B is for bread.

It is not accidental that all phenomena of human life

 are dominated by the search for daily bread - 

the oldest link connecting all living things, man included, with the surrounding nature. 

Ivan Pavlov 

Are you sensing a theme? I thought that the easiest way to get this thing going was with a theme. Since the alphabet has 26 letters, it gives me 26 different things to blog about.

Today's is all about bread, with apologies to my mom and dad who started Lent really early and have given up bread. (And pasta, potatoes and chocolate.) That's another story for another day.

When I was growing up, my grandma made bread. Cinnamon buns, white dinner rolls, plum kuchen and Christmas Stollen bread. She didn't really measure anything, so precisely making her recipes was always a challenge when you wanted to replicate something at home. I can remember my mom going over to Grandma's house armed with paper, pen and proper measuring cups, determined to figure out Grandma's cinnamon bun recipe. She had Grandma measure out the ingredients, and then transferred the ingredients to the proper measuring cups to get a better idea of what really went into the buns.

Some of my fondest memories of time spent with my grandmother come from the times we would make her annual Christmas Stollen. It's one of those family recipes handed down from person to person, and I asked her to teach me how to make it.  Flour, spices, butter, sugar, nuts and fruit. Yeast and milk and more butter. We would mix everything by hand in a giant plastic tub and would end up covered in flour to our elbows. Once that part was mixed we would have to add in the eggs one at a time, by hand.

Once we couldn't figure out why the dough felt so strange, and had a good laugh when we realized that we hadn't added the yeast mixture into the dough. We kneaded it in anyway and it all turned out OK. The dough was shaped and placed into an assortment of mismatched aluminum loaf pans. The recipe makes around 14 loaves, to give you an idea of the sheer amount of dough we had to knead by hand.

I have her recipe, written down just as my mom did years before. Grandma and I went through the recipe one ingredient at a time, making notes about feel, temperature and how to alter the recipe depending on how the dough felt and tasted.

I love making bread. I love the feel of the flour on my hands, the sweet earthy smell of proofing yeast, and the feel of the dough as it changes from a sticky mass to a smooth shiny ball of dough. My favorite part is punching down the dough, and feeling the burst of the spongy dough as it deflates for it's next rise.

I don't remember when I started making it with her, but I do know that the first Christmas she wasn't with us, it was hard to make that bread. My great auntie Eleanor (my Grandma's sister) and I spent the day making the bread, and I think it turned out well. She was a good teacher. Auntie still makes the bread every year, and it tastes exactly right.

Lily likes to help measure out the ingredients and is a pro at kneading. She shares my grandmother's name Ruth and I hope that she will also share my grandma's love of baking and cooking, and pass it on to her own children some day. Whether those recipes are on line, on paper or in her heart, she will be passing on a family legacy in that baking.

The cookbook in the photo belonged to my great grandmother Karoline, whose name I share (she was called Carrie). The cookbook was a gift to me from another great Aunt, my Auntie Ann. She's going to be 94 this year, and she still makes bread at least once a month. Her care packages are legendary, and are made with the most important ingredient of all, love.


Project 365-2