A new (old) ritual

One of my earliest memories is of my Grandpa Quebbeman adding the final ingredient to his bread dough before popping it in the oven--a touch from his grandchildrens' cheeks. I remember the yeasty smell as the warm moist mound of dough was brought to my face. And I remember firmly believing that my contribution was essential to the delicious outcome.

My grandpa cooked vicariously for my grandma, who when her third child was still a baby, began losing the use of her extremities until, by the time that last baby formed his first memory of her, she could no longer walk. She eventually lost the use of everything below her neck. (After many years and much too late, we learned she had myasthenia gravis, usually curable in its early stages.)

And so I suppose that the huge kitchen drawer solely devoted to flour and permanently installed with a sieve was not only a product of thrift (baked bread is that much cheaper when you live a ways out of town) but also of a mechanic who learned to cook his wife's recipes so that their house was often filled with the smell of her bread baking, though she couldn't bake it.

(It wasn't until years later that I thought to ask my mom about the incongruity of my grandpa--who washed his hands raw daily rather than pass one germ to my grandma--touching bread dough to the presumably unsanitary surface of childrens' cheeks. She assured me it was a sign of his love but also that the high temperature in which the bread was cooked would kill any transferred germs.)

My mom inherited this baking gene and this recipe, though she more often uses it for Italian foods than for the bread of her rural Orgonian home. Her calzones and pizza crusts are divine.

The perfect ending to this post would be me telling you that I've mastered the recipe myself. But we tend to stick to whole grain varieties of bread around here (spelt being our favorite, a grain it turns out my grandpa grows on his land), only splurging on white for our favorite "crusty" artisan bread.

As it turns out, my friend Rachael included a recipe for such bread in the family cookbook she emailed me last week. I don't have the mixer it called for and I honestly didn't have much faith that yeast, flour, water, sugar, salt, and my two hands could create anything worth eating. And though they didn't turn out looking very pretty (Zoë had woken up and was screaming for me while I was forming the loaves), they were delicious!

Thus has begun a new ritual in our house, a ritual that will be marked next time by some germs from Zoë's fat little cheeks making their way into the bread dough--if only to be baked out.