Though he was a professor for many years, my grandfather’s pedagogical skills are a bit rusty. He showed me the recipe he used—it’s the one on the back of the bag of King Arthur flour—then proceeded not to follow it at all, measuring absolutely nothing and giving inscrutable instructions about how to judge whether more kneading was necessary by evaluating the dough’s relative matteness; I tried to take notes, but gave up by the second rise.
He did manage to succeed in teaching me to knead, which I guess I’ve been doing completely wrong for years, on the rare occasion that anything in my sphere of influence has needed kneading. His method, which produces pretty, spherical lumps of dough, involves folding the dough away from your body then pulling it back towards you as you press it down, sealing it back into itself. And when it was time to punch down the dough, it turned out that a firm push, rather than an angry boxing-style jab, was easier and more effective, and also didn’t result in me bruising my knuckles on the bottom of the metal mixing bowl. Baking bread, it turns out, is not the most appropriate outlet for rage.
As we waited for the dough to rise a third and final time, my grandfather and I left my napping grandmother and took a walk around the apartment complex. My grandfather keeps pace with me easily; he could probably outrun me. While we walked he complained about the general downward trend of everything, especially my grandmother’s increasing frailty, and his own aches and pains, which he loves to describe but which never seem to prevent him from doing anything. His hearing aid, especially, troubles him: embracing him, you hear it buzzing, which must be irritating. But whether or not he knows it, he continually contradicts his overdramatic pronouncements about the general bitterness of life: he gets animated and enthralled with his own cunning as he describes the problems he’s solved lately, like the recent steps he’s taken to keep away the deer that love to chew the tender stalks at the vineyard. Coyote urine, sold commercially for this purpose, and an old FM radio blaring country music have proved successful deterrents. He’s also in the process of building a website to display his aerial photographs of Africa. While these might be fascinating to anthropological researchers, my favorites are the ones he took of his family during that time—my grandmother, tanned and young and extra-thin from a recent bout of malaria, grinning and squinting in the blinding sun, with a toddler version of my mother peeking suspiciously out from behind her legs.
We returned to the apartment, shaped the bread into loaves, and put it in the oven. After it was done, we didn’t wait anything like the recommended amount of time before slicing it; it tasted exactly as I’d imagined it would, no better or worse for my involvement in its production. I took the remainders of the loaf in my backpack when I took the bus back to New York the next morning and during the (short) time that the bread spent on my kitchen counter, I more than once had the semi-insane thought of inviting friends over specifically for the purpose of eating a slice. But ultimately I didn’t end up sharing it with anyone; it was too difficult to explain, and I wanted to eat it all myself.
I thought I might try to recreate the bread on my own, but so far, I haven’t. Baking bread is so labor-intensive and time consuming that the idea of working through a few (or a lot) of less-than-stellar loaves before hitting my stride is unappealing, but it also may be that laziness is only part of my hesitation. Another part of me thinks I won’t bake that bread until I have to; in other words, until I’m the only one who can. That day seems unimaginably far off, especially in my grandfather’s dynamic presence, but as he’d be the first to remind you, probably as bluntly as possible, it’s coming. Till then, though, I will keep making pilgrimages to the assisted living apartment, where my grandfather organizes his time around the vagaries of the wine grapes, the tender and taxing chores associated with my grandmother, and the regular rising of loaves.
Emily Gould is the author of And The Heart Says Whatever and the host of online cooking/book chat show Cooking the Books.
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