Food Tales #3 Making Bread

I remember making bread with my mom. The sifting of the silky white flour, the way the edges of the hill would rise, rise, rise in dusty millimeters only to cascade in a gentle avalanche toward the bottom of the red basin we always used; the red basin that most times was for scalding dishes and had the perfect curved edge that fit the tips of my fingers just right. But the days we used it to make bread were a kind of holy sacrilege, a breaking of its purpose for another Greater Purpose.

So we sifted flour into the red basin, added yeast and sugar and warm water and kneaded it on the table denuded of its table cloth. I remember watching mesmerized at the fold-push-fold-push-fold of my mom’s elegant hands carefully shaping the dough with the practiced strength that spoke of the years of her own past coming into the now of that moment – times she had kneaded dough with Grandpa in the farmhouse kitchen on a winter Saturday. Those years worked now in the lines of her tendons, pulling the dough against the uneven cracks and knots of that old pine table. I remember how we would each get a small piece of dough to knead and shape on our own, trying to mirror her movements.

And then the dough would all be placed back into the red basin (or were those small, grubby bits tossed away?), covered with a towel and placed ceremoniously in the back seat of our trusty Isuzu. Only the semi-greenhouse conditions of the car provided enough warmth to proof the dough in the cold mountain air.

I remember loving the making of bread because it was a day-long process. Time spent kneading and waiting and kneading some more. I learned community and a long togetherness over bread. The solidarity of shaping a loaf and the mouth-watering anticipation of the steam wafting from a fresh-cut piece. The sharing of labor and tasting the fruits of that labor. It created a feeling of trust in the simple processes of life that also gave me a trust in my mom. The act of baking was an unspoken line of connection to her past that she extended to us. My understanding of hospitality is tied to the making of bread because it was when one of the most important people in my life felt most at home. In making bread, she was offering “that space where we do not have to be afraid and where we can listen to our own inner voices and find our own personal way of being human” (Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out, p. 102). My mom extended hospitality to us by being at home in the making of bread, and she showed me that I could be too.