Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Learning to bake a good loaf of bread is not an easy thing, especially when you've got a broken bread machine.
Jun 10, 1999 | My friend Barbie gave me a bread machine last week. I did not really want it, although I have always loved bread -- the taste of bread, the smell, the images. Unleavened Passover loaves, in memory of Hebrews who had to leave Egypt so fast that they didn't have time to let the bread rise. Communion bread, broken to you; as Jesus was broken that one might live, and in the sharing of brokenness comes oneness, and in that oneness, freedom.
I met Barbie when I was three years sober. She was about my age and also sober, with long, straight hair and round, brown eyes. She had early-stage multiple sclerosis. We got to be friends and she gave me fresh-baked bread from time to time. She was baking five loaves a day in bread machines that were all over her small house, and these loaves made the greatest toast, including, on several occasions, Melba toasts for my teething son. A freshly baked loaf, hot and fluffy, gives way so soon to bread that's slightly stale. But toast is the loaf's second soul: lighter, a little rough, perhaps more masculine but still comforting, like a soft beard. There is no food I love more than toast.
In fact, my first interesting magazine pieces were about toast. I was in my 20s, living on a tiny houseboat and broke, but had scraped together just enough money for a toaster oven. I began throwing brunches billed as Cavalcades of Toast where I provided bread and the toaster oven, and some guests brought jars of jams and jellies, and cheeses, and others brought champagne so you could pretend you weren't really "drinking" at breakfast. But these were bountiful drunken meals: Stone Soup meets "The Lost Weekend."
Then I decided to parlay my toast acumen into cash, and got a gig writing a column called "Toast of the Town" for a local avant-garde magazine. The idea was that I'd invite visiting dignitaries to my house for toast, and while we were eating, I'd interview them.
Like many brainstorms in my life, it seemed like a good idea at the time. But right off the bat we discovered that almost no one in his or her right mind, strung out on a publicity tour, wanted to travel across the Golden Gate Bridge to eat toast with some odd nobody. Then we got a bite: Harry Dean Stanton agreed to do an interview if I would conduct it in his hotel room in San Francisco.
So one Saturday I packed up my toaster oven, a loaf of bread, butter and jars of jam and honey, and took a bus into the city. I arrived at Stanton's hotel around noon, was announced by a skeptical concierge, and moments later found myself standing at the door of Stanton's room, with my toaster oven.
It was not until this precise moment that I had any second thoughts whatsoever, and of course by then it was too late. The door opened, and rumpled, bleary-eyed Harry Dean Stanton peered out at me. Then his gaze dropped down to the toaster oven.
"Yes?" he asked.
"Hi, I'm Anne Lamott and I'm here for the interview." He stared at me with what looked like terror.
"What's that?" he asked, indicating my toaster oven. I explained what it was, and that I was going to make him some toast.
"But I don't want any toast."
"But see, my column is called 'The Toast of the Town,' and so what I do is to make some toast, and then we talk ..."
"But I don't want any toast ..."
Finally we compromised: I made myself toast. He ordered coffee from room service and we had a long marvelous conversation about art and God.
The magazine ran three of my Toasts of the Town, and then it folded. I went back to giving intime toast parties. I brought bread, store-bought, ready-made, as I would no more have thought to bake a loaf than to raise chickens for eggs.
It was a shame, too, because good memories of baking bread might have slaked my spirit's terrible hunger, in a way that the spirits I was swilling then could not touch. To come upon a friend making bread, the scent of yeasty dough baking, can send me backward into a wavy Mvbius strip of memory, looping back into the kitchen of our house where my mother made bread -- white bread, black bread, Danish pastry. She kneaded her dough like a brawny masseuse, wiping at her damp, furrowed brow with the back of her sleeve, letting it rise, punching it down -- Take that! And thus wafting through the Harold Pinter dialogue and tension of my youth were comforting smells from a world of gingham aprons.
That smell of dough is so intimate, and it pleases me in the way of the other private smells. Maybe we're heartened to remember that we are animals who smell, in the active sense, and who give off smell -- clean or salty or rank or sweet or new. It is how we recognize our mothers even before we discover them making bread. It's how in the wilds and deep inside, they recognize us.
Get Salon in your mailbox!