I’ve recently began doing a lot of cooking and baking–which has been a huge deal for me. As a kid, I never had the patience to cook/bake, and as an early adult, I simply didn’t have the time after working overtime at my full time job. I was also a cook at my job, and so I didn’t exactly relish the idea of coming home and spending more time getting burnt and forcing my legs to keep me upright.
But as W* and I got poorer and poorer living as students with kids, the time came where I simply had to cook, whether I wanted to or not–eating out (even at McDonalds) was simply too expensive, and W* couldn’t be home to cook me food whenever I had the urge.
I finally decided that it was time for me to not only commit to cooking, but to learn how to do the type of cooking that I find to be liberating (of course, right?? :->).
A few years back, I had found that it was cheaper to bake bread than to buy it–but I totally sucked at baking it. Yes, there were *many* a time when my bread came out about as big as a small brick and just as hard. We ate it anyway, because we were just that poor, but nobody enjoyed it, to say the least.
This year, I committed to baking bread even though we could (finally) afford to buy it, no matter how terrible I messed the whole thing up–I committed to baking bread until I finally figured out how to make it the right way–the way that sustains and nourishes AND tastes good.
As I worked through the process, I realized many things–about life, about bread, about liberation, about skill…
* It takes skill to bake a good loaf of bread. Genuine skill. You must be patient. You must keep the room the bread is rising in a certain level of warm. You must know when yeast is ready to go. You must know how to knead. And how the bread should look when you are finished kneading. You must know the way bread sounds when it is cooked. The way to tap it, so you can hear the story going on inside the loaf.
And working to make three, four, five loaves of bread all at the same time? You must know how to juggle the quirkiness of yeast, how to pop loaves in while leaving enough time for the other loaves to rise–but not too much time or it “over rises” itself…I have such profound respect for bakers of yore.
* Is it ok with the world that so many of us have lost the skills it takes to bake bread?
* The book “Heidi” used to be one of my favorite books as a kid. There is a part in the book where Heidi and her grandfather share a couple of slices of bread and some freshly made cheese for a meal–and then it is said that there is nothing healthier or better for a child than the simplicity of a good hearty meal like bread and cheese.
I remember being entranced by that idea. Bread and cheese are good for a child? Simplicity is a good qualification of a meal? I remember then trying to survive for more than ten minutes on a couple of slabs of store bought bread and a piece of sliced cheese. I usually made it about five minutes before I caved in and ate *real* food.
You know how kids who grew up in concentration camps or in jail literally have no reference point when somebody says simple words like “house” or “cat” or “car” to them? That’s what it was like for me as a kid to read that somewhere in the world, there was a place where kids actually survived (quite well at that) off of bread and cheese.
* It wasn’t until I ate my first slab of righteously baked homemade whole wheat bread that I understood what was going on in that story.
* And it wasn’t until I ate my first slab of righteously baked homemade whole wheat bread that I understood why so many cultures hold bread (or variations of bread) as sacred. I understood what an Arab friend meant when she told me that she was taught to never ever throw bread away–to offer it to the birds, to set it aside for another meal–respect must be shown for bread because of what it gives.
* Bread gives life.
* What has become of our world that we accept and believe that the shit that is *sold* to us is life sustaining, nutritious, and needed by our bodies? Is this really a better world, a more advanced one, when there is so little (ahem, NONE) food out there that earns the type of respect food in the past did?
* Can you respect and honor food that takes no skill to make? Can food that takes no skill to make give life? Or more to the point–what kind of life does it really give?
* Are we ok with the kind of life that our current food sources give us?
* Is there a reason why the skill it takes to create a loaf of bread that is life sustaining and simple and nutritious is so casually written off as not necessary or desirable by “the powers that be”?
* Is it an act of revolution to relearn the skills that used to sustain and nurture entire communities?
I say yes.
Become a Radical Bread Baker.
Revolution at its finest.
- Share
December 22nd, 2008 at 2:59 pm #
I like that way of putting it so much. And that’s what threw off not just bread-baking but all my cooking endeavors for a long time–I didn’t have any practice at listening to what I was making, and I know you know that I don’t mean “listening” literally, necessarily. But I came from no cooking experience, too many convenience foods, too many hurry-up-and-eat situations, and I just did not get for a long time that cooking is more like a dance in some ways than it is a linear process. I needed a more contemplative approach to it (haha now I’m thinking “okay, let’s not sound like a New Age asshole.”).
But to respect the final result there has to be some respect going in, and I’m not getting that from a loaf of Nature’s Own or Oroweat.
The bread and cheese story has reminded me that I have a dirt simple recipe for homemade yogurt cheese balls that I have put off attempting–”it’ll make a mess,” “I don’t have time,” “what if I don’t sterilize the jar properly?” Damnit, I’m doing this.
December 22nd, 2008 at 4:43 pm #
i recently found out i have a health condition, interstitial cystitis, where certain foods cause me pain when i eat them. the list of foods i can’t eat is a mile long, includes tomatoes, avocados, onions, and almost all fruits—i also can’t have preservatives. access to food is extremely limited in detroit: when you finally do find a grocery store, the produce is typically not that great and most all other items contain tons of preservatives. the only place i can shop for food that won’t make me sick is the trader joes thirty minutes from my house–but that food within the city is making EVERYONE sick, not everyone can get to the trader joes.
over the summer i practically lived off of food from the community garden–there is a reason why these have sprung up all over the city.
we NEED these skills. we need to know how to take care of ourselves/others. thanks for sharing your experiences (p.s. i used to love heidi too!)
December 22nd, 2008 at 5:29 pm #
This is totally true for cooking things that take time: beans, bread, gardening your own veggies.
Feasting on inexpensive but time demanding recipes is one of the most life-giving and peace-filling acts I’ve learned as a lover of cooking and activism.
December 22nd, 2008 at 7:14 pm #
@ ilyka
You DO IT! ANd the write about it and tell us how it goes. I want to learn how to make yogurt cheese balls–that sounds freaking delicious as shit.
And you know, for a long time, cooking was just plain ol intimidating to me because of ADD (ADD makes it so that working through step by step process can be incredibly difficult)–ALL THOSE STEPS! I CAN’T DO IT AND KEEP IT STRAIGHT!
But I’ve found that repetition helps me. doing something over and over again–it feels good to me, and my body remembers the way to do it that feels best–and gets the best results. It also has provided a good learning lesson for my kids–because they see that I totally fuck things up all to hell–but I stick with it, and it gets better–they can TASTE the results of my sticking with it, so they can physically realize that sticking with it actually honestly and truly yields results.
There are so FEW opportunities these days–where learning through the process of repetition is valued, honored–where learning old tricks and combining them with your own new methods are respected and found valuable.
In a corny way, i think that sort of repetition is like planting yourself into the earth, it grounds you, and teaches you so much about life and how to deal with it.
I think that its a very purposeful thing that the kind of repetition that teaches and creates and builds communities is so steadily being edged out of the world.
December 22nd, 2008 at 7:27 pm #
Gracias for this. Now as I venture into single mamihood part two, with two children, how I cook, what I cook and how I get the staples to cook with is becoming more important. We are not huge bread eaters pero after a weekend of baking from scratch with my oldest, it is indeed a powerful thing. I’ve been thinking about growing food and baking bread, thank you for being here and feeding our heads and hearts.
December 22nd, 2008 at 9:41 pm #
oh thank you for this post. I have LONG been intimidated by cooking, because I am so clumsy I’m afraid of burning the house down, and because even when someone explains it to me, I get confused and of course I always forget the first time I try to do something by myself.
but for a while now I’ve had a vague unarticulated desire to start cooking/baking for reasons something like what you say, and while I won’t get to start anytime soon being in college, well, it’s nice to think of learning to cook as something rewarding to look forward to instead of just another draggy part of becoming a grown-up.
December 22nd, 2008 at 10:26 pm #
definitely an act of revolution!
like my friend Vered who just started a community supported breadery. for real. check it out:
http://saltyfemme.com/csb/
tonight i had the best bread I’ve ever tasted. onion rye just out of the oven. wow!
December 22nd, 2008 at 10:58 pm #
I’ve been waiting for something to spur me to learn to bake. And, I believe the credit shall go to you. If it wasn’t 1am I’d go to the store right now and get yeast.
If I can whip up tamales, I can bake bread, dammit. And I will. And when I make it, I’ll take a picture and dedicate it to you and to this post. Even if it is hard as a brick.
December 23rd, 2008 at 3:20 am #
I find it so incredibly sad that our basic skills have been eroded in such a short time. In my lifetime. I grew up with baking and cooking from scratch. My mum never bought a ready-made meal or rice in a bag(!) or any kind of “inconvenience” food.
I was shocked when I was in England last year and she had bought frozen roast potatoes! Shocked. Stunned. What is happening to us? I know that we women are burdened with the majority of home work and we are also expected to have jobs or HAVE to have jobs as well as taking care of our families. Our skills have always been undervalued and unnoticed. But it makes me angry that “society” says that in order to “do it all”, we must feed ourselves and our families absolute rubbish because it’s convenient and time saving. It’s not.
I love your post because you recognise the skills that we have lost or have been denied. I can almost smell the bread you make. Thank you for reminding me again of what I am quite capable of doing. And making me proud of myself for doing it!
Happy holidays to you and your family.
Kisses
DD
December 23rd, 2008 at 3:21 am #
That should say “convenience” food. LOL
December 23rd, 2008 at 3:41 am #
Beautiful. My boyfriend is the bread maker is the household (I am the pastry maker, and he’s not really allowed to touch my grandmother’s recipe books anyway), but it took us a while to be able to made edible bread.
I agree there’s something sacred in the making of bread, from the time it needs to rise to the repetition of movements you need to get it right. Which is why so far I have refused to purchase a bread maker, even if it would be damn easy to have fresh bread made for me by a machine. A balance needs to be struck, perhaps.
December 23rd, 2008 at 5:40 am #
Yeah, I totally feel you on this one! I love real food, and actually was reading your post while eating homemade bread.
My younger brother, when he moved out of the house, discovered the exact same thing, which was that decent bread to buy is expensive, and making bread is very satisfying. I kind of resent the return to Women’s Work being essential to the proper keeping of a family — hell, it’s even moral — but at least in my family, the fact that the men (both my bros) are the bakers balances that out. And everything you said here totally resonates with me; convenience food is such a nutritional rip-off and homemade is so great. bfp, do you have any qualms about the women in the kitchen stereotype in this context?
December 23rd, 2008 at 7:09 am #
I feel lucky to have grown up in a family where things were expected to be made from scratch, in general, though we lost a lot of that imperative when my grandmother died. In all seriousness, if you’d ever like some help or company when you’re baking, just let me know.
December 24th, 2008 at 5:09 pm #
AHH BREAD!!! My favorite. Bread and cheese.
I’m still learning to bake bread and I totally suck but I know that the more I do it, the more I’ll understand it. Right now I just make simple wheat bread, one loaf at a time, but I love the idea of foodhacking – getting out of the meat culture rut and understanding every ingredient and not being afraid to experiment. If you have kids I bet it might be a bit more difficult, but it’s worth trying out a new thing whenever you can.
you know, the one nice thing about making pan de polvo and tamales is that I don’t feel disconnected from myself. I like the fact these are slow/group-oriented foods. And then I realized that I wish I didn’t live by myself, so that I could get other people to help me cook.
December 25th, 2008 at 6:41 pm #
I love love love this post, and should have said so days ago. I emailed it to a few friends even.
Other than pumpkin and zucchini breads, I have to confess I’m not a bread maker. And those two don’t count, because that is like making a cake, really, LOL.
But what I do love to make on my own is tortillas. I only wish that I knew how to grind the corn the old way etc. No, I mean, I take a bag of maseca, add water, and hand make tortillas. Not quite as fabulous or difficult as what you are describing here. But I’m telling you because for me that is still a very important thing. I used to make them when the Nica would have a friend over and I’d make dinner for them. He always was proud of me that I could make guacamole and carne asada and other stuff the way that brought compliments from his friends. But when it came to the tortillas, he always said “no no, let me just buy some at the store, they are cheap, don’t go to all that trouble”. I had such a hard time getting him to understand how much I truly ENJOY making them. It is no trouble at all anyway, but also it is relaxing to me! And it did make me feel some small almost connection to the ancestors. Honestly, I tried even getting up and making just two in the morning to send him to work with along with his coffee. Very traditional, you know, the way he remembers his father going out to work – fresh tortilla in hand. But he made such a big deal out of it that I felt like I was making him feel guilty so I stopped.
December 27th, 2008 at 12:21 am #
I don’t do any ‘real’ cooking and neither does my mother. Having watched my grandmother slave away in the kitchen growing up, my mum decided she preferred her textbooks. So she never learned to do any of the traditional cooking the women of my people are famous for. I can’t say I regret that – if she had, her father would have married her off instead of sending her to university. As it was, she had to beg him to let her go.
Mum and I get our soya milk from a carton. We don’t hand-grind it the way my grandma did. I’m sure the taste and nutrition can’t match the real thing, but I think that’s a small price to pay for having the time, energy and opportunity to get an education, build a career and be financially independent.
So, in answer to some of your questions:
* Can you respect and honor food that takes no skill to make? Can food that takes no skill to make give life? Or more to the point–what kind of life does it really give?
Yes I can respect food that takes no skill to make. The kind of life it gives is the kind of life my mum and I have had – one with an education, a career and money that doesn’t belong to our husbands.
* Is there a reason why the skill it takes to create a loaf of bread that is life sustaining and simple and nutritious is so casually written off as not necessary or desirable by “the powers that be”?
I wouldn’t call such skills ‘unnecessay’ (on the contrary!), but I’m not sure I want to call them ‘desirable’. The time it would take for me to learn these skills would deprive me of the time to – you got it – get an education, build a career and be financially independent. Plus the fact I’m sick of being told that it’s ‘desirable’ for me to know how to cook the old-fashioned way simply because I’m a woman, and that women who hand-pound their chillies are somehow more virtuous than those who get theirs from a bottle. Maybe it’s different in America but where I come from, the virtuous mother who makes everything from scratch and toils all day in the kitchen to feed her family is still often held up as the gold standard for womanhood.
* Is it an act of revolution to relearn the skills that used to sustain and nurture entire communities?
Yes, absolutely, if only the men would do it too.
Just to clarify – I’ve got nothing against your baking experiences. Good for you I say, and I hope your family realises how lucky they are. But I just want to point out that the cooking thing isn’t a liberating experience for all women. In fact, for many of us, it has been – and continues to be – a tool by which women are judged, pigeon-holed and oppressed.
December 27th, 2008 at 6:16 am #
that’s interesting Dawn, I appreciate you sharing your experiences. I guess for me, I see it differently because I’ve spent my life working through my issues with gender and forced labor in different ways. I was never ‘forced’ to cook nor was I judged by my ability (except on the grill line at a restaurant where I was the only woman and was severely harassed for not being able to ‘keep up)–I had ‘labor’ forced on me in different ways, through taking care of younger siblings, and working as a migrant worker as a youth.
So I am definitely coming at ‘cooking’ from a different perspective. As a youth who has given up their youth to pick fruit that my family could never afford–only the rich white folks could do that. I’m looking at baking and cooking from scratch not as prioritizing gender or mexicaness or any other ‘identity’–but as prioritizing health. something I’ve never had the space, time, money or right to do before. Something that far too many women of color have never had the space, time, money or right to do before. we’re all far too busy taking care of the health of white families, either through providing them food to buy or nurturing their kids instead of our own, etc.
And just so you know, education and home cooked meals are not mutually exclusive. I learned to bake/cook while going to university to get my masters degree, and I currently work both in and out of the home. I cook with my family and without them and we still eat out when both W* and I are simply not in the mood to cook. And W* did 95% of the cooking during the first 10 yrs of our relationship because I didn’t know how to cook or simply didn’t feel up to cooking due to health issues.
Thanks to the feminist movement, there is the space now for women to have multiple choices while learning how to take care of themselves and their needs. I’ve never once felt even a tiny bit subjugated or violated or indignant because I was cooking and W* wasn’t. Nobody told me that it was “desirable” to cook the old fashioned way because I was a woman, I *decided* it was desirable for me to cook this way because I value my health (something I’ve never really done before, or had the space to do before) and I wanted to do things for myself. It would be different if I didn’t have the space to choose how to nurture myself in my own way on my own terms.
I’m glad that you have the space to choose what you need to take care of yourself too.
December 27th, 2008 at 11:38 pm #
inspiring as always. i want to cook more! i want my son to know what real food tastes like, food from my hand and heart. i’m teaching myself slowly–even though it’s hard bc of time, the cost, the state of the world, etc. but it’s coming. thanks for reminding me of my own intention.
December 30th, 2008 at 9:36 pm #
Mm. Thank you for sharing this, BFP — I’m a longtime fan, and these explorations in particular really resonate. You’re so right: once the stress and fear fade, the process of guiding ingredients into full-blown food (you know why they call it soul food, haha) can be incredibly grounding.
I relate to both you and Dawn on the cooking front. My mother didn’t have the challenges of a single mom, but she worked crazy-long hours AND got dinner on the table almost every night. She did it with frozen peas, canned spaghetti sauce, rice from a box, and occasional chinese takeout. There was a lot of love in the way she fed our family, but it showed in her reliability and acrobatic timing, more than the production of the food itself.
I would have loved to grow up in a household with recipes passed down through generations, but my mom wasn’t about that. Which makes me wonder about the structures of the home (beyond gender roles) that give us (or don’t give us) “the space to choose how to nurture [ourselves]…”
My love of cooking really blossomed during my last year of college, when I lived in a co-op (the only one on campus). I don’t think the setting was a coincidence. There were some difficult aspects about co-op living, but one of the things I appreciated most about it was the distribution of labor within a large group. The sheer number of people in the household (around 35) guaranteed that most years you’d have at least two or three enthusiastic cooks, pastry aficionados, breadmakers, etc. Of various genders. Plus, the elective chore system encouraged everyone to try their hand at feeding the crowd. The enormous, well-equipped kitchen and walk-in fridge didn’t hurt, either — nor did the opportunity to experiment with whole grains and produce that we bought more cheaply, in bulk.
So I guess what I’m saying is that larger households might offer a bit more leeway for the folks who want to preserve the art of cooking, and others who’d rather skip it but still honor the process. It sounds like you worked out your own solution in your fam, but in my experience the relatively tiny households we’re expected to live in put a ton of pressure on individuals (read: women) to feed everyone or Feed Everyone, you know?
Anyway, thanks again for the inspiration. On a sillier but related note, I recently posted a couple of real-food-related music videos on my blog: talib kweli’s “eat to live” and dead prez’s classic “be healthy.” Maybe you’d like ‘em.
Be well!
December 31st, 2008 at 8:29 pm #
So interesting. Going to Europe this year was the first time I heard of eating a bread and cheese sandwhich though I’d eaten grilled cheese growing up. I think the cheese and bread most North Americans eat aren’t tasty enough to be eaten together with nothing else. Ever since I came back from Europe, I don’t buy the popular cheeses that don’t have much taste.
My dad taught me to make bread with an old Betty Crocker recipe. It’s not too hard though it takes an afternoon. It’s been too long since I’ve made bread. I don’t buy pre-made meals anymore. After a while of cooking my own suppers, they aren’t appealing anymore. Someday I’d love to learn how to make my own jam and can my own vegetables. I would love to have a garden again someday too.