We're all still baking bread, right?
Because I'm still doing it—are you?
Lovely readers and friends, Notes To Self is taking another pause! Thank you for your patience with me 🤗 I’ll be back in September. In the meantime, enjoy a revisit of a piece I haven’t read since April when we were all so much younger—Why is everyone baking bread right now?
The answer is, exactly and inarguably, this: it’s a recipe for usefulness.
Almost everyone has been neutered of what they thought was their purpose. Stripped of our social lives, plucked from the world, and nestled into our apartments like smooshy babies. We’ve approached a case of emergency, so we’re breaking the glass and opening up our end-of times recipe book. There is only one recipe: bread. Sourdough, if we’re full-Mad Maxing it.
Sifting makes us feel sorted, kneading makes us feel needed. We imagine our families in bunkers, with post-war soot on our faces and soiled hats on our heads. (As we—I—have a car and a home and enough toilet paper to wipe my spoiled bum—don’t be dramatic.) Bread is elemental, the crusty cuts on our gums are prehistoric. It returns us to our mastery of the earth. “Agrarian” is a word that rolls from the space between our tongues and the tops of our mouths.
As we sit in front of the oven, gazing at the dough like a rising sun, we ponder the Big Questions: Who invented flour? Was it a stroke of genius or fortune or sloppiness that gave life to yeast? And HOW did SOMEone decide to BAKE a LOAF of this concoction? Did it all just go bad and sit out in the sun one day? Are we all going to go bad before we can sit together in the sun one day?
When the timer rings, open the oven to a melting aroma; you’ll want margarine and raspberry preserves. You’ll want to curl up into a loaf of your own, warm and weepy and new again.
Go check on the yeasty beasty that’s brewing in your kitchen. Place your face real close to the tiny bubbles, perhaps the only real signs of life you’ve seen in weeks, and whisper in your best Palpatine voice: RIIIIISE.
Today’s Prompt: What are you good at making—like really, really good at making? Hint: if it’s nothing tangible, maybe you’re good at making people smile, or making it to the train exactly on time.
Pie! The pastry, the spice combinations, the lattice - I love the whole process from start to finish (and eating it too!).