Essay 2, Part 4.

Of course, my personal associations with bread include more than heavy theology and obscure etymology. A quick glance in any recipe book would reveal this food’s wide cultural use. Somehow, the English word manages to include everything from Indian naan to South Asian roti, from Irish soda bread to Southern corn bread. The fact that bread is present in almost every culture in some form gives it a cultural breadth that my family has always enjoyed. It’s one of our favourite foods, a relatively easy way to participate in humanity’s diversity. My sister, a skillful baker, manages to produce beautiful loaves that look completely different from each other and that hail from totally different traditions—highly-frangible rice bread, sweet, glossy challah, hard, bubble-filled baguette. Perhaps the most coveted bread she makes is Finnish pulla. This bread only appears at Christmas because it is so labor-intensive. Laura usually bakes two loaves, but none of it ever survives past one meal. Sweet, dense, flavoured with cardamom, pulla is a family favourite. Though we have no Finnish ancestry whatsoever, we maintain the tradition from which this bread derives by using it to celebrate this holiday.

So perhaps it’s time for me to overcome my long-standing fear of yeast and try to bake some bread myself, as a way to experience afresh the layered importance of family history, of cultural appreciation, and of faith. Aside from the connection I always see as I watch yeast shaken out of its packet into the mixture, bread requires self-sacrifice from the baker, too—you have to be willing to dedicate significant amounts of time and attention to bread. Is the dough too sticky? Add flour. Is it too flaky? Add water. Why is the dough not rising? (My perennial question.) Probably it needs to be tucked away in a warmer, moister spot. Why is the loaf baking lop-sided? (Check your oven coils. Probably there’s one that’s not heating properly.) It commands attention from all the senses, from sight to touch to smell to hearing. Does the timer have ten more minutes, or was I too preoccupied with The Georgics to notice that it went off five minutes ago? By forcing me to employ all my senses, as well as my seldom-used biceps, bread forces me to enact my own incarnation, my own physicality, even as it reminds me of my fragility, my dependence broadly on other human beings and on microscopic eukaryotes in particular.

A particular dependence that I think I’m going to have to cope with by removing myself from the fermentation process by one step. I can never seem to coax yeast to thrive for me; most of my loaves don’t rise properly. But one of my friends, a born-and-bred Hoosier, recently introduced me to another variation on this food. It might have been concocted just for yeast-phobes like myself since it doesn’t require the baker to deal with live yeast. Or it might have been the creation of a backwoods Indianan with too much alcohol on hand. Though it’s not as classy as brioche or as nutritious as anadama bread, it’s much easier to make. Tonight it’s time to try some beer bread.