The Year I asked for Beard on Bread for Christmas..
…and when I opened it, my siblings deemed me “weird”
Nothing new, there. My siblings still think I’m weird.
The year was 1975, and I had spent 4 months of a gap year in San Francisco, where, when I wasn’t making $2.30 per hour temping for Kelly Girls, I prowled the city for the famous sourdough starter that someone’s great-great-grandmother had made during the Gold Rush and sometimes for carrageenan to thicken my homemade yogurt. And yes, I did ride a cable car.
Bread-baking, organic gardening and all other homesteading was coming into vogue for my generation. Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappe turned the world upside down by revealing just how damaging factory farming was/is to our planet (the book just celebrated its 50th anniversary with a new edition) and how you could live healthily on plants. Laurel’s Kitchen (1972) came out of a group of three young women in Berkeley who had UC Berkeley professors and scientists give them accurate nutrition information that made their case for vegetarianism. It is also a lifestyle book with recipes.
I was 21 at the time, January through April, 1975 and my then-boyfriend, who later became my husband and is now my then-husband (try to keep up, will you?), wanted to go to deep-sea-diving school in the Bay Area. When he stopped in Massachusetts to say goodbye, my mother and I strong-armed him into taking me with him. (There is just no other way to put it). We were merciless. In a good way. I had taken a gap year because he’d broken up with me at the end of last term, and broken-hearted, I told the Dean of Students that I just could not come back.
Faced with a year of waitressing, and regretting my decision, when Then-Boyfriend asked my forgiveness and would I please get back together with him, I agreed. Then he dropped the bomb of “oh, by the way, I’m leaving for San Francisco for four months. See you when I get back!” Hold your horses, buster. Not so fast. Mum and I made a strong case for him taking me along (I forget what that case was), and he completely, reluctantly agreed.
Off we went in a beater of a car that miraculously got us through a blizzard in Kearney, Nebraska, that killed 57 people. Hill and dale across the top half of our country until we arrived in Alameda, California. We pretended to be married in order to get an apartment together. My mother even gave me her wedding band to help convince the landlady of The Alamo. She wasn’t convinced, but gave us the apartment anyway. (And who names an apartment complex after a fort that went down in gunfire and (not much) glory?))
Back to the good parts. I loved to read newspapers and had heard all about the hundred-year-old soup (I never got any to start my own pot), and the sourdough starter shared by many area foodies (which wasn’t a term back then). I was dying to get my hands on some of that starter. Never happened, so bread was not baked in Frisco. (“Don’t call it Frisco,” said Chronicle columnist Herb Caen).
But when I got back to Massachusetts in April (you notice how I flashed forward without belaboring the failed experiment of living with your Then-Boyfriend when he really didn’t want you there), I hung in for a break baking breakthrough. My Christmas list included James Beard’s book, which became seminal, Beard on Bread.
I also wanted something to make the mixing of the dough easier. The food processor wasn’t around then, or it wasn’t accessible and I never owned a stand mixer (and still don’t — Santa, are you listening?). But for not much money, you could get a bucket with a crank attached and dump ingredients, hand crank for awhile and voila. I have no idea why I thought this would make me a good bread baker, but I do love gadgets.
Photo from eBay listing. I can buy another one….but those days are over.
My bread, if it could be called that, was always rock-hard and ended up in the garbage. Sorry, greenhouse gases. We didn’t know about you then.
I even tried to make bagels in my Colby College dorm kitchen, which had a bowl, a spoon and maybe a cookie sheet to bake on. I like to think this made me a serious cook, curious and intrepid. I should have been studying.
Christmas morning: my mother, whom we called “Mum,” went into debt every year buying presents on credit, also a new thing back in 1975, or on layaway, which went the way of the AOL compact discs, where a store holds items for you and you make weekly payments. Anyway, we had epic gift-openings that went most of the morning and afternoon, with small breaks to put in the turkey to roast, peel potatoes, and otherwise make Christmas dinner.
I opened my Mirro Hand-Cranked Bread Maker, then Beard on Bread, and maybe a few other cooking tools, and that’s when one of my four sibs looked at me and said, “You’re so weird.” Oh, well. No homemade bagels for you!
I kept the book for many years, but off-loaded the bread maker. It wasn’t until November, 2006, thirty years later, that I once again attempted making bread.
The morning New York Times ran an article by Mark Bittman about No-Knead Bread, developed by Jim Lahey, owner of Sullivan Street Bakery. Flour, yeast, salt, water, mix well and let sit in the same bowl for 12 to 18 hours. Turn a few times, let sit some more until a finger poke in the dough stays put and doesn’t spring back. Bake in a preheated 500 degree oven for 30 minutes in a covered Dutch oven. Remove cover, bake until top is chestnut brown. Take out and stand back, because you have just created a miracle.
My most recent loaf: bread flour mixed with whole grain spelt flour. Delicious.
I’m not alone. Bittman wrote a week later that the recipe and technique went “viral,” before social media existed in the ways we know of it. No Facebook, No Instagram, No Twitter, no Tic Tok. And people from all over the world wrote in and said the method was life-changing. I would agree.
I feel blessed to be able to say that I remember many events that took place 50 years ago. Yes, I’m getting on, but I’m still that curious cook, always willing (and obsessed) to experiment with a new cuisine, track down the right spice/s and ingredients and make a recipe. Even though I’m now alone, and try to keep from making enough for six people, I’m still tracking down “that” flour, “that” ancient grain pasta, and I may even start making sourdough starter. I’ve given up on getting some of someone else’s.
The Pandemic and isolating at home caused a wave of home-baking and I did try some sourdough recipes. The King Arthur hotline was a godsend. “I know you want to make your own sourdough bread,” the nice woman said, “But just add some yeast to it too so it really rises.” Okay. Turned out great.
And now I’m going back to those half-century books I mentioned and re-exploring veganism, baking my own bread, buying organic produce from a local farmer (when a fave bean is not priced like a Harry Winston diamond), and practicing fervent lack of wasting food.
Now I well know about greenhouse gases, hundred year old weather disasters and rising sea levels. I’ll do my best.
I’ve also switched out Beard on Bread for Jim Lahey’s book, My Bread. Those no-knead loaves keep calling.
Jim Lahey’s pizza crust recipe: it proofs for only 2 hours!