Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [3]
Second, prices of food vary from day to day, shop to shop, region to region. I did my best to price ingredients consistently and accurately as of late 2010 and early 2011, but the prices you see here might not always reflect what you pay, where you live, today.
When I started this project I had a lot of time on my hands—more than I’d ever had before as an adult. A lot of these projects are very ambitious, and I’ve tried to make clear which are particularly time consuming. But when you’re exhausted and overworked, even the simplest kitchen job—even mixing a jar of salad dressing—can seem like too much. When I say “make it,” I mean that when you have the time and the inclination, the recipe in question is something you can do better, and/or more cheaply, than the supermarket. By no means do I think everyone should make all (or even any) of these foods, all of the time. I sure don’t.
Moreover, if you don’t enjoy messing around in the kitchen, you probably aren’t going to end up making your own Camembert and pancetta, despite the fact that they’re better and cheaper than what you can buy. Nor should you. As my son, Owen, said one day—a little spitefully—while he was reluctantly doing his homework and I was happily stuffing pot stickers, “Mom, I think if you didn’t like to cook we’d eat canned soup every night.”
He is right.
CHAPTER 1
BREADS AND SPREADS
Laurel was just setting out four long, fat strips of dough to rise for French bread. A light dusting of flour was especially visible on her black cat, but it covered everything in the room. Framing the whole scene was the most luxuriant sweet potato plant I had ever come across. It shot up from one corner, curled up across the ceiling, meandered along the far wall, and darted out a window. Laurel herself was right out of Vermeer.
—Laurel’s Kitchen
When I was growing up in the 1970s, my mother had a battered copy of Laurel’s Kitchen that I used to pore over when I was bored on a Saturday afternoon. Laurel’s Kitchen painted a vivid, highly romantic portrait of a vaguely counterculture vegetarian home, lush with houseplants, infused with the aromas of baking bread and bubbling soups, and I was captivated. It was one of those books that were always lying around in homes of that era, like I’m OK—You’re OK and Fear of Flying, from which I gleaned many seductive, misleading ideas about the way the world operates.
I opened Laurel’s Kitchen recently, for the first time in twenty-five years. The frontispiece features a black-and-white photograph of the three authors, all of them wearing prairie skirts, smiling beatifically at one another, not one of them looking at the camera. They are drinking mugs of tea—or perhaps it is their beloved Gandhi’s coffee, a “good warming drink” made from toasted wheat—and their long hair has been pulled back in old-fashioned buns that make them look like Manson sisters, or Amish wives, or Ma Ingalls.
I started reading. Was I hallucinating? Had I really once loved this book? And were these truly the views of groovy Berkeley, California, women in the 1970s? Interspersed between paeans to the glory of homemade bread and recipes for cashew gravy were meditations on the nature of women that struck me as so essentialist and retrograde that they might have come from a fundamentalist religious sect. “I would never go on record as saying ‘a woman’s place is in the home,’” wrote one of the authors. “But to my mind the most effective front for social change, the critical point where our efforts will count the most, is not in business or profession … but in the home and community, where the problems start.” In the home, kneading a big batch of cracked wheat bread, was where women—the “nurturant” sex—belonged: “No paycheck comes at the