Breaking Bread
Nov 8 2013


My first loaf failed.
My kitchen is too cold
for bread,
its frigid air
and white hygienic surfaces
inhospitable, at best.

And where slower is better
I am too impatient
for bread.
Between the mixing and proofing and kneading,
the miraculous rise, and the final golden loaf
redolent of yeast

and winter wheat
and caramelized sweetness,
is the alchemy of time.
Appetite
whetted by waiting.

And even then, must sit,
setting the crust
firming the crumble
of its sweet spongy interior
before the first steaming cut.
Melting butter,
or nothing but
unadulterated bread.

And to think, the air is filled with yeast.
As grapes, untended
will naturally ferment.
As bread
reflects its place.

So, despite careful measuring

and rigid recipes
and the expert touch
the master baker
can only show, not explain,
there is magic
in the science of bread.
In the sorcery of time
the virtue of patience.
In invisible things
like temperamental yeast
at which the ancients

could only wonder.
Fresh-baked bread,
object of worship
gift of the gods,
equal parts
reverence, and gusto.

The heady smell
of a living thing
in a warm welcoming kitchen,
of earthenware bowls
and wooden slabs.
Where we bake together;
and even enemies
break bread,
seasoned with the salt of the earth.

This poem was directly inspired by a terrific Adam Gopnik piece from the Nov 4 2013 New Yorker: Bread and Women. The only bit I regret not stealing (and not for lack of trying!) was his thoughtful double entendre on "mother" (literally the sourdough starter, and metaphorically self-evident).

Anyway, the article made me think of my one and only -- and spectacularly unsuccessful -- attempt at bread-making. I suspect the kitchen was too cold. And since I still keep my house that way, I've never thought it worthwhile to repeat the experiment.

But aside from the personal history, I think a cold kitchen can be as much a metaphor as Adam Gopnik's "mother", since the kitchen is the centre of life and hospitality in any home. I don't dwell or elaborate on this, and had no intention for this to be a deep introspective and confessional piece; nevertheless, the kitchen does provide a useful framing device. I especially like the contrast between the coolness of "white hygienic" in the first stanza and the warmth of "earthenware" and "wooden" in the last. (Gopnik’s wife’s long forgotten recipe requires both, btw. Something else I lifted!)

"Bread and salt" is there for a reason. It was the traditional greeting, a symbolic way to extend hospitality, for even enemies to enter into truce. Where salt was wealth. And where salt has this powerful connotation of permanence, earthiness, and gravitas; as well as the ambiguity of a rock we eat …a solid that disappears into liquids …of something that preserves the perishable …and something that you wouldn’t eat by itself, but makes better everything it accompanies. And bread, of course, is the staff of life, made all the more magical by the alchemy of leaven. Which is the essential uncertainty of bread: as much art, as science.