Knead To Be Loved

Heroic bakers at home, and local bakeries for the rest of us.

by Fiona Murray

The baking gene is not so unlike the one determining high cheekbones or great abs-you either get it or you don't. With an impressive array of women in my lineage who dazzle on the stove-front, the desire to bake should be in my breeding, but "aromas" of warm bread emanate from my kitchen only when I've burned toast. When it comes to matters of the hearth, it appears that I'm rather half-baked.

My grandmother, on the other hand, could whip up a cake from scratch in less time than it would take to queue outside Magnolia Bakery. Owing to a "light hand" the specialty of her kitchen was genoise sponge, and her afternoon-tea table was a showcase of homespun elegance. Around the centerpiece of a china teapot were, varingly, paper cases of fairy cakes, their delicate wings dusted with icing sugar and balancing on a soft mound of chocolate butter-cream; a vanilla chiffon cake, sliced and triple-layered with homemade blackberry jam and fresh cream; or, fragrant and pastel, an exquisite duck-egg sponge with lavender icing. Deftly mixing cake batter while selecting her horses from the weekend racing form, my gran once advised me that I should always use duck eggs for a cake as there was less chance of messing it up. Even then, her instincts were stellar.

Then there's my mother, who, with all the ripe, rustic instincts of an artisanal baker, is a woman willing to get her hands dirty for her craft. With a masterly touch she double-handedly slaps and cajoles bread dough from a soggy mess to a pristine, breathing lump. Watching the woman wrangle dough is akin to watching a cardshark shuffle. But the most outstanding element of this domestic portrait is that my mom produces the crusty offspring of a sourdough bread starter she has been maintaining for the last 16 years. From what I am told, this is a formidable feat for a professional baker, let alone a recreational one.

For the uninitiated, a bread starter is a "living" culture that bakers use in place of commercial yeast, to naturally leaven bread. A natural starter is the plum ingredient to elevate the taste and quality of your bread, but an age-old one-a starter that has garnered ripeness through multiple seasons and spawning-is a rare prize indeed. Conceived from stuffs as simple as flour and water, then allowed to ferment to a yeast-bacteria cocktail, the starter is the kitchen pet my mom decided to save. With the commitment of regular feeding, "Flo" has lived to a ripe old age in our family, and her tempered existence has brought a mature personality to our table over the years-and is a testament to my mother's character as well. Like good wine, artisan bread is the refined product of its raw environment. And like great wine, its taste develops complexity over the seasons and absorbs the gout de terroir distinct to a particular period. (I'm struggling to skirt the wine-wanker barrel here, but the bread's chewiness with the crunch, the springy saltiness best eaten ripped apart and unaccompanied, all deliver a "mouthfeel" incomparable to the commercially produced stuff.) I'm sure our bread's robustness speaks to the tropical summers or pollen-y springs of my youth. Then there's the winter my father took to smoking a pipe and was banished to the garden for his habit. Here, he would sit puffing and stoic, a dethroned lord of the manor in a bottomed-out lawn chair, just under the kitchen window. To be sure, it wasn't sabotage, but loaves from that period had a smokiness that guests couldn't quite put their finger on. I like to refer to this era as the "Ready-rubbed Vintage of '83."

On a recent and rare visit home, I sat around the family dinner table throwing back my mother's raisin loaf with cheese and slices of fresh pear. Savoring this home-fired manna, I looked at my three brothers, from one to the other, and the more I chewed the more everything slowed. And as I contemplated that we were as much a product of our childhood and our mother's engineering as the bread we were breaking, I experienced a moment-just a small moment of overwhelming connectedness as I looked at her chatting and laughing in her place at the end of the table-but one of those moments you dare not mention for fear it will turn trite. And I got it. The commitment, the nurturing, the clucking, the sacrifice. I got it, right before it was gone.

So it was with a doctored heart that I received news-news that would have once left me gagging-before I left to fly back to New York. During a lively session of "What are you going to leave me when you die?" (an old chestnut that I love to ignite; it appeals to my ghoulish side and the bouts that ensue never fail to amuse me), my mom informed me that she was going to bequeath me her starter. I digested this for a moment. Needless to say I was not that amused- I was angling for my grandmother's engagement ring but had instead secured a breathing mound of bacteria. I didn't flinch. I just sat back. I looked at my mother and she at me. She winked, and that was that.

Of course, back in the city now, I still eat out three meals a day, seven days a week. But one of these days, it seems I may just inherit that baking bug.

The Hit List

If you're no "rising star," drop by one
of these local favorites for your baked fix.

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