In Memory of Bread

by Paul Graham

  We had been sitting at the kitchen table, sampling, of all things, mashed potato candies,*2 when the girl’s siblings appeared with a butternut squash for me; then they brought me a jar of pickles. These were gifts; the girl had loved the bread I’d brought. It was the closest thing to real bread she had tasted that was safe for her. And I remembered the relief Bec and I felt when we found the Pamela’s mix after months of making bad recipes, our sense that here—at last—was a food that we could at least live with until we discovered the next good thing.

  In Dutch, the children told Karen that their mother wanted the recipe.

  I saw my miscalculation too late. Rachel thought I had made the loaf from scratch. How could I explain to her that she had little hope of getting this bread, because it wasn’t available locally and required an internet connection to order it? And even if they could get it through the company this Amish community ordered their staples from, they would need a stand mixer to make it taste the same. It simply wasn’t possible to achieve the texture the girl was responding to if you mixed it by hand. Process, I had learned, mattered.

  I didn’t know what to do. It might be possible to approximate the recipe from the side of the bag. Do a little experimenting, see if I could break it down into ingredients the Amish could order and mix themselves. In the meantime, they might even forget about it.

  Rachel and her daughter didn’t forget, of course, just as I had never forgotten about each better loaf I found along the way. The bread may have even haunted them, as all of my discoveries haunted me after we had eaten the last slice, with no immediate hope of getting more. My solution was to write up as many recipes as I could find—from the Test Kitchen, from sites on the internet, from other cookbooks in my kitchen. I brought them out and told Rachel she had to experiment. She needed to work the dough for as long as possible by hand. Nothing she did with real bread applied when she was working with rice, sorghum, or potato flours. In fact, if a baker did everything she could think of to ruin a conventional loaf of bread, she just might get a good gluten-free loaf. That won me a grin.

  * * *

  *1 Her name has been changed out of respect for the Amish culture.

  *2 Talk about an experience that shot me into the World War II rationing era from which came M. F. K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf. What, you ask, are mashed potato candies? Three ingredients—a boiled, peeled, and mashed russet potato, a whole bag of powdered sugar, and half a bag, more or less, of sweetened shredded coconut—mixed together until the dough is formable, and shaped into little discs. They’re not bad. They’re gluten-free. And they have a screaming glycemic load. My fillings hurt, eating these things.

  I stood on a street corner in Vancouver in the January fog. Jet-lagged, hungry, and more than a little wary, I was casing the Gastown district for something to eat. No apps, no GPS: just my instincts and the conviction that something that was safe for me awaited nearby—something I wanted to eat.

  Not that there weren’t plenty of places right in front of me to get a safe and adequate meal. Finding GF in cities, as compared to rural places, has become quite easy. My hotel had a restaurant with GF menu items, for starters. There were sushi houses if I wanted to take the risk of getting glutened by some errant soy sauce in the midst of business travel. I passed several bistros where I could have found a few items on the menu, cafés that almost certainly offered sandwiches on gluten-free bread. Earlier that morning I had stumbled onto the best GF doughnuts I’d ever eaten (first, pineapple upside-down cake; then vanilla crème; and then, because it wasn’t like I was coming back anytime soon, plain cinnamon-and-sugar). I didn’t want any of the options I had already passed by. I didn’t know what I wanted, exactly. My intention was to roam around until I found something that sounded unmistakably good.

  I stopped in front of a Lebanese restaurant to read the menu for kicks. Lebanon! The Levant! The birthplace of wheat and barley! I laughed out loud.

  This was not a fun way to snag a meal. This was work. The night before, I had walked eight blocks only to find that a highly reviewed Vietnamese restaurant, listed on the Web as open, was in fact closed. So much for advance research. I wanted to cry in the doorway. I settled for a self-important gastropub and the one item that my waitress said was sure not to kill me: braised beef cheeks. They were good, but they were not what I wanted. As I ate and sipped a glass of British Columbia red (no GF beer in the house), I wondered when and how getting what we wanted to eat had become such an imprisoning expectation.

  Evidently, I still had not unlearned what little gourmandism I’d come to command. I still had ideas about what dining out in a city should be like: serendipitous, exotic, totally satisfying. I had once aspired to eat like the literary gastronomes, like M. F. K. Fisher and Elizabeth David, but I realized that I never would have gotten there, celiac disease or no. Few of us ever do, and that is why we love them. They possessed more freedom, more money, more time, and the world was different then. What they provided, and what some of them still do provide, is a glimpse of the ideal. We live—and eat—vicariously through them, as we do through all hopeful, luminous stories, and in the process we learn some things that better our own experiences at the table. It was not possible for me to eat my way across Vancouver now, but it never would have been possible anyway.

  Nonetheless, I was willing to walk a long way in an unfamiliar city to sniff out the one dish I did not yet know I wanted to eat. That counted for something. I was still something of the eater I used to be. I still cared about good food, meals that have been prepared with attention and mindfulness.

  I had walked an expanding grid of about ten blocks when I saw the place across the street: a tiny taquería with a spray-painted Virgin Mary over the door.

  Oh, yes.

  That was the place. I knew it immediately. Along the way I had passed three or four Tex-Mex-looking restaurants and a Chipotle chain franchise, without a single one tempting me. But clearly, my search needed to end here, at the line that snaked out the door along with the beat of Mexican hip-hop, beneath the Blessed Mother’s brightly colored robes. She seemed to be saying, Come, eat real tacos, and be relieved of the burden of your intolerances.

  I waited in line and ordered in Spanish when my turn came. In a tiny dining room where the walls were decorated, floor to ceiling, with Catholic-themed platters, I sat down to a dinner of four tacos—fresh fish, chicken, beans, and beef tongue—and quick-pickled vegetables on the side. I had to tell myself to slow down. I had to tell myself to enjoy this, because these tacos were a victory as much as they were a meal. And what a meal it was: spicy and sweet, tart from the pickled carrots, the tortillas caramelized on the flat-top before they were filled enough to be generous but not so much as to be difficult to eat. No cheese, no fake sauces. Just awesome, honest food.

  A hell of a lot of trouble, this meal. I still had to hoof it back to my hotel. But it was well worth every tired footfall down the last block. Nothing else could have satisfied me so much. And the best part was that I had not even known I’d wanted tacos.

  —

  Shortly after I returned home, the North Country’s first gluten-free bakery opened its doors. It was in Potsdam, only ten minutes away. The owners named it Three Bears Gluten-Free Bakery and More. From the earliest days, their goal seemed to be to fill as many holes in the diets of people who were sensitive to wheat as possible. Eventually they would install a salad bar and offer soups, sandwiches, and gluten-free pizza. A bona fide GF utopia.

  On the day I visited for the first time, the temperature was five degrees above zero. Thirty inches of snow was piled on the sidewalks. Not the best time of year to stir excitement for a new business, not by a long shot. I knew there had been anticipation in the community, though. Friends had been mentioning it to me for months, happy to give me the news and happy for themselves, too. How many events can bring excitement to a small town like the opening of any new eatery—especially a new bakery? I kept checking in throughout the early winter as the o
wners of Three Bears posted about attending workshops and classes offered by King Arthur Flour in Vermont, where they also consulted with the staff at America’s Test Kitchen. There were challenges with the space, the equipment, the materials. The opening date was pushed back, pushed back again. From my vantage point, they were taking their time and appeared to be doing everything right.

  When I opened the door, I stepped into that familiar, pillowy warmth. The smell of baking bread, sugar, and butter mingled together. The café was inviting, the focal point a glass case filled with more pastries, cakes, and cookies than most kids with wheat allergies had seen in one place, ever (and more than most adults had seen in one place in a long time). I knew from a prior phone conversation with one of the owners, Chris Durand, that children had been a big motivator in opening the bakery. He had been diagnosed with celiac disease years ago (his wife and principal baker, Faye Ori, could eat wheat), but at least his childhood, like mine, had been filled with all of the iconic baked goods. He used to work as an entertainer at children’s parties, and it had broken his heart to see certain kids left out because of their allergies.

  I tried a sample of white bread and pronounced it good. Ten minutes later I carried a bag of fresh bread out of a bakery ten miles from home. Only a block away sat the bakery in the old carriage house where for years Bec and I used to buy loaves, before we started baking so much ourselves. I still passed the breads on their wooden racks every week when we went to the co-op for groceries: multigrain, spelt, whole wheat, apple bâtard, ficelle. I had trained myself not to notice the bread shelf anymore; it barely existed. And now, life had come full circle.

  —

  We went back when the bread ran out, and then, as Bec’s birthday drew near, I began to consider getting her a cake from a bakery for the first time in as long as I could remember, possibly the first time ever.

  Cakes had continued to be a sore spot for us. We still hadn’t found a replacement for the Oreo on ’Roids, and the ATK recipe had proven a little too fussy and elusive for us to perfect. In search of a viable replacement, I had come up with “Brûlée-Your-Own Night,” when I made custard with cardamom or vanilla bean and then passed the sugar around the kitchen table, followed by my mini-torch, the trigger locked into the full-automatic position and a cone of blue flame roaring out the end. It was a real showstopper. No one seemed to miss a cake with such pyrotechnics going on.

  Nonetheless, I returned to Three Bears and sat down with Faye, who jotted my order down on a pad: a gluten-free version of the Oreo on ’Roids. It wasn’t a complex order. I didn’t want anything too fancy, for my part, and the bakery, for theirs, was still learning. Faye wasn’t even sure what to charge me because she had never made a six-inch cake before. I left feeling a connection with all of those afternoons my mother had walked into D’Angelo’s and ordered a birthday cake. Two days later, when I returned for the cake, the experience was just as I remembered: the white box brought out from the back, cold and sweet-smelling in my hands. I lifted the flap, glimpsed the icing, and resisted an urge to swipe a taste off the bottom like I used to when I was a kid.

  We invited friends over. I seared scallops (from the gas station), roasted potatoes and onions with herbs, and made Deborah Madison’s warm cabbage salad because the red cabbage population in the crisper was getting out of control. As a hedge against disappointment when it came time to have dessert, I filled everyone’s glasses early and often with plenty of Finger Lakes Grüner Veltliner. I presented the cake along with a bottle of single malt. Then we toasted my wife and the new bakery and pronounced the cake as good as any other we’d ever had.

  —

  The comfort, the splendor, of locally made GF bread seemed to come unraveled—just a little—sometime later that week. We sat down to a breakfast of eggs and toast after I had walked the dog and stoked the fire. It was minus-twenty outside. I was hungry.

  I was absently pulling away the crust from a piece of toast, which I’d buttered and topped with strawberry jam that Bec had put up last June—solace in a jar, on a morning like that—when I noticed fine, spiderweb-like strings spanning between the two pieces. This was new. Or, if the bread had been doing this from the start, I had been too blinded with joy to notice. Now I raised my eyebrows, and held the toast up to the light.

  “I know,” Bec said. “I saw it too.”

  What did these strings look like? Well, they resembled melted nylon, but they also reminded me of a food I couldn’t quite place. The whole time we’d been toasting this bread, a cakey smell filled the kitchen, teasing me to name its source. Was this effect somehow connected with that aroma? Something in the flour blend? A new, ingenious additive for structure, mouth-feel, or flavor?

  After a minute, Bec had it. “You know, Rice Krispies Treats do that.”

  I struggled to recall the recipe. When had I last eaten one, let alone made a batch? When I was twelve? At summer camp? For a while Rice Krispies were on the no-go list—the original recipe contained malt coloring derived from barley. Now there were gluten-free versions, as there were of so many foods that had been unavailable when I first eliminated gluten. Every day, in fact, more GF counterparts of traditional and popular foods seemed to appear. I rarely ate them, though, because I seemed to have forgotten that the original versions even existed, at least until something forced me to remember.

  “So you’re saying,” I asked her as I concentrated on the taste, searching for intimations of childhood, “that there are marshmallows in this bread?”

  I wasn’t alarmed, exactly. Marshmallows contained no wheat, just chemicals.

  “I’ll bet it’s corn syrup,” Bec said. “Corn syrup is in Rice Krispies Treats, right?”

  “No idea. But it goes into marshmallows for sure.”

  That was all it took. I was out. I wanted sourdough, and flaxseed, and rye. I wanted the hearty loaves eaten by my ancestors, near and ancient. I wanted bread that could stand up to stews and chowders and could do justice to chicken-liver pâté, confits, artisan cheese, and spicy jams. Most of all, I wanted bread that was so good it required none of those accoutrements. Was this snobbery? I remembered the day we bailed in the middle of a GF lunch at a conference we’d paid for in advance because we both sensed, at the same instant, that the mashed potatoes had come from a powder, the dressing on the salad contained thirty ingredients, and the chicken had been injected with salt solution. All GF, but—We’re such snobs, Bec said as we hustled to a restaurant that made excellent Pan-Asian dishes featuring fresh vegetables. I had no good comeback for her, except to admit that if she was right, at least I believed wholly in what we were doing and was willing to work hard for it.

  “Bread is tough to do,” I said. “It’s just so damned hard.” I remembered her birthday cake. “That cake was pretty great, though. At least we have that problem solved.”

  A little while after, I went back to the bakery and asked Chris about the bread. I described the gossamer threads and offered our guesses as to the source—which amused him. He said no, he was not putting marshmallows in his bread. Or corn syrup. Or anything weird. The recipe was more or less the same one I followed in How Can It Be Gluten Free, with a key difference: when you’re baking GF for high volume, the yeast needs a better supply of sugar to produce enough carbon dioxide to get the fake gluten—the psyllium, rice flour, tapioca starch, and potato flour—to expand. The best solution he had found was to feed the yeast honey. That was the smell wafting out of our toaster, and it was honey I had seen stretching between the torn pieces.

  If there’s a moral to this story, it’s that good GF bread is so hard to make, it can seem possible for anything to end up in the dough. Even marshmallows.

  Chris told me that Three Bears planned to bring out an oat bread next, which would have a different recipe and might not behave so strangely. I told him I wouldn’t be able to try it, though it sounded good. I would keep rooting for them anyway, rooting hard.

  —

  My quest for bread, then,
ended where it began: not in a bakery, but in our own kitchen, where we once again baked as we used to. Thanks to a few good recipes, some modern and some ancient, some leavened, some partially leavened, and some flat as pot holders, some alarmingly expensive and some poor as rutabagas (which show up in our share and make delicious fries, but apparently are fodder in France), Bec and I restored our weekly ritual. I didn’t eat through a loaf nearly as fast as I’d eaten the bygone Swedish limpa, or soda bread, or homemade whole wheat. A person shouldn’t eat that much psyllium, for one thing, and for another, the chore of making GF bread finally taught me restraint. If I ate less, there was more time before one of us suffered through the process again. And whenever we did, the house filled with the smell of baking grains, and I felt, as I used to feel, the familiar sense of anticipation, not unlike when a good friend is coming to dinner. I felt a sense of equilibrium, as well. And wealth, and joy.

  Most of the time, the loaves we baked satisfied us. When they lost their appeal, we had our bakery up the road, and we had pushpins in a mental map representing places where we could find those breads we could not get at home, as well as the beers we may never be able to brew for ourselves. This is more or less what it’s always meant to be a person who loves food and who lives in a rural place he’d be slow to trade for all the culinary wealth of the suburbs, or the city. I know of no person who has everything he wants, just so.

  Despite its shortcomings, our wheatless bread did eventually look and taste “real” to us. This happened because of the spirit in which we baked it: the perseverance through the trials and errors, the inspirations from history and the teachings of science, whether we found them in books or bakeries, and the ancient traditions we made our own.

  What made it realer still was that we came, in time, to share these loaves with trusted friends. Our guests enjoyed them as if the bread that awaited them at home in their own kitchens were no different. It was different, of course. Deep down, I still know this. I will always long for the loaves on their counters. But when we gathered around our table and passed the steaming dishes, or reached for the board spread with cheeses and salted meats, we never questioned whether the tastes were good. We never doubted whether the companionship was real.