Today, I make bread again for the first time in a month since I left Oregon. As I pour the lovely bran flour (Lonsome Stone Organic Hard Red Spring Wheat) into the bowl, I think about toast. This is my family’s food. My mother burned it a lot, but in between burnings, I ate it nearly every day of my childhood and have since eaten it all of my adult life. Toast must be spread with butter (these days I use Smart Balance, sigh) And then anything is possible: honey, jam, apple sauce, marmalade, srambled eggs, peanut butter, just to name a few.
I beat the flour, yeast,water, honey mixture the requisite 100 strokes, counting them as I go and then throwing in a few extra for good measure. Good exercise for my right arm. I think about my grandmother who first made this bread for me, of my mother who didn’t. And then I remember:
I am sixteen and going through an emotionally difficult time. My boyfriend has been killed in a car accident, and I am at my Uncle Sam’s house in Chicago for a visit to help me get over it. It is morning, never my best time. Have I slept at all? I only know that I came to the kitchen bleary eyed, stunned into silence by this blow life had recently dealt me, and I find my Unlce’s wife in the kitchen. Everyone else has already left the house for somewhere. “What can i get you for breakfast,” she asks brightly. She is the kind of woman who is always bright and cheerful. We, my mother and stepfather and I, are rarely cheery. We prefer a kind of restrained gloominess. We believe it wards off bad times. Only, it hasn’t.
I mumble something at her. She must think I’m too shy to ask. But it’s only that I can’t think of anything except oatmeal (which I really, really don’t want) and toast and scrambled eggs, and I think if I have to eat another scrambled egg, over cooked and dry, I’ll choke to death on the spot.
“How about eggs?” the bright aunt married to my uncle says. Oh no, I think, here it comes. I mumble something, and she continues. “An omelet?”
I have eaten maybe two omelets in my life, and I’m not even quite sure what goes into them besides eggs. I mumble something. “Or,” she continues in her hard, bright voice, “Over easy with bacon and toast?” I like the sound of “over easy” and toast is at least familar. And bacon? A sinful pleasure in my house, rarely indulged in. “Too expensive and too fatty,” my mother always says.
I nod, smiling in what I hope is an encouraging way. She begins to move around the kitchen, chattering to me. I am not really listening, but then she says, “How do you like your bacon?”
I can’t believe she’s asking me such a question. How do I like it? I don’t know how. I just do.
“How about crispy?” she asks. She must believe I am some kind of mute. I nod again, and she continues to buzz around the kitchen while wonderful smells of frying bacon fill the air.
And soon, there is a plate in front of me on which she has put two wonderful fried eggs, their edges just a bit crispy and four! pieces of the heavenly smelling bacon, two pieces of billowy white toast, another no-no in my mother’s house, and lovely pots of jam and honey. “There,” she says. “I hope you can eat some of this.” And I do. I eat every last bite of it and use the wonderful, barely brwon and not burned toast to mop up the egg, while the smiling aunt beams at me and says, “Why, Christine, you must have been hungry.”
