind of prayer, folding into it my breath and body, my worries about my ear-achey boy and the work I wasn’t doing, the sleep I wasn’t getting.

On the face of it, that sounds kind of sappy and pious, but the reality (sweat on the forehead, remember) is anything but. Like prayer, kneading bread is hard—I decided that exactly 10 minutes would have to suffice, as my hands were about to give out.

Like prayer, kneading bread is also boring. I was happy to place the oiled bowl of dough into the oven I had barely warmed, and left it to rise for an hour. I was hoping: the yeast was old, and I’d had dough that hadn’t risen before.

When I returned, I saw that the yeast had done its work, after all: the dough had risen to the edge of the bowl, brimming with bubbles, the oil coating it in a slick sheen. I punched it down, re-kneaded the dough, shaped the loaves, and ran them back into the oven—in about the same amount of time it would take to read the food section of the New York Times.

An hour later, the loaves came out, brown and hot. They even sounded hollow, when I thumped them on the bottom as the recipe commanded.

We had hot handfuls of bread that day, and freshly cut toast with butter the following morning. The big test was whether my son would actually consent to eat it: When he returned to school, I cut slices as carefully and uniformly as I could, then slathered them with peanut butter and raspberry conserve. After he came home, I checked the lunchbox and the sandwiches had been eaten.

Success: Bread for a week, for literal pennies.

I baked that bread on a day I was exhausted, preoccupied, busy, annoyed. Making it became a minor celebration that sustained me for days.

Can I do this more than two or three times a year? I’m at least going to endeavor to try.