Bread
Bread is the original comfort food. It is the most basic and universal food. Cross cultures and borders there is bread. Wonderful, white, beautiful, moist, dense, spongy, soft, buoyant, black, flat, crusty, brown, bubbly bread. Isn’t bread our palettes desire in our unformed first years and a bastion in our last?
Memories of bread include my first croissant an early morning in Paris with my mother. It was early morning. We had just gotten in on the bus from Holland and the chairs of the café hadn’t been loosed from the Rubik cube formation. I cracked the delicate crust by sinking my index finger deep into the buttered and warm layered insides. The plain croissant needed not a dollop of jam or any other dressing that usually had to be added to make me, aged 6 or 7, eat it with distracted wonder. Delight!
My grandmother’s bread, is also a memory evocative of safety, belonging and satisfaction. Several loaves of fresh bread were daily on offer to feed the descendants of Frenchman’s Cay. Freshly bathed and powdered an hour or so before being herded to bed. We sat in the main sitting room or on the porch being lulled by the sea, the rustling palms, the volcanic earth, and citronella candles. We sometimes upwards of 6 children from different branches of our family tree enjoyed a thick slice of heavy honey brown bread with a tightly packed crumb, toasted and slathered in peanut butter. Of course this had to be accompanied by milky bush tea. Ecstasy!
My first experience with injera bread came via my older brother who recently started school in Washington D.C. Home on his first break his Freshman year. University, freedom, big city life and exploration peppered the conversation while he unpacked the largest plastic bag full of nearly black, flat bread I’d ever seen. Spongey and pancake like I was told that this bread was both food and tool used to scoop up lively strongly herbed foods in a place and of a people that were as beautiful and exotic to me as a fairy story. Discovery!
My bread baking came much later. I did my native fried Johnny Cakes with my mother but never did any yeast breads until I was well into my 20’s. I was given the book Tartine Bread at a difficult point in life by a chef come lawyer who encouraged me to work through my process by delving into the comfort of bread baking. I didn’t realize how much I would enjoy the practice. The headiness of doing something so basic and essential and physical at a time when nothing was working. Rolling out elastic dough early in the morning, folding it over on itself, pulling and pushing on a floured surface, redoubling and kneading it out wide again, seeing it spring back, proof, proof, and eventually perfume the house was an allegory for life.
The first few efforts were disasters brick hard and inedible. But soon, as I took to baking a loaf a day, an artisan loaf, cut for all sorts was developed and my nerves were soothed. I could produce. The value of the process to me became more than just a nice loaf for sopping over easy eggs. Homemade bread gives more than just delight, ecstasy, discovery and comfort to the taster but wellbeing to the creator.