Since my days as a young mother, bread has taken a back seat in my life, but there has always been toast.  Now that I have control over my toast, it hardly ever gets burned, but every now and then, shades of my mother, I find myself with a piece of bread in my hand, scraping the charred bits into the sink.

     Then I retired and began spending my winters on the Oregon coast and suddenly, found myself in a land of no normally yeasted bread. I could never have imagined such a thing. I had heard about San Francisco sour dough, but no one had warned me that this penchant for sour dough would extend all the way up the West Coast and that I would find nothing but sour dough and that it would taste like what the name implies…sour. It is most definitely not the sort of bread one eats for breakfast. So for a couple of years I drove up and down the windy Oregon coast as far East as Portland searching for a bakery that baked non-sour dough yeasted bread.

     Wherever I went, I was met with looks of disbelief on the faces of Oregonians. They couldn’t seem to grasp the fact that someone would dislike their precious sour dough. “But it’s so much healthier” they would say in a last ditch effort to convince me of its infallibility.  A  very debatable fact, indeed. Some didn’t even quite know what yeast was or how one could use it to make the bread rise and how the taste was different, sweeter than bread made from sour dough.

     In Lincoln City, I found a bakery that made what they called “deli bread” or bread made with packaged yeast one day a week. After a couple of tries, I decided while it wasn’t bad bread, it just wasn’t worth a twenty some mile drive weekly to get it. Likewise, a bakery opened up in Waldport, OR owned by a guy from the East Coast who bakes yeasted bread regularly. But Waldport is still about fourteen miles away from me, and he doesn’t use enough wheat flour to suit me. Finally, I gave up, realizing once again, I would have to make my own. So I began the search for locally grown and milled four which I had heard through friends might actually exist, a mere one hour’s drive from my house.

 

Later, bread came back into my life again when I started making it myself. I was a young mother without a lot of money, and I got a recipe from somewhere. (My grandmother’s recipes like so many of her generation had never been written down.) But with the memory of her oatmeal bread still alive in my mind, I immediately began to tinker with whatever recipe I used, adding oatmeal and whole wheat flour to the recipe. What I remember clearly is how when I turned the dough out onto the counter the first time and began to knead it, the rhythm came naturally to my hands, the rolling and turning and then pressing down with the heel of the hand. And it came to me then that I had learned how to knead bread way back in that Chicago kitchen when I didn’t even know I was learning. My hands had memorized the movement, and now could mimic the rhythm as if they had been kneading bread all these years.

Even my mother was impressed, although she didn’t think I had the taste quite right. Back in Chicago, I had thought she had barely noticed those plump rolls sitting so smugly on our kitchen table, but now it seemed she had become an expert on my grandmother’s oatmeal bread. Not that she had ever made any bread. The only baked goods she ever made were muffins, and then she usually ruined them by tossing in so much healthful stuff it was like eating a mouthful of hard things with a few crumbs thrown in for good measure. Once, she even mixed chopped up Vitamin C tablets into the batter. In those days, people barely knew what vitamins were. No one had ever told her that heat kills Vitamin C. To this day, my brother always breaks his muffins in half and peers suspiciously into them.

Basically, my mother hated the fact that I was learning to cook and bake. Most any other mother would have praised my efforts. But she wanted me to spend my time composing poetry or learning to play the flute or better yet, becoming a famous actress. How she thought this was going to happen to me now that I had two children, a husband and a large old house to maintain, I had no idea. And besides, we still had to eat.

She liked to breeze in the back door with the neighbor woman who idolized her, and they would sit at the kitchen table and talk about their lives and watch me cook. To be fair, the neighbor offered me suggestions or recipes from time to time. But my mother would say things like, “Look at her. She could have it all–fame, fortune, whatever she wants. And instead, she spends her time chopping foodstuff.” Foodstuff was about as close as she could get to actually letting the names of the food we ate pass across her lips. It was as if she thought if she said the word doughnut or even broccoli out loud, they would land in her stomach.

And I would look down at my shirt covered with flour and my hands red from the endless dishes and think: all I want to do is make bread.

As a child just big enough to see over the top of the kitchen table, I remember oatmeal bread rising in bread pans and fat yeasty rolls sitting next to them slick with oleo. And the smell of rising and then of baking bread filling our Chicago apartment, a kind of perfume in the air that cancelled out the smoggy Chicago afternoon, or the dryness of the meat that would come later for supper. My later bread memories are less deeply pleasurable, often odd, but taken together they impressed into my memory that bread is not only the staff of life, it is its very essence.

We always had toast for breakfast. The sky might be falling and often was, but there would always be toast, warm buttery toast that could be slathered with jam or honey and eaten for breakfast, later with tea or at night as a bedtime snack sans jam.  Our mother didn’t allow much sugary stuff in the house either, also believing that white sugar was to be avoided if at all possible. If my grandmother was with us, there would be more jam, sometimes even homemade, and it would be homemade bread, but even without her yeasty presence, we always had dark bread, because my mother didn’t believe in eating anything white. “Useless stuff,” she’d say, disgust curling her lip. “No nutrition, no taste.” And of course, like so many things, she was way ahead of her time.  She somehow knew that without taste there is little nutrition.

For someone big on taste, she had an odd way sometimes of showing it. The toast, while plentiful was often burned almost beyond recognition.  She claimed she only liked dark toast. She burned it so often that she was forced to develop the improbable theory that charcoal was good for us, and that she, in particular, had a deep need for it. How she thought nutrition would survive in burned toast is a mystery.  The answer to the question, where’s mother? would often be, “Out in the kitchen burning toast. “

”Time to put the kettle on” was often followed by toast Her children learned early on to watch for smoke coming out of the kitchen, when someone would yell, “Toast!” and whoever was nearest would run out and rescue what was left of it to be either thrown in the garbage or left indifferently on the counter for someone else to throw out. Often, by the end of the day there was quite a pile of it in various stages of burn, some completely black and not even resembling bread any longer, curled into delicate wisps of charcoal and others in various crispy stages of black/brown.  This should have been a bread turn off and was, to some extent for my brother and sister, but for me, I sometimes even joined her in her charcoal consumption in a thrifty effort to “save” the bread, although I tended to nibble around the really black parts. A more imaginative cook might have at least attempted croutons, but I doubt we knew what they were back then.

Later, our father drank his after work tea at the table to keep an eye on the toaster, and bread fared somewhat better after that. I can still see him, one leg crossed over the other, one hand wrapped around his tea cup, nibbling on a piece of nearly but not quite burned toast. He was a jam eater, a fact that counted against him with my mother, and she watched him carefully to see that he didn’t get too much sugar.

You might even say that in a family where food didn’t count for much except for its nutritional value, bread might have been the only constant. “Someday,” our mother would prophesy, wagging a finger at whatever hapless child happened to be present, they will make a pill with the day’s nutrition inside, and one will be able to pop it in the morning and then go about your business without the interruption of eating to ruin one’s day.” Ruin whose day? I wondered. I liked to eat, liked it a lot. A fact that only seemed to irritate my mother. “All you think about is food!” she’d say in disgust.