Bread Is Time
A culinary signpost
One of the things that making bread can teach you, is that time is an ingredient.
That’s not a revelation, nor is it a solution to life’s greatest truths, but time, as a valuable item has come into focus for me lately, maybe for all of us.
Learning to work with pauses, allowing things to take their own time, that is an amazing part of making and baking bread. To make bread we have to work on a bigger clock than our own, and that very simple cycle of give and take between baker and bread was on my mind as I embarked on a summer of “normal” life.
This summer I traveled a little to places where I had roots or some personal invitation. Like many others, I was excited to go somewhere —anywhere!—but I was also coming at it from a completely new perspective. I was somehow impatient and more patient than ever. I was patient at the airport after some really terrible delays. I was patient when my suitcase was lost for five days, too. On the inside of course, I was popping with need, with wanting my things! — but also on the inside I knew that my anger was nothing if I didn’t turn it into action. Customer service people, like bread yeast, do not respond well to anger, or to my whimpering, so yes, I learned that time is an ingredient, one to be respected.
This summer I went from the familiar suburbs to a brand new city, and then suddenly there I was, on this tiny little island so small it doesn’t even have cars. No matter where I went or what I did, I found that the mere mention of writing a bread blog captured people’s attention. I will admit, I was surprised.
Just the other night, I met an Egyptian journalist and when I mentioned the bread blog, her eyes lit up as she said, “Oh! Interesting!” I myself, was surprised by her enthusiasm. I used that moment though, and once again, like a charm, the whole table was talking. We went from bread to pizza and from there to books and movies.
For two plus months I knew I could have, should have, written a daily blog, should have kept up the dough talk, but I was too busy living to actually do it. I wasn’t just living either. I was learning how to navigate a whole new world, with its constant testing and proof of vaccination. I was learning to be social outside of the small family pod that had sustained me for over twelve months. I was learning all over again to introduce myself to interesting strangers, without really knowing how to do small talk.
Before the quarantine did you think you had to be a social machine? I did.
As I traveled, and basically re-engaged with others, face to face, I was reminded that all the statistics I had read about bread and food, actually represented people. I wasn’t the only one who found food interesting all the time, much less during quarantine time. I definitely wasn’t rare for finding something perfectly curious about the rise and fall and rising again of the yeast.
In fact, I quickly admitted to myself this summer, that I am on the rookie team of bread baking. I might even be on the rookie team of understanding what makes bread magical and important. Everywhere I went, people I least expected, had some experience baking bread.
On the tiny island where we go to be with our extended family, to go back to the “old” country, we have the tiniest of grocery stores. The place is small enough to be a shoe closet in a Mc Mansion, but it is well stocked with the essentials, which includes, wine, cheese, chips and yes, yeast. In a place where changing a lightbulb probably requires a boat and a car to get to the appropriate store, this means something.
This summer as part of my “I will be social again” campaign I worked bread into as many conversations as possible and I was rewarded with enough material to take us deep into winter.
The spirit of bread, if you could say it has one, was everywhere I went and now I feel like this spirit and I — we have a dialogue. Bread was in the gossip and the intrigue. It was in stories that I can’t share with you now, but maybe someday I will, if I can change all the names.
Anyway, as the summer progressed I found that while I was able to make an edible, passable loaf of bread I would not, necessarily say I was a natural. I was a very decent beginner, I thought. Then we went to see my cousin, and he showed me what true, raw, culinary talent looked like. He’s also much taller, but that is an issue for another conversation.
I watched my cousin with awe, but not envy, because I have long understood that I don’t have the baker’s gene. I knew it and I was OK with this fact, but still he inspired me to imagine that someday I could actually do better.
I watched as he made all sorts of things happen in the kitchen, while I sliced the cheese and did other useful and less talented chores. He nonchalantly mentioned how he just didn’t have time to start a sourdough before we arrived, but next time he would. I believed him. I vowed to return and watch him start his own yeast. “Then if all goes well,” I thought, “We can bake it in the fire, like my father had planned to do…” Then my mind shifted a bit, because time, like health, is not assured. This was the summer of learning to deal with reality. This was the summer of dealing with time as an ingredient, a rare and precious one that you can’t just pick up at the store.
Of course, the summer went quickly and I only tried to make bread a few times. I say “try” because even though my bread came out “fine,” it was never a “wow.” It was easier and almost better to buy it from that small grocery store, or from some really nice bakery.
Basically, time is an ingredient, and I was starting to wonder if I could afford the time it took to bake mediocre bread. The answer is yet to be known, but I will say, I could probably put bread maker on my Christmas wishlist now.
SO that was some of my hot bread summer, hot at times for sure, but not in the way that that always felt great. In fact, if I were going to sum it all up, my hot bread summer was more of a humid rather than a hot affair. It was sticky and it made my make-up smear.
Of course, there were also some pleasantly magical moments, too.
One night in particular, we went to meet some very new friends. They picked us up at the boat dock and soon we twisted and turned on a road with pines and cliffs, a road more suitable for goats or motorcycles, or mountain bikes than it is for cars. As we stopped and went a few times in the late summer traffic over the sea, our new friend, Fabiola showed me a video. An artist, an art teacher and mother, from Italy, she could not help but show me this adorable video from earlier that day, when a young doe ate bread off her shoulder.
It was somehow, exactly the thing I needed to see. It made me think about how important food is to every single creature. It made me wonder what the deer thought about one of our greatest creations as humans. What did it taste like to her? What did that bread, what could it mean, to that deer surrounded by nature and tourists all at once?
When it comes to making bread, time is money, but money is not time. Teach a child to bake bread and 30 years later you might see them do it during good times and in bad. You might even see them wow their distant cousin with their talents. There is no measure to what that simple skill taught to them now will bring to them later. Civilization in that way, is a funny thing, because I realized this summer that it doesn’t always make us better, but it does give us skills.
The more I experienced this summer after the “worst” of COVID, the more I knew the world was not completely out of the pandemic woods. Sure we had birthdays and celebrations — we had all sorts of bright spots bursting through the clouds of last year, still there was this feeling that maybe the world was so different, too different — to actually be comfortable like it used to be.
So I’ve decided that bread is still a great talking point, and an even better way for all of us to agree that life is precious and strange, and is generally shaped by forces we can’t see. Bread in that sense can reveal obvious mysteries to us despite our thoughts, our views, our strongly held beliefs.
Bread is not time, but it is a good way to mark the passing of time. Bread is not kindness but in sharing it we learn about the needs of others. Bread is an ingredient in life as much as time is an ingredient in bread and this is maybe the whole thing I learned this summer.
Use your bread and your time wisely.
With Love and Fewer Pauses,
Mariette