Like many men who cook a lot, I’m good at doing several things that look hard but aren’t—béarnaise sauce, tuna au poivre—and not very good at doing some things that are harder than they look. I can’t make a decent vinaigrette, anything involving a “salt crust” baffles me, and, until quite recently, I had never baked a loaf of bread. For years, I told myself that I didn’t bake bread for the same reason I don’t drive a car: it’s a useful skill, unnecessary in New York. In New York, you don’t drive because you can take the subway practically anywhere, and you don’t have to bake bread because there are so many good bakeries. Even at the supermarket, there are baguettes from Tom Cat and cinnamon-raisin loaves from Orwasher and Eli’s empire of sourdoughs.
Just a few weeks ago, though, going through heirlooms that had been left by my wife’s ailing ninety-three-year-old mother when she moved out of the family house in Montreal, we found a beautiful hand-lettered, framed recipe for something called Martha’s Bread. It was a long, very seventies-looking recipe, samplerlike in style, with instructions and ingredients—including lecithin granules and millet and oats and honey—surrounded by a watercolor border of leaves and falling petals and pumpkins.
“Martha’s Bread!” I cried. (Martha is my wife.) “When did you bake bread?” To say that I was incredulous doesn’t capture it. One way to describe Martha is to say that she looks like a woman who has never had a loaf of bread named after her—perfumes, dresses, and dances, perhaps, but not oat-and-honey bread. “No Loaves” might be the title of her personal manifesto, as “No Logo” is of Naomi Klein’s.
“When I was a teen-ager,” she said. “I sewed all my own clothes and I baked all my own bread.”
This puzzled me. I knew her in her teens, and she never baked bread. She didn’t sew her own clothes, either, not that I could see. She ate matzos with bits of canned asparagus on top, and she dressed, beautifully, in Icelandic woollens and Kenzo dresses and lace-up boots. So I was genuinely curious to see what she looked like baking a loaf of bread. After many years of marriage, you tend to focus your curiosity not on the spectacular moments that might yet happen but on excavating the stranger, smaller ones that did: your partner punching down dough at sixteen. As Proust knew, all love depends not just on current infatuation but on retrospective jealousy; lacking a classy old lover, a Marquis de Norpois, to be jealous of, I was jealous of the men in Montreal health-food stores who had sold her millet and lecithin granules.
“So why don’t you make your bread?” I asked.
“My bread’s not that easy,” she said loftily. “I have to get a big earthenware bowl to make this bread. And a big wooden breadboard. I used to have them at home. I used to make this bread with my friend Rachel. She’s the one who illuminated the recipe. We would bake all day in aprons and then drink tea and eat our bread with honey.” The thought of her in an apron surrounded by all that homey seventies blond wood was so intoxicating that, to shake the spell, I resolved to start on a loaf that night. I lighted upon the now legendary “No-Knead Bread” recipe I clipped from the Times half a dozen years ago. Invented by Jim Lahey, of the Sullivan Street Bakery, this is bread that sort of makes itself. I ran across the street, bought some Fleischmann’s yeast, and followed the directions for mixing it with water, salt, and flour. I left the dough to rise overnight and, in the morning, put it in the Le Creuset Dutch oven I normally use only for lamb and beef braises, and then into a four-hundred-and-fifty-degree oven.
An hour later, out it came. It was—bread! It wasn’t good bread—it didn’t have many of those nice, irregular bread bubbles, and I must have put in too much yeast. It was oddly bitter. But it was bread, and I can’t explain how weird and pleasing this was. It was as if you had put a slosh of stuff in a bowl and it had come out a car, with a gleaming front and a good smell inside.
For the next couple of days, I became, for the first time in my life, acutely bread-conscious. So many breads! I marvelled as I stared at the bread counter at Dean & DeLuca. I thought of the bread I loved to eat. There was the big, round pain Poilâne at the bakery in Paris, sour and stiff and yet yielding to the bite; Montreal bagels, sweet and sesame-rich; and real croissants, feathery and not too buttery. Could you really make these things?
“If you’re so interested in bread-making, you should apprentice with someone big,” said Martha, who had declared herself hors de combat, waiting for her wood. “Someone who yells at you a lot and teaches you what’s what. You know. Every writer does that now.”
I wouldn’t want to learn just one thing, though, I mused. “It would have to be someone who had range, so I could learn how to bake pain Poilâne and Montreal bagels and croissants, and—”
I stopped in mid-sentence. The larger implication of what I had been saying hit us both. We looked at each other balefully, as those on whom the implacable hand of fate has fallen.
“I’ll call her,” I said.
When I got my mother on the phone a few hours later—you often have to leave a message, because she and my father are always out in their fields, building things—she was delighted at the idea of a bread-baking-master-class weekend. “Yes, yes, dear,” she said. “It’s so funny you called. I’m just working on a new series of water-buffalo-milk ice creams. You’d love trying them. Do come for a visit as soon as you can. I’ll show you how to bake anything in the world you like.”
A week later, I found myself once again in the back seat of my parents’ all-purpose child-mover and S.U.V. My parents live these days on a farm in what their six children think of as remote rural Ontario—a designation my parents emphatically reject, pointing out that it is only a three-hour drive from the Toronto airport, not seeing that a three-hour drive from the Toronto airport is exactly what their six children mean by “remote rural Ontario.” They retired a decade ago to these rather Berkshire-like hills, after a lifetime as college professors.
The vibe of their property, one of their kids has pointed out, is somewhere between “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “The Island of Dr. Moreau.” Bosky though their woods are, within them are a host of strange new buildings that my mother has designed and she and my father built, laboriously, with local lumber, responding to their own unaltered eccentricities and the changing passions of their grandchildren. There is a Japanese tea house, complete with a little Hiroshige-style arched bridge; an Elizabethan theatre, with a thrust stage and a “dressing house” above; a garden-size chess board, with life-size pieces, made when my own son was in the midst of a chess mania, now long past; a Tempietto, modelled on Bramante’s High Renaissance design; and a Pantheon, a domed building lined with niches, in which sit portraits, with quotations, of my mother’s heroes—Galileo, Shakespeare, Darwin, Emily Dickinson, and Bach among them.
My parents, you might gather, are unusual people, although, to be honest, “unusual” is not really an unusual enough word to describe my mother. One of the first women in North America to earn a Ph.D. in mathematical logic, she became a notable linguist and (as she would be the first to tell you) also reared six kids, for whom she cooked a big French-ish dinner every night. We have a complex relationship. I know that I am more like her than I am like anyone else on earth, for good and ill. Like her, I cook every night. Like her, I offer hyper-emotional editorials to the television at moments of public outrage. Like her, I look accusingly at my children when they fail to devour some dish that, backed into a corner, they had acceded to at seven in the morning. (“What do you want tonight, salmon or capon?” “Uh, whatever. Salmon.”)
I even inherited some minute portion of her creative energy, which once launched a thousand shapes—from doll houses to linguistic theory—so that, coming home after an eight-hour family trip (during which I, like her, will have left all the driving to my spouse), I can actually enjoy whipping together a big meal, with a hot dessert, for the gang. I once realized, with a sense of fatality, that I have written long essays in praise of nearly every hero in her pantheon up there on the Ontario hill—only Bach and Emily Dickinson had escaped my attention, or her gravitational pull. Into one of her areas of particular mastery I didn’t even try to follow her: baking bread. As a kid, I never left for school without being equipped with croissants or pain au chocolat or cinnamon babka or sticky buns, often in combination; on the morning before a big holiday, the kitchen always looked like a Left Bank bakery.
As we pulled up onto the property, my mother turned around. “Did you see our new building, dear?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Last visit I saw it.” I thought she meant the Pantheon, or maybe the Tempietto.
“Oh, no, not that,” she said, as though a Pantheon were as commonplace as a lawnmower shed. “I mean our Erechtheion!”
Alarmed by the name, I peered out the left-hand window, and, insanely enough, there it was: in wood and plaster, a nearly full-scale model of the Porch of the Caryatids from the Acropolis, with its six Ionic columns and six draped female figures supporting the roof. The Greek girls were about six feet tall, and, in the Ontario farmland, they looked pretty impressive, though something about the way the figures were incised gave them a demure Canadian quality.
“It’s beautiful, Mom,” I said, feebly.
That night, we sat down to a dinner mostly of breads—sketches of the weekend to come. I recognized most of them from childhood, but there was a dinner roll that was the best dinner roll I had ever eaten: flaky and rich and yet somehow reassuringly simple and eggy.
“Oh, that’s my broissant,” she explained gaily. “It’s my own invention. It’s brioche dough given a croissant treatment—egg dough with butter folded in in layers. Do you want to try it? We’ll do it tomorrow.”
My stomach filled with gluten, I took the books on bread baking and bread history I had brought with me, and went back to my old bed.
At this point, there should be a breath and a space and a new paragraph and lots of stuff about ancient yeasts, the earliest known instances of bread, bread-in-Sumer-and-Egypt lore, and then a joke or two about the Jewish invention, on the lam, of the unleavened kind. I will spare the reader this, for, turning the pages in my books, I decided that the worst of modern food bores is the bread bore. The very universality of bread, the simple alchemy that makes it miraculous, can also make it dull to discuss.
But, as I was reminded the next morning—with my mother wearing her flour-resistant “Monaghan Lumber” T-shirt—bread, though perhaps unrewarding as an analytic subject, is fascinating as a practice. It is probably the case that these two things often vary inversely: activities that are interesting to read about (science experiments) are probably dull to do, while activities that are dull to read about (riding a bike) are interesting when you attempt them. What makes something interesting to read about is its narrative grip, and stories are, of necessity, exercises in compressing time. What makes something interesting to do is that—through repetition, coördination, perseverance—it stretches time.
Fortunately, my mother is also an expert in-depth explainer, although her children have been known to run for doors and leap out windows when she starts up with “Well, studies show that . . .” I have a fond summertime memory of her explaining Gödel’s Proof to me; I wish I had retained it, though I recall an indecently vivid picture of sets struggling, in vain, to contain themselves.
Yeast, my mother explained now, is really just a bunch of bugs rooming together, like Oberlin grads in Brooklyn—eukaryotic organisms of the fungus kingdom, kin of mushrooms. “When you mix the little bugs with a carbohydrate—wet wheat is a good one—they begin to eat up all the oxygen in it, and then they pass gas made up of ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide.” The alcohol they pass is what makes spirits. The carbon dioxide is what makes bread. The gas they pass causes the dough to rise. It’s what puts the bubbles in the bread. If you bake it, you trap or fix the bubbles inside.
As we mixed and kneaded, the comforting sounds of my childhood reasserted themselves: the steady hum of the powerful electric mixer my mother uses, the dough hook humming and coughing as it turned, and, in harmony with it, the sound of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the background, offering its perpetual mixture of grave-sounding news and bright-sounding Baroque music. (A certain kind of Canadian keeps the CBC on from early morning to bedtime, indiscriminately.)
Like most good cooks, my mother is sweet-tempered in the run-up to cooking, short-tempered in the actual event. (Her quick, sharp “Gop!,” instructing my father to do something instantly, is as familiar to her children as birdsong.) For all its universality, bread’s chemistry, or, really, biology, is a little creepy. “The longer it takes the little bugs to eat up the oxygen, the better the bread tastes,” she went on. “The high heat of the baker’s oven simply kills off the remaining little bugs, while leaving their work preserved in place. It’s all those carbon-dioxide bubbles which become fixed as the nice spongy holes in the crumb of the bread.” The tasty bits of your morning toast, I realized, are all the tombs of tiny dead creatures—the Ozymandias phenomenon on a miniature scale. Look on my works, you mighty, and eat them with apricot jam.
We turned to the pain Poilâne, whose starter she had made earlier; it now luxuriated under a plastic bag in the sink. You can mix up water and wheat, she explained, put it out in the air, and wait for all the wild yeast that’s drifting around in the schmutz of the kitchen to land on it and start eating the carbohydrates. This yeast tends to have more character than the yeast that you buy in the store, because, as every dog knows, the schmutz on the kitchen floor has more flavor than anything else. Well-kept schmutz of this sort provides the sour taste in sourdough bread. (San Francisco has a distinctively sour kind of schmutz, so distinctive that it has a scientific name: Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis.) The long-cherished deposit of ancient schmutz—a spongy mess that you can use day after day and even decade after decade, and whose exigencies you, as a baker, basically can’t escape—is called, no kidding, “the mother.”
“Bread is very forgiving,” my mother said, as she turned over the pain Poilâne dough. “In the books, they fuss endlessly, and, you know, I used to worry and weigh, but now I know the bread will forgive. The secret of bread is that bread is much more forgiving than non-bakers know.”
We took out the breads that we had prepared the night before. “The broissant is essentially a brioche egg dough with butter folded into it,” my mother said. “Now, the trick, dear, about laminating butter is to get the thickness of the butter exactly the same as the thickness of the dough.” We cautiously beat down the butter into layers. “Then you fold it over in exact thirds, like this.” She showed me.
We began to fold. And fold. And fold again. As I tried to fold, she frowned ferociously. “You have to even it out so that you don’t have those bulges at the corners,” she said. The CBC rose in the background. As luck and life would have it, a mildly alarmed Canadian-style piece about gluten allergies and gluten-free diets was on. In a slightly prim tone—as my sister Hilary points out, Toronto is the last big town where “hygienic,” a holy word, is pronounced as though it had five syllables—it told of how many people had given themselves a diagnosis of celiac disease, and how our bread-addicted society might be ending.
“That is so stupid,” my mother bristled. She went on to rattle off facts about the incidence of celiac disease and the follies of self-diagnosis. But beneath it, I knew, was the simple love of bread. I imagined my mother and myself as the last bread-heads, the final gluten addicts, sitting in a stifling, overheated basement room somewhere, stuffing ourselves with broissants.
We spent two days mixing water and yeast and different flours, and then we waited for different lengths of time. We did the pain Poilâne, dark and crusty and dependent on a long, long resting period; we did bagels—real bagels, as produced in the Montreal bakeries, with a large hole, a bright sesame glow, and a sweet, firm bite. These had to be rolled, and my mom was impatient with my rolling, since unless you do them just right they bounce back yeastily to their original form.
I was taken by the plasticity of every sort of dough, its way of being pliable to your touch and then springy—first merging into your hands and then stretching and resisting, oddly alive, as though it had a mind of its own, the collective intelligence of all those little bugs. Bread dough isn’t like dinner food, which usually rests inert under the knife and waits for you to do something to it: bread dough sits there, respiring and rising, thinking things over.
Then, there are the smells. There’s the beery, yeast-release aroma that spreads around the kitchen, the slowly exuding I’m-on-my-way smell of the rising loaf, and the intensifying fresh-bread smell that comes from the oven as it bakes. The deepest sensual pleasure of bread occurs not when tasting but when slicing, cutting into softness that has suddenly gained structure: the pile of yeasty dough, after its time in the hot oven, turned into a little house, with a crisp solid roof and a yielding interior of inner space. Bread is best seen in cross-section, and each cross-section is different. Each bread has a beautifully different weight and crumb as the knife cuts into it. The pain Poilâne style almost squeaks as you cut into it, the sourdough, or levain, that gives it that nice acid bite seeming to protest under the knife; the bagel’s firmer flesh is made less resistant by that hole; the broissants crumble, with a spray of soft crumbs, under the lightest touch, the many layers you fold into the puff pastry turning into a house of a hundred floors under your command. And greed can sometimes lead you to tear off the end of the softer breads, in a gesture satisfying in itself, even before you bite. (And if all this sounds a touch Freudian for a man baking with his mother, well, the Oedipal dramas we enter knowingly leave us better sighted, not blind.)
As one project followed another, I realized why I had not been drawn to bread baking in the first place. Stovetop cooking is, at a first approximation, peeling and chopping onions and then crying; baking is mixing yeast and water with flour and then waiting. The difference between being a baker and being a cook is whether you find waiting or crying more objectionable. Waiting is anathema to me, and activity is essential to my nature—a nature I share with my mother. But then it occurred to me that my mom is that anomalous creature: an impatient baker. She fills the gaps created by enforced waiting by being active, so that each bread, as we put it down to wait for it to rise, was succeeded by another bread in need of mixing or punching or rolling. The kitchen of my childhood had filled up with bread as she waited for the rest of the bread to be ready.
On Monday morning, I packed the loaves and broissants and bagels in my overnight bag. I would take them home to study and share with my own children. I gave my mother a hug. “It’s such fun to bake with you, dear,” she said. “Of course, I spent years making you bread every morning. We always had croissants and muffins and—oh, dear, I always had so many things out for you.”
Was there, after all these years, a just discernible note of exasperation, a regretful sense that her children’s appetites were not equal to their bafflement at her avidity? I realized that I had never once thanked her for all that bread. On the long drive to the airport and the short flight to LaGuardia, with all her bread in my bag, I reflected that the thank-yous we do say to our parents, like the ones I hear from my own kids now—our over-cheery “Great to see you!”s and “We’ll catch you in October!”s; our evasive “Christmas would be great! Let’s see how the kids are set up”—are never remotely sufficient, yet we feel constrained against saying more. (We end phone conversations by saying “Love you!” to our parents; somehow, adding the “I” seems too . . . schmutzy, too filled with wild yeast from the hidden corners of life, likely to rise and grow unpredictably.) We imagine that our existence is thank-you enough.
Children always reinterpret their parents’ sense of obligation as compulsion. It’s not They did it for me but They did it because they wanted to. She wanted to bake that bread; you told those bedtime stories every night, really, for yourself. There’d be no surviving without that move, the debt guilt would be too great to shoulder. In order to supply the unique amount of care that children demand, we have to enter into a contract in amnesia where neither side is entirely honest about the costs. If we ever totted up the debt, we would be unable to bear it. Parents who insist on registering the asymmetry accurately (the Jewish mother in a Roth novel, the Japanese father in an Ozu film) become objects of frantic mockery or, at best, pity for their compulsiveness. “All I do is give and give and what reward do I get? You never call!” the Jewish mother moans in the novel, and we laugh and laugh, and she is right—she did give and give, and we don’t call. She is wrong only to say it out loud. In the market of emotions, that sacrifice is already known, and discounted for, as the price of life.
When I got back to New York, Martha was at last ready to make her bread. She had found the right kind of earthenware bowl, and the right kind of wooden board, and even the right kind of counter scraper. After my weekend with my mother, I offered to show her how to use the dough hook on the Sunbeam, but she looked at me darkly. “My kind of bread isn’t made in an electric mixer,” she said.
“There’s a certain aesthetic to baking my bread,” she went on. “Everything has to be clean and nice.” She had, I noted, put on a black leotard and tights for the occasion, so that she looked like a Jules Feiffer heroine. She mixed together all the good natural ingredients—the brown flour and the millet and the organic honey—and then laid a length of white linen over the earthenware bowl. “It’s not a sweet bread, but it has sweetness in it,” she explained.
At last, in the silent kitchen, the dough had risen, and we all gathered around to watch. Her kneading startled her family. She kneaded in a domestic fervor, a cross between Betty Crocker and a bacchante. There was no humming mixer, just a woman and her dough. Then she began to braid three long rolls of dough together, expertly.
“Mom, this is, like, such a big bread,” our fourteen-year-old said. “It’s like bread you would bring to Jesus.”
It was, too. And suddenly, crystal through the years, I saw Martha at nineteen, on one of those bitter, beautiful Canadian mornings, eyes turned almond by the cold, fur hat on and high collar up, carrying . . . a braided loaf, in a basket, tied with a shiny purple ribbon. She had baked bread, this very bread, and brought it to me, too. And it had been lost in the family kitchen, surrounded by too many croissants and sticky buns and too many chattering and devouring mouths.
“You brought a loaf like this over to my house!” I said. “I see it now. But I can’t remember how it tasted.” It was an anti-Proustian Proustian moment: memory flooded back in the presence of something that I had forgotten to eat.
“Of course not,” she said. “No one noticed. It was just, ‘Oh, how nice! Put it there.’ I don’t think you even ate any. Your mother’s whole French thing was so different. It overwhelmed my loaf. I think it was the last time I made my bread.”
When it was baked, sixty minutes in a slow oven, her loaf looked beautiful, braided like the blond hair of a Swedish child. The next day, I buttered a slice of it, delicious and long-deferred toast, and had it with my coffee. As toast always will, it seemed morning-bright, and clean of complications. Women, I thought, remember everything. Bread forgives us all. ♦
