The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [17]
So loyal, though, was my dad’s passion for pies that he never bothered to bake any other types of dessert. Nor did he bake bread.
My eyes ran across a crumpled deck of three small envelopes on the baking aisle shelf. Fleischmann’s Active Dry Yeast, they each read, in jumping-bright yellow and pink print. I picked one up and tossed it into my basket.
Back outside along the busy street in Brooklyn’s quaint Park Slope neighborhood, restaurants were just beginning to fill up with customers. As I made my way home from the grocery store, I passed several couples and groups hesitating in front of restaurant windows, or gazing at menus on their doors. I walked past a restaurant I had loved going to just a month before. It was a small, unassuming place that specialized in pressed sandwiches—with any combination of the works. It was a little pricey, though, for what it was. Maybe I should invest in a panini press, I mused. In front of another restaurant, a new one I’d never been to, a tall young man opened the door for his female friend.
I quickly reminded myself of why I had taken on this mission. Currently, my total spending for the day was $18.13. That accounted for the yeast packets, frozen squash, bag of flour, quart of butter, and the makings of dinner for at least three people, with leftovers. The flour, yeast, and butter would make it into many more meals, too. For dinner, I’d gotten some chicken leg quarters, which I was thinking of simply braising or else roasting on trays like I’d seen Erin do for her chicken-and-biscuit nights, and a bunch of Swiss chard. I knew my boyfriend, Ben, would be showing up at some point that night also, so with the rolls, there would be plenty for all of us.
I turned the corner to my block, leaving the quieter parts of the neighborhood to the noisy street with four lanes of traffic that I lived on, Fourth Avenue. This was totally going to be worth it, this whole not-eating-out thing.
Once home, I cleared aside all the piles of CDs from the kitchen counter and wiped it down with a fresh sponge. This was it: I was making bread for the first time. Just think of it: I might never need to buy bread for sandwiches and let the rest go moldy again! I ripped open one of the foil paper yeast packets and let loose a spray of grayish, millet-sized pebbles all over the counter.
Nearly since the dawning of agriculture, bread has been the quintessential food of the Western world. But before my blog, I’d never thought of it as something people actually made themselves. The puffy, spongelike textures and uniform shapes of store-bought bread and dinner rolls resembled no food I’d ever seen produced in a home kitchen. This wasn’t counting banana bread, or muffins and other cakelike breads, which I later learned are quick breads, as opposed to yeast-based breads. Even those I didn’t have much experience making. I’d heard of bread machines that you could buy and bake loaves inside of, but these sounded unwieldy and complicated.
In Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food, Felipe Fernández-Armesto proposed that it was bread—and not beer, another common usage for wheat—that propelled the grain’s popularity in the Neolithic period: “Wheat has no obvious advantage over other edible grasses for the farmers who first favored it or for the peoples subsequently seduced by it, except that it has a secret ingredient—gluten.... This makes it a peculiarly good source of bread, because gluten is the substance