Dear Bread Fans,
I hope you are doing all right. I am relishing a lovely day, Easter Sunday, spent with family in our big open kitchen.
We needed each other extra right now, because my sister’s best childhood friend, Michelle, died last week. I keep thinking of Michelle’s family, and how they must miss her, especially on the bright promising days of spring. Look at all these daffodils & tulips she won’t see!
I planned a big meal for everyone who could come: my mom, Jack’s mom, my sister & her mate, my brother & his son, my sons & their sweet friends. Lamb and salmon. Jack would make salad — an expected, architectural and delicious event. Yeasted bread with poppy seed filling. Birthday cake for Francis — he requested double butter yellow cake, which I’d made one blurry year in his childhood. That cake just would not bake! And the mistake was because of my doubling the butter.
My mom brought vegetables and dip. My brother and sister brought drinks. Jack’s mom ended up staying home because she wasn’t feeling up to the day. India, Felix’s friend, came early to help cook.
I like to do everything myself. This has been a problem when I cook in group situations — like at community meals! I don’t like explaining what I want done. I can’t find the words fast enough, and it is quicker to just do everything myself.
But India is articulate about asking and anticipating what I want. I discovered this pretty accidentally, when she offered to help one night and she slid right into my improvisation. A few other people cook with me this smoothly — but often, I just don’t give anyone a chance to try.
I don’t know why I have such a terrible independence streak when it comes to food.
I love to cook for other people. I love being able to feed others!
I love the symbolism of bread and how it represents the long line of people working to feed us and the many selves in our history. I love the fact of bread and that it represents the individual and cumulative labors of farmers, millers and bakers. I even like the religious meanings of breaking bread.
Food is a bridge between people.
I want to be that bridge, to build that bridge, walk across it and hand everyone — friends & neighbors & strangers — dinner or a snack. I’m not so comfortable with receiving a meal or dessert. The traffic in my feeding habits is one-way.
I noticed this recently as I served myself soup my friend Crystal had made, soup I’d almost rejected. I was under the weather, and Jack was out of town, and reflexively, I nearly said no. But I said yes! I let her feed me. Spooning the warm, velvety broth and giant friendly carrots from a bright red bowl, I remembered another meal I DID reject.
When my father was dying, and we were keeping vigil around him at my parents’ house, my friend Kyra offered to cook for us. My automatic reaction was to say no.
Why not? she asked.
I’ll just make spaghetti, I texted back. I didn’t want her to go to the trouble. I felt self-sufficient. I can make lunch for 100, I can feed us. I didn’t understand that I was in a vigil, and that I could not think about food while I was in this liminal space, my father hovering near death.
I burnt the spaghetti, scorching thick clumps of strands to the bottom of my grandmother’s pan. I spilled the sauce all over the stove.
My father was on a hospital bed in the family room he built with his friends and my cousin. We — my mom, my siblings and our families dismissed the risk of Covid to be together.
My failure in the kitchen was comical, but it still haunts me. One of my biggest regrets is this, that that I didn’t let my friend feed us. I couldn’t accept her loving offer.
I don’t know why I’m so unreceptive. Believe it or not, I even rejected food from Ellie, my dear Ellie! When we first met, I wouldn’t let her bake for me. The first thing I let her give me was fermented carrots.
With Crystal’s soup, with India’s help, I am experimenting with being on the receiving end of food. The older I get, the more I’m going to need to stop being so silly. Can anyone relate to this kitchen independence?
Back to yesterday. It was glorious. I made sweet dough with White Fife flour from the freezer — Chris at Ironwood Organics grew it, and ground some for me when I visited in Ontario last year — and mounds of poppyseed filling, with pecans, currants and apples, using a recipe from Olia Hercules as a map. The salmon and lamb got slathered with olive oil, oregano, the last of Jack’s garlic, and some preserved lemons — it was like a thick, slick skin of garlic! Potatoes were red, boiled with parsley.
We watched videos of Thanksgivings past that my uncle just gave us! We colored eggs, and drew on the tablecloth Mom started when she taught nursery school. My brother played piano. My older sister & her husband stopped by to say hello after their Easter visits. Eventually we ate, starting off holding hands and remembering Michelle, how much a part of our family she was when we were young. '
Finally, we sang happy birthday to Francis, who turned 27 last Wednesday! His double butter cake was a hit, topped with whipped cream and a serviceberry sauce.
We were all on the same bridge, the bridge that food made, all afternoon and into the evening. We were in other times, and we were in time, right then and there. We were becoming a part of our futures, memories.
Everyone brought poppyseed bread home.
Wishing you very well,
Amy
Just really lovely. The tablecloth is magnificent — I thought it was embroidery at first.
i love receiving food but i feel just like you when cooking with others. it is just too hard to assign tasks, and improvisation requires advanced planning which i rarely do. thank you for sharing the story of the burnt spaghetti. love to you all in your grief.