Big Bread

I am an amateur bread-baker who bakes bread for her home-world with store-bought flour and yeast. I started baking bread about two years ago because I wanted to get more in touch with my food, and also because whenever I thought about baking bread, as opposed to something like cookies, I got anxious. Not wanting to allow anxiety to stop me from trying something new, I made myself bake some bread. I found a recipe for basic white bread and shakily made my first two loaves. Since then, I have baked bread for my boyfriend and me whenever I’ve had the time. I’ve made wheat bread heavy as a brick, French bread full of not-quite-big-enough air pockets, and, most recently, a soft, surprisingly sweet, but still perfectly mellow, sourdough from a ball of dough that took forever to rise. None of the bread I’ve made comes near to artisan quality, although every time I make it I hope for those wide, stiff pockets of air to expand inside the loaf. Nevertheless, the bread tastes good, more special than store-bought bread, and I can settle for its imperfections when other things about baking it are otherwise satisfying.

One of my most central life-dreams is to be a happy homemaker. I tell myself that I would be content to cook, clean, and garden as attentively as possible, all day long. To tend chickens, milk a goat. To me, that circle of related activities is a life connected to the present and to Earth, to myself as a human and to the other beings with whom I share my intimate existence. I sometimes feel that the early feminist movement, while it had good reasons for seeking to open working-world opportunities for women, had the unfortunate side-effect of tainting the idea of basic domesticity. The argument was that women shouldn’t be chained to the home if they don’t want to be. Women who were chained to their homes, furthermore, were middle-class or upper-class women with privileged backgrounds, usually white. But the images depicted by the movement’s analysis of domestic bondage in industrial civilizations make for a circumscribed, lopsided picture. Women in tribal groups have often been strongly connected to their home-place as the center of their powers; in many cases they owned the home itself and everything inside it. In some tribes women were able to become masters of their domains, practicing economics, from before sunrise until after dark, according to the original meaning of the term, home-management. And although I realize that in many cases tribal women also lived lives of limited choices, as women seem always to have lived, the tasks associated with taking meticulous care of one’s home and the beings with whom we share it are still attractive me. Although I have had privileges as defined by the society in which I take part, I have also been limited in my choices, to a degree, by the same society; It’s perfectly normal, but I still have had to enter the working-world to be able to survive—a mild form of servitude to which industrialized civilization subjects its inhabitants. It is an anxious bondage which limits the amount of time we’re able to spend patiently scrubbing the tub, chopping vegetables for stew, or communing with the plants, their glistening leaves and potent roots, in the garden and beyond.

The small act of baking bread, therefore, has become an expression of my desire to realize this dream. By baking bread, I can recall human dependence on plants, especially wheat. I can enter myself a little bit into the strange process of fermentation, the mystery of yeast. I can work with my hands, to me a privilege in a life dominated by mental work, kneading the dough for several minutes, contemplating my actions. I can provide sustenance and pleasure for my loved one, who will easily devour half a loaf, right out of the oven, in wide slices topped with chunks of cold butter. I can connect myself to the past, if I’m thoughtful while I work, because I can remind myself that once, people had no choice, if they wanted bread, but to make it themselves, to invent it. Best: I can dream—of expanding my domestic and bread operations, of maybe becoming a good enough baker to be considered an artisan, of growing grain, grinding it myself, baking loaves in a wood-fired clay oven, sharing the bounty across a wider range—with people who have little to eat or to derive pleasure from. Those are the reasons why, to me, although the actual time I spend making bread and the methods I use are small, bread is still big.