Why I Bake Bread

“Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods.” —James Beard

Some time ago, I began baking my own bread. I don’t mean banana bread or corn bread or soda bread. I mean the kind that doesn’t need another word attached to it, the kind that easily ends up a little misshapen or slightly too dense, the kind that goes stale in two days but even after that can be revived in the toaster and drizzled with honey.

When I was young, there was often fresh bread in the house. And though she didn’t consult it often, my mother had a copy of James Beard’s Beard on Bread on the shelf. I knew the book was older than I was, and for that reason it interested me. A few times, I pulled it from the shelf and leafed through its cream-colored pages. “That book was how I learned to make bread,” my mother would tell me. She spoke wistfully not because she wanted to go back to that time but, I sensed, because there was so much she couldn’t say.

It started with a visit home. I took my mother’s copy of Beard on Bread off the shelf. I was alone, nosing around as I frequently do when I visit. I’m not exactly snooping, just studying my parents’ possessions, comparing how valuable or beautiful they seem now to how valuable or beautiful I used to think they were. I now found Beard on Bread unimpressive and dull. Its binding, mustard-colored, cracked delicately when I opened it. The pages were thick and the text and illustrations were a burnt brown, more or less the color of a good crust. Thumbing through the book, I saw topics like “Special Flours, Meals, and Additives,” “Bread Pans,” and “Freezing and Storing Bread” and recipes for brown bread, currant bread, water-proofed bread, and cinnamon bread.

Suddenly I wanted to make bread. But then I thought: I’ve never done this before. Baking bread will be messy. I’ll probably screw it up. I don’t have the time. Do we even have yeast?

Before I returned the book to the shelf, I noticed an inscription on the inside cover:

Merry Christmas to Linda 1973
Dad

In 1973, Mom was thirteen. Her dad would often come home drunk, wielding a meanness Mom would spend much of her adult life trying to forgive him for. All of her older siblings had either moved out or were in the process of doing so. My grandmother had little patience for pain and loneliness, her own or anyone else’s. Reading the inscription, I thought of heartache. I knew somehow that Mom hadn’t kept the book out of sentimentality. She kept it because sometimes even the painful things are too important to forget.

Things changed for my mom in college. She knew my dad first by reputation. People called him “Christian Chris” because he was usually seen with his Bible. My parents started dating, and Mom became a Christian too. They married. And while I’m not saying my father – or Christianity – solved Mom’s pain, I know that faith gave her a measure of hope she hadn’t known before.

My parents have three children close in age who grew up on bedtime prayers, Bible stories, church, and Sunday school. All three of us were Christian by default until we moved out and started scheduling our own lives, at which point our ties with the church slackened. None of us rejected Christianity outright. For the first few years after we moved out, Dad would invite us to go to church when we visited. At first we always said yes, and then we only sometimes said yes, and then we started saying no, but thanks. Eventually he stopped asking.

Maybe I like making my own bread because homemade bread was part of what was, by and large, a happy childhood. Maybe I want to get back to that pure and simple time. But it took years for me to even try. In fact, in all the time after I left the house, went to college, moved, and moved again – each move taking me farther from the place I grew up – I made bread only once, when I was teaching at a small high school.

I found the recipe in my roommate’s Joy of Cooking. My roommate rarely prepared food from scratch, relying instead on high-end frozen meals and boxes of Chex and Honey Nut Cheerios. Whenever she was moved to bake, though, she took the heavy Joy of Cooking into her hands. “My cooking bible,” she called it.

That first loaf I made was not good. It was crumbly, dense, and dry. Still, I was proud of what I’d accomplished, and on Monday morning I crowed to my ninth-grade Spanish class about how I’d made bread that weekend.

“Why would you bake your own bread when you can buy it?” asked Miles, a boy as winning as he was sneaky.

“Because,” I said, “there’s something valuable about taking a whole morning to just bake a loaf of bread.”

“I can think of a million things I’d rather do.” Miles bunched his sweatshirt on the table in front of him and dropped his head onto its thick cotton folds.

Over the next few days, I managed to eat the whole loaf, but those last few slices were uncomfortably dry. I didn’t bake bread for three more years. I suppose part of me agreed with Miles, in practice if not in principle. I could buy bread that was much better than anything I could make. What was the point of choking down the mixed results of my ineptitude? And what would other people think if they knew that “making bread” meant this?

Still, I saved a copy of that Joy of Cooking recipe – bread being, I guess, something I wanted the option of making again.

When I was sixteen, my dad often made bread because our neighbor down the street had cancer. For the final few months of the neighbor’s life, Dad spent most Saturday mornings baking a loaf of bread for him and his family. He kneaded so vigorously that the table bowed under his weight.

Once the bread was baked, Dad walked down the street with the loaf wrapped in a kitchen cloth. He returned about an hour later, cloth bundled loosely in his hand. Sometimes I wondered what happened while he was with the neighbor. Dad is not garrulous: his careful conversation reveals his discomfort with small talk. Since I couldn’t imagine him chatting or trying to cheer the neighbor, and because I knew the neighbor was a Christian, I figured they were praying. Dad prays frequently – usually alone, occasionally with a few others. He reads the Bible at least once every day. He has memorized a handful of the Epistles, whole chapters of the Gospels, and many of the Psalms. His faith means so much to him I think it’s actually hard for him to talk about. Yet he also doesn’t want to tell me what to think (or believe, for that matter). In a way, he and Mom raised me to be a Christian without ever telling me I had to be one.

For a long time, I did choose faith. While Dad was baking bread for the neighbor, I was a professing Christian – the busy, conscientious kind. At that time, being a Christian seemed to me a matter of attending the right events, expressing the right thoughts – of, in short, looking and acting as a proper Christian should. In that sense I did not have time for praying frequently, alone or in small groups, or for giving the Bible more than a perfunctory read here and there. I certainly did not have time for bringing baked bread – or even my presence – to a dying man.

Mom doesn’t bake much bread anymore. Neither, in fact, does my dad.

Some habits last for a lifetime; most are much shorter lived. Habits persist for as long as they feel important, and they can feel important because they are pleasing, or comforting, or because they have become so routine that we can’t imagine living any other way. And when habits stop being compelling or comforting, when our sense of their importance dissolves, we drop them. I don’t think the habits of Christianity – the services, the hymns, the Bible studies, and the praying – are excepted from the pitfalls of any other habit or practice.

A person picks, or is given, a faith. Perhaps the habit will stick. Perhaps it will not. Soon after I turned twenty, I lost the habit. I began to feel that the trappings of Christianity were rote, that the rituals I was supposed to perform and the beliefs I was supposed to hold had lost their potency, that I was not ardent enough to be a remarkable Christian, and that if I was not going to be a remarkable Christian, there was little point in being a Christian at all. It seemed that any special nourishment I’d gotten from being a Christian I could get somewhere else: if I wanted community, I could volunteer; if I wanted guidance, I could read a book; if I wanted a measure of peace, I could go for a run or lie in the yard and stare at the wriggling silhouettes of leaves against sky.

When I was young, my faith filled so much of my life that I didn’t need to distinguish between the enactment of faith and faith itself. Now I wondered: How could I be sure there was actually a faith inside all that practice? If it was there, shouldn’t it have turned me into the person I thought I was supposed to be?

I once asked Mom why she made so much bread when I was younger.

“Your father just raved about it,” she said. “He’d take a whole loaf in to work.” I asked if there were any other reasons.

“I liked the way the house smelled,” she said. “And because …” She paused. “I know this is corny, but it made me feel like a good person.”

After leafing through the book at my parents’ house  – and a few years after my Joy of Cooking loaf – I borrowed Beard on Bread from the public library. I found it accidentally and checked it out on a whim. For two days it sat on my shelf. Then, on a Sunday morning, I woke up early, couldn’t fall back asleep, and decided to make bread.

The simplicity of the process surprised me. I mixed yeast with warm water and some sugar. I put flour and salt in a mixing bowl. As soon as the yeast started to foam, I added it to the flour mixture and stirred. I dribbled some flour onto the counter, scooped the tacky mass of dough out of the bowl, patted some extra flour between my hands, and began to knead. I hadn’t turned on any kitchen lights, so the room was filled with that early morning silvery sheen. The stone counter was cold. Flour rose in little puffs, like long-settled dust stirred up again.

I realized how much I had learned by watching my parents make bread. The rhythm of kneading, the turning of the dough in an oiled bowl, the rising, the punching down and kneading again, the second rising in the pan – none of this was foreign to me, though it was strange that I was the one performing the motions. I had the uncanny feeling of being guided by memories I couldn’t recall.

After thirty-five minutes in a four-hundred-degree oven, the loaf sounded hollow when rapped with a knuckle. My bread was done. I didn’t wait for it to cool. I held the hot loaf with a towel while I sawed off a thick heel piece. I arranged slices of cold butter onto the slice. The pale squares softened around the edges and then shrunk into themselves, finally disappearing into their own oily pools. I took a crusty bite, sucking air into my mouth to cool the bread. I exhaled steam. It tasted just fine – it was, in its own humble way, exquisite.

Photograph by Nady / Adobe Stock.

Then, to my surprise, I continued to make bread. For weeks I kept my bread a secret. What was there to say? “I’m not very good, and I will probably quit tomorrow”? I was often impatient with the process: I kneaded as though I were angry; I punched the dough down before it had sufficiently risen; I forgot the salt or to oil the bowl; I was irritated with the flecks of dough that dried to the fine hairs on my hands and forearms. I imagined the cushion-sized loaves of artisan bread I could buy. But then, on a slow afternoon, I’d find myself lifting the flour from the top cabinet shelf and filling a measuring cup with warm water to proof the yeast.

Technically, I didn’t need to proof the yeast. It’s an outdated step in the process, from back before yeast was as reliable as it is now. But I proofed it anyway, in part because the step used to be so important (and why should it end with me?) and in part because I liked seeing evidence that the yeast was alive – that it was, in fact, already working.

After I’d been making bread for a little while, I visited my parents for a weekend. While I was home I made a loaf of bread. I didn’t say I was going to make bread or that I’d been making bread. I simply made it and put it on the table when it was done.

“I didn’t know you baked bread!” Mom exclaimed.

“That looks delicious,” said Dad, taking the jam out of the refrigerator, a knife out of the drawer, and a plate out of the cabinet. He sat in front of the loaf. “May I?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said.

Dad pronounced it delicious. I figured he was just being kind. After all, I was still on Basic White Bread, the very first recipe in Beard on Bread. Actually, I preferred not to think of myself as much of a bread maker because then I didn’t have to worry about how good I was, and if I wasn’t worried about how good I was, there was less of a chance that I’d quit. In other words, bread had become too important for me to try to be any good at it.

Another thing I did that weekend when I visited my parents was announce that I wanted to go to church.

“We’d love to have you,” was all my father said, though I could tell he was pleased.

Church was pleasant, nothing special. I half listened to the readings and half stared at the quality of light in the windows. I sang off-key. I did not tithe. I wondered if I looked OK. I wondered what was for lunch.

I walked to the front and kneeled to receive the Eucharist, at which point a man in a white robe (though I could see his sneakers) said, as he handed me a wafer, “The body of Christ, broken for you.” I knew that the stale wafer was meant to represent bread, and I accepted it because I was there to take part in the service, but I will be honest – the Eucharist can feel like the handing out of stingy rations. It hardly resembles a holy feast. I returned to the pew, unchanged and unmoved.

Then, during the homily, I remembered a particular friend, a woman who cared about my faith. Whenever she saw me, she would say, “I want you to know that God loves you. Do you know that God loves you?”

Of course I did. That message seemed like the Wonder Bread of Christianity, tacky and cheap. But now I couldn’t dismiss her question any more than I could dismiss how much I longed to keep baking bread. My friend and my parents had all along been offering me a simple, humble truth, one that is impossible to mass produce, let alone sell. It’s the kind of truth that comes from a home kitchen, the kind that, because it’s been worked over so many times and under so many conditions, is real and nourishing. God loves us. That basic recipe of faith.

Maybe, I thought, I could practice this truth. Maybe I could work my hands through it, watch it puff and brown and melt butter. And wouldn’t that be something? Because on this, I knew, I could live. I could eat this every day.