In Memory of Bread

by Paul Graham

  I, for my part, was haunted by Eliza’s sourdough bread months after we discovered it at the Burlington Farmers’ Market. We had brought the loaves home and rationed them out, stunned by how much fuller and more bread-like they were than the bagged mixes from Pamela’s or Bob’s, and certainly any of the disasters we had baked from cookbooks. The next time I saw her table, I wasn’t going to blow it. I would buy every crumb she had, no matter what she thought of me.

  We returned to Burlington again in the fall. No Eliza. No table of breads in three flavors, all of which were safe. Nothing for me. What the hell, I muttered to myself as I retraced my steps past the same tables again and again, just to make sure I hadn’t missed her.

  I feared the worst. Had she been unable to build enough of a customer base, pay the bills, stay solvent? After all, she was not baking in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, or Chicago. She was in Vermont, the land of cows and kale and maple syrup, and while it was true that I’d met more people there than in my own town who were sympathetic to the challenges of celiac disease, that didn’t mean there were enough people like me to keep a small business like hers afloat, no matter how good the bread.

  It was, I would come to know well, one of the cruelties of the market for small-scale GF producers, those who made the artisanal versions of the shadowy Udi’s and Schär breads. Apparently I had to be cautious about loving these discoveries too much. We had gone back to the bagged mixes from Pamela’s as soon as we ran out of Eliza’s sourdough. And it looked like that was where we would have to stay.

  —

  There were also some bright spots in the late summer and early fall. I had experienced the “food is love” metaphor before, but never as frequently as I did now. The summer parties gave way to more formal invitations to dinner, when friends invited us to meals and abandoned, for a night, their typical repertoire. I never once sat down to a dinner where the food consisted of theirs and ours, safe and not safe. We gathered around the table as equals, everyone GF for a night. They cleaned cutting boards and counters, read ingredient labels, and took the potential of hurting me so seriously that they were not afraid to check on the obvious: Does mustard oil contain gluten? Could I have quinoa?

  Our friends did not have to learn to cook new dishes just to have something to share with us—it doesn’t get any safer and simpler than rice—but many of them acquired, for our benefit, new kitchen skills, new ways of cooking. They threw themselves into polentas and white beans, inventive salads, ethnic dishes. They visited the GF corner of the grocery store where they stared at strange brands of crackers and snacks, wondering which were the lesser evils to put on their buffets. They brought back fine ciders from the Finger Lakes, my favorite GF beers from sojourns in cities, and honey mead from Maine. (Even at the office, our department secretary stocked a file cabinet with my own stash of snacks for long meetings.) Coincidentally, at this time, the cookbooks and websites were getting better, and the trend seemed to be helping everyone along. This did not change the fact that converting to cooking GF with any ambition did take time, and it took effort. Remembering my own attitude toward people with allergies before I developed celiac disease—I had found them inconvenient, more often than not—now made me blush, especially in the face of my friends’ generosity.

  Their skills with GF baking in particular had improved. I have to assume that along the way, they’d experienced their own kitchen disasters just as we had, and thus learned the hard way. They too had looked into the bowl of the KitchenAid, thinking, What the hell is happening in there? For all I knew, every dessert they presented us had at least one failure in its wake. They had likely also wasted ingredients, money, and time. I didn’t have the heart to ask how much. I just enjoyed their experiments with cheesecake, pies, and fruit crisps. One friend arrived to dinner one night with an amaranth pudding (not too bad). Another stocked her kitchen with baking chocolate and butter, and made impromptu desserts of rehydrated figs and honey. Others dropped ice cream into booze. Most impressively, nobody resorted to GF boxed cookies. They seemed to know what awaited down that road.

  At the end of the meal, after the dessert, the friend who had made the cake, or the pie, would often declare in equal measures of disbelief and pleasure, “That wasn’t too bad for gluten-free, was it?”

  Then they sent us home with the leftovers.

  —

  There were some things we hadn’t figured out how to do yet, and were still a long way from doing.

  In October, I began to anticipate my birthday with anxiety, even a little dread, simply because of the cake. Bec and I usually made cakes only around our birthdays, preferring desserts with fruit throughout the year because we had so much of it. Consequently, it had taken us a long time to master cakes, and in recent years we had perfected our go-to, which came out of the 1997 edition of The Joy of Cooking—a simple but rich chocolate layer cake with vanilla icing that we nailed every time and took to calling the Oreo on ’Roids. We could have branched out and discovered other recipes, but we never seemed to feel the need to.

  After spending the better part of a year trying to bake without wheat, we knew better than to just wander into the Joy recipe with GF cup-for-cup flour and good intentions. The hard lessons about the limits of baking chemistry had stuck. We had become pessimistic, cautious about destroying recipes and memories that we loved—or maybe we had just become GF realists.

  It didn’t help matters that long before the days of our own homemade cakes, I had formed pleasant associations with birthday cakes. I could still clearly remember the Italian bakery favored by my mother in Newton, New Jersey, when I was growing up. D’Angelo’s sat beside a dry cleaner’s in an unassuming strip mall. The moment you stepped through the glass door, you were immediately greeted by the heady, velvety scent of creamed butter and vanilla. Every year, my mother, brother, and I would enter the cool, bright shop in the middle of August to pick up my brother’s birthday cake (for some reason I cannot remember picking up my own cake, probably because my birthday fell during the school year, and so I arrived home from the bus to find the cake magically there on the counter, waiting for me). My brother, David, always chose chocolate with white buttercream icing, and often strawberries or candied cherries between the two layers. I think these cakes were the first gourmet foods we ever ate, though I don’t think my mother necessarily saw them that way. In going to a bakery run by a large, pale-faced Italian woman with hair piled on top of her head, who offered us pignoli cookies on the house, my mother was simply doing the sensible thing: patronizing a fellow Italian. The experience of walking into a bakery and selecting from so many options the one thing you desired was, in the days before supermarket bakeries, a powerful annual rite. I never forgot it. Most people never do.

  A familiar feeling came over me and intensified the nearer my birthday drew: something about not being able to have a real birthday cake, whether our cake or one from a bakery, made me want a cake even more.

  It did not help that, at about the same time, I had a bad visit with my GI, who had wanted to talk about some concerns he had over my routine blood work. His receptionist called me because he’d been concerned to discover that my hemoglobin and total iron-binding capacity scores had dipped. At my appointment, I told him not to be concerned; the explanation was that I had briefly tried to reintroduce steel-cut oats to my diet. I blamed that bad decision entirely on the arrival of autumn: walking the dog in the early mornings, past the frosted lawns and orange-capped trees, through air filled with the scent of dried leaves and wood smoke, made me come back to the house wanting a hot bowl of oatmeal (and it wasn’t even below zero yet). I wondered if my tolerance for it might have returned along with my tolerance for fish and dairy. I needed only one serving—prepared the right way, I’ll add, with thawed blueberries, maple syrup, a little nutmeg and cinnamon, and some toasted, slivered almonds—and about two hours before I started to feel off. All day long I was agitated and light-headed. I threw the bag of oats away, downed some water, an
d went for a run. The symptoms cleared up fast, but apparently the effects of my experiment had lingered in my blood, and ratted me out.

  When I told my doctor all of this, he looked at me as if I were stupid. “Everything you get from oats,” he told me, “you can get from some other food”—as if mere nutrition, acquiring fuel, comprised the only goal of eating. Even my dog knew there was more to food than getting the calories you needed.

  If I couldn’t have one of the most humble breakfasts a man could cook (and part of my heritage, too: think about Dr. Johnson slighting the Scottish by noting how in England oats are fed to horses, but in Scotland “they sustain the people”), then I wasn’t willing to compromise on cake. In time, I would grow to be fine with a flourless chocolate cake at the end of a special meal, or even a plate of my favorite cheeses. I would come to realize that cake is tradition, but if I can’t go back to the Italian lady and get the cake that lives on in my mind, or make the Oreo on ’Roids, then a generous tumbler of single malt is as deep a pleasure. But that October, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, I regressed to being a kid. I asked my wife what she thought she could do. She did her best, and hit the Pamela’s website for a spice cake recipe that used their all-purpose baking and pancake mix. Best not to take chances, she thought; no crazy internet recipes, nothing that hadn’t been tested. The Pamela’s recipe might have seemed uninspired, but it had the virtue of being a pretty sure bet.

  While Bec baked I hit the road. I remember pounding out that run, breaking seven-minute miles for the first time. The air was cool and bright and clean and I ran like an animal that had been let out of a cage. I knew that this was my gift to myself; that, strange though it sounded, the run, the sweat burning my eyes, was my cake. I had not become a crazed, ascetic runner—time would prove that I could balance running hard and playing hard well enough—but I realized, as my focus sharpened with my footfalls, that at this time a year ago, I’d been a month away from going down the drain.

  Afterward, the hunger and fatigue felt so intense that, even though the cake for my first birthday tasted like glorified pancakes, I felt satisfied nonetheless.

  —

  Six weeks later, in the first week of December, there was another anniversary of sorts: it was a year from the time I’d gone into the hospital, a season that I will associate for a long while with dizzying sickness. I was running again, in the streets of Canton in the dark, in the snow.

  Three inches had fallen already. Snow accumulated on my shoulders, on the top of my head, in the folds of my jacket. We are connoisseurs of snow in the North Country, and this one was light and powdery, completely manageable, though I still felt strange running in it. The drivers who passed me looked annoyed, as if they thought I was purposely on the shoulder of the road to make their evening commute more difficult. The real reason behind the snowy run was that I had seen the gunmetal clouds moving in as I walked home from work and I thought, Now.

  I was out for only thirty minutes, working time instead of distance. At home the oven was preheating for dinner, which I intended to determine on the run, though as usual, I quickly forgot what I was supposed to be thinking about. Not being able to hear my footfalls allowed me to pretend I was floating. I liked watching the vapor from my breath shoot out in sharp gray plumes. It was easy to stay cool.

  Somewhere near the one-mile mark I removed my hat. By two miles my face was crusted with a mixture of melted snow and sweat. Near the street corner, on the bottom limb of a bare birch tree, a wind chime stirred gently. The sound of it as I passed by, light and summery, made the sudden onset of the winter snows seem like a mistake. I descended into the trees and shadows at Bend in the River Park and, as I expected, found myself completely alone. A hush enfolded me. The Grasse River flowed thickly past, dark and slow. I kept my head up, hoping to be rewarded with a glimpse of an owl.

  For nearly six months now, I had been training hard. I made my intervals as grueling as I could stand, and I didn’t avoid the difficult runs, the long hills, the hot days. I had adhered to my GF diet. Yet as recently as October, I had been returning from long runs overheated and banged up. The breakdown point seemed to be right around ten miles. Why, then, had I kept running past it, to eleven miles, and twelve? The fatigue I felt for hours afterward made it difficult for me to cook with attention or patience. The dehydration made it hard for me to hold my wine, and that annoyed me. Still, I didn’t quit. What the hell was I doing this for?

  Right around Halloween I had realized the answer. I was far into a twelve-miler when I rounded a corner and the reason seemed to be waiting for me on the trailside, so simple and obvious I couldn’t believe I hadn’t figured it out sooner.

  I was still so goddamned mad.

  I still was angry about the diet, the challenges, feeling different, Bec having to change, and the lack of a good explanation for why these things had occurred. I had tried to content myself by tapping into forgotten traditions, by eating those non-wheaten foods that people had been eating with gratitude for thousands of years; I had tried to see the connections between my local eating and history. In some ways this had made things easier, but the approach of the one-year mark allowed me to see that, paradoxically, I had made progress and had not made much at all. I especially felt pained whenever we traveled, or went out to eat. Lately I had been thinking that Bec and I had become like animals that always returned to the same feeding grounds: Thai and Vietnamese restaurants in Ottawa, our favorite bistro and Thai restaurant in nearby Potsdam, and our stops in Burlington and Lake Placid. I had not yet ditched my grand—or maybe they were just inflexible—ideas about eating. That explained my tendency to spoil a perfectly good meal by thinking, It’s always the same place. You’re not exploring, not doing anything new. And then: Be grateful. Shut up and eat.

  So I had decided to see if I could burn a hole right through all of the frustration in another way. I chose December 11—the date I went into the hospital and spent three days looking out the windows—for a 13.5-mile run. I wanted a private half marathon, but I was continuing to estimate my distances—I refused to run with a GPS, or expensive gear—and I didn’t always want to wonder if I’d run 12.99, so I tacked on the extra half mile.

  I wanted a personal-best pace. I was willing to completely trash my body to get it. When winter arrived for real, I could hang up my shoes and repair for as long as I needed.

  Then, suddenly, winter did arrive for real, and earlier than I had anticipated. The snow that I was running through now was the vanguard of a system that intended to hang around for a week, through my celiac anniversary and past it. More snows were coming. After that, subzero temperatures. It all came on before I had the chance to taper my miles, ease back my pace. While I could have gutted out 13.5 in the dark right now, it would not have been the run—the event, the tribute, the vengeance—I wanted and needed.

  You take what the land, the climate, gives you.

  What else could I do? It seemed, as I climbed the hill leading out of the park and turned away from the river, that what I had learned about food, and agriculture, and even about celiac disease, also applied to the land I was running across. Yield to where you are instead of fighting it. Figure out how to work within that frame. It’s not necessarily easier that way, but it’s better, saner.

  The same climate that had helped me recover, given me respite from the GF diet with Adirondack blue and Siberian red potatoes, kabocha and butternut squash, sweet corn, globe eggplants, red and poblano peppers, blueberries, cranberries, molasses, maple syrup, lamb and chicken and turkey—that same sky and soil seemed to want me to quit the running season a little earlier than I had planned. I appeared to have no choice. In a way, I was relieved.

  I turned up my street and hit the bright lights of our house at the half-hour mark. By the time I had my shoes off, I knew what we would be eating for dinner: a pan of Dan’s root vegetables, celery root and carrots and beets and shallots, tossed with dried herbs from the garden and olive oil a
nd roasted, along with some of Kassandra’s pork loin, seared and topped with the spiced apple chutney Bec had put up back in September when we were buried in apples and onions.

  Even as I cooked, though, I thought that somewhere out there, someone knew how to turn rice into wheat. People like Eliza Hale: there had to be more of them. There had to be. If we could put a man on the moon, as the saying went.

  I resolved to find them, as many as I could.

  One day early in the spring of 2014, my gastroenterologist fired me. Or did he dump me? Either fails to capture the end of a relationship where one person sent a camera down another person’s throat, determined the cause of their suffering, and told them the “cure” was eliminating the cornerstone of Western cuisine. Who, I wondered, was working for whom, here? Apparently, it didn’t matter anymore.

  His receptionist informed me that I’d broken too many appointments for upper endoscopies. By my awkward silence, I confessed that this was true. I had canceled three appointments, to be exact. In the span of two months. At more or less the last minute. In medicine, this constitutes giving a physician the runaround. It’s normal for doctors to want to follow up with severe cases a year later and make sure everything looks good, and the clock had now expired. We were way past a year. The receptionist conveyed that my GI wanted his patients to take their health seriously. That’s a paraphrase on the verge of quotation. His real interest, I knew, was in being a good doctor, being careful. I had gotten what I deserved.

  It was the first time I’d been fired or dumped since college.

  I tend to be a bad patient for two reasons: I research and think critically about what I’m being told by my physicians, even though medicine is about as far from my skill set as I can get; and I don’t sit still and convalesce for long. Only the first character flaw applied in this case. The need for endoscopies in patients who are asymptomatic remained an open question in some celiac forums, and I knew that (funny, how I subscribed only to those forums that corroborated my own thoughts). So any assumptions that I was not serious burned in my gut like a chunk of Triscuit.