To All the Breads I've Loved Before

An essay about my love for simple foods.

Welcome to a post for all subscribers, an essay about my enduring love for bread in all of its forms. Next Tuesday, paid subscribers will receive a recipe for my fail-safe party nut mix. As always, check out my past posts here and learn more about my day job here. Thanks for reading!

Bread is baked into me. Into a lot of us, probably. It’s the thing that I’ve eaten the most in the 30-odd years I’ve been on this planet, surpassed only (maybe) by apples. My grandma used to say that she had never met a cheese she didn’t like. I feel this way about bread.

A book I read as a child, whose name has long since left my memory, featured a character who carried her family’s sourdough starter in a pouch around her neck throughout the course of her many wilderness adventures. I think her name was Maggie. I remember being so perplexed, so bemused that this fictional character thought bread important enough to carry with her. Now, I measure my life in the loaves I’ve eaten.

My grandma’s bread was like no bread I eat today. It was sweet and close textured and soft-crusted. It was made in bulk and frozen until we went through it, slicing and toasting and shaving thin snacking slices off of the crooked edges in the name of evening it out. It went just as well with wedges of cold meatloaf as it did with homemade strawberry jam. She was always in the midst of making a batch of bread, right up until the end. She baked it weekly, with no regard for the temperature or season. Standing in her galley kitchen, which we lovingly called the “one-butt kitchen,” she’d mix and bake with nary so much as a window cracked open for a hint of breeze in the deepest, hottest days of the summer.

A few weeks ago, after baking a loaf of enriched bread for a client project, I nearly cried at the smell that hit me as I cut open a loaf hot from the oven. It smelled like Mammaw: sweet and warm.

Mammaw’s bread was the heady bread that I munched on as a kid, fighting over who got the butt of the loaf, then twisting the plastic freezer bag shut and shoving it back in the bread drawer. It took up real estate in her legendary freezer, then precious counter space as it defrosted. It was a bread with presence. It was also a bread that I thought I left behind when I moved away.

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During a college visit to San Francisco, a friend took me to Tartine, back before it was Tartine the empire. In line, I watched the enormous mixers turning flour into dough. Looking at the assortment of commercial baking tools so casually on display in the window, I must have looked as amazed as I felt, because my friend said, finally, “Oh, this is like Disney World for you, isn’t it?” That was my first sourdough, and I was bewitched.

In Chicago, even before we were locked in an apartment during the pandemic, I experimented with baking sourdough. The first loaves were miserable, but they got better over time. At a certain point, they were good enough that I was trading loaves with friends during COVID, meeting at street corners and accepting business advising sessions in return.

But perfect sourdough is an elusive practice, and one that you have to keep at consistently. I’ve nurtured a starter and then killed it many times over, letting it go black and sickly sweet in the back of my refrigerator. I know what sourdough tastes like, the good stuff, and I’m ruined for having one of the country’s best bakeries just a few blocks from my house. Baking it became an exercise in frustration, in disappointment, in comparison. To really love sourdough, I had to let go of baking it myself.

Now, there’s no double-edged love and envy with sourdough. It nearly sent me the way of over-fermented sourdough—admitting I loved something I couldn’t quite replicate—but I have made peace with that now. Sourdough is an every day indulgence, like cheese or wine, that I buy from talented artisans because I cannot produce it (at least, the version I want to consume) myself. This, I think, is growth.

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When my anxiety turns my stomach, I soothe it with bread and butter. So on an early, jetlagged morning in Florence, stumbling around the cobblestones, I wasn’t surprised to find myself standing in front of a bakery. The unmistakable aroma of the alchemy of flour and water and yeast called to me around the corners. At the counter, shy, I pointed to the plainest thing I could find: a loaf, short and wide, not unlike focaccia, studded with sea salt and olive oil. The baker helped me count out the change and patiently taught me how to name this new bread: schiachatta alla fiorentina.

The bites of the bread, still hot from the oven, zinging with sat and dripping with oil pulled me back down to Earth. I was anchored now, steadier. I had found the bread to hold me. Every time I’ve been lucky enough to be in that city, I make a pilgrimage back to Forno La Pagnotta. That I know the way the bread will taste in a foreign place signals that I have been able to carve out a piece of home there.

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It’s flour and water and time and heat. Sure, there might be salt, and there might be yeast. Maybe some oil and an herb or two. Bread is bread. I was raised in a Christian church, and though that feels like a distant memory, it still feels like a holy sacrament to cut a slice of bread, enriched and sweet as my Mammaw’s or tangy and crusty as sourdough.

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See you back here next week for my versatile nut mix recipe! Thanks for reading.