The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [16]
I typed out an e-mail response.
Thanks so much for spilling your mom’s secret recipe! I think I’m going to try it out tonight.
I paused.
One question, though: where can I find yeast? Is this something you can only get at a special baking supplies store?
While I waited for his response, I took a quick mental stock check of my kitchen supplies. I’d need to buy butter and the squash. There was only one mixing bowl in the apartment, which belonged to my roommate, Erin, and I doubted it would suffice for all that flour. Then, I didn’t think we had any flour either. There was a dusty box of biscuit mix on top of the refrigerator, which Erin used every time she couldn’t resist a craving for chicken and biscuits, and which I’d used instead of flour once or twice, to dredge some meat in before splashing it into an oily pan.
Wait, weren’t biscuits essentially the same thing as rolls? How come I didn’t see Erin punching down any dough or kneading for ten minutes? What did yeast even look like? Just then my boss walked by my desk, and I closed the window for my e-mail.
I began wondering whether it would have been better to pick a weekend to make DJ’s recipe instead of beginning the recipe once I got home from work on a weeknight. But my mind had already been made up; I was determined to make the squash rolls. The sooner, the better, to learn how to knead, and let dough rise with yeast.
DJ’s response came back a couple of hours later.
You can find yeast packets in pretty much any grocery store. Or that’s where my mom always found them. I think they should say on the label, “dry active yeast.”
As I walked down the baking supplies aisle of my local grocery store that evening, I realized I had no idea what I was searching for. I should have tried to look up an image online while I still had the chance at the office. I didn’t think I’d ever seen one of these packages of yeast before, and I had no concept of its shape or size—was it inside another box, bag, or canister? How big was it? I stared at boxes of sugar and baking soda for a moment. How did a twenty-eight-year-old bachelor like DJ, who barely ever cooked for himself, know more about baking than I did?
At times like these, I was reminded of the little differences between my mom and what I had gathered about most American moms, from friends or the television. My mom didn’t bake. I’d never watched her take a tray of cookies out of the oven, or helped her ice a birthday cake. Even cake mixes or tubs of frosting were curious objects to me from the crowded grocery-store shelf. I should back up by explaining that my mom is Chinese. Her home cooking is done on the stovetop, in pots and wide saucepans (she didn’t have a wok, as she didn’t feel they were very different from regular saute pans), and is typically completed in twenty minutes or less. Of course, she made long-simmered stews and soups from time to time. She also cooked plenty of American dishes, like spaghetti with meatballs. But she simply didn’t bake. When moms were called on to bring in food for a potluck or bake sale at elementary school, she brought Chinese pot stickers (and they were always a hit). At a family get-together at our house once when I was young, one of my aunts turned on the oven to preheat it. She ended up scorching a bunch of cutting boards and cookware that were stored inside it. My mom stopped using the oven for storage not too long after that, but she never used it much for anything else—least of all for baking bread.
My dad was different. He’d use the oven four or five times a year, maybe, to roast an enormous piece of meat or to fill its racks with various homemade pies. When he wanted to cook, it