Breaking Bread
channeling my grandmother while baking her easter bread
It’s Good Friday two years ago, and I am baking Easter Bread. I’m not much of a baker, but the recipe belongs to my late grandmother and I am channeling her, hoping she can somehow guide me.
I stick my finger in the finished batter, meaning to sample just a little of it to make sure I got it right. The taste and smell of the batter, all that lemon and sugar and butter, is a one-two punch to my gut. Memories of my grandmother flood my head. Baking on Easter weekend, her hands covered in flour, deftly working the dough. The smell of the lemon zest, the squishy feel of the batter when she makes me stick my hands in the mix as she pours in the beaten eggs, then the flour and sugar, then more lemon zest, and I would whine that the dough at first was gluey and stuck to my hands. The more I complained, the harder she made me work the dough until she threw enough flour in the pot for the batter to finally seem right. It would finally begin to feel soft and pliant and I could take it out of the mixing pot to knead it.
Years of memories in one swoop, just from tasting that batter. In every single one of those memories, I am standing in Grandma’s kitchen on Easter weekend and we’re baking, watching The Price is Right. I’m small, in green plaid pants and a sweatshirt with the sleeves rolled up. I’m a grouchy teenager afraid to get my band t-shirt crusted with flour. I’m an adult and I’m laughing at something Grandma said and I have no idea that it’s going to be the last Easter she’ll be alive.
I lived with Grandma for a while, in an apartment downstairs from her. She was my constant companion for many years. Even when I wasn’t upstairs drinking tea with her, the sound of her footsteps, the knowledge that she was up there, cooking and watching television and entertaining relatives comforted me. She’d often yell down the stairs at me, asking if I wanted some food, if I’d come up to help her with something. I think she liked having me there as much as I liked being there. I’d often send my kids upstairs to retrieve cookies or meatballs from her. One day she gave my daughter a container of frozen meatballs. I put them in the freezer, thinking I’d throw them in some sauce on Sunday. Later that day, Grandma wasn’t feeling well. We took her to the hospital and she never came home. Those meatballs sat in my freezer for years - they even came with me when I moved. They sat in the garage freezer until one day it broke down and everything in there was ruined. I cried when I had to throw away those meatballs; they were the last tangible connection to my grandmother.
I knead the dough and I know I’m not doing it the way Grandma taught me. I hear her chastising me for not getting it right. I try again, working it through my fingers, rolling it around, finding comfort in the texture while I’m not really paying attention to the necessary intricacies of the knead. I don’t do this because I love the taste of Easter bread. I don’t do this because of the symbolism of the rising dough. I do it for the memory, for the way the lemon smells and the dough feels, tactile things that invoke the Good Friday mornings in the kitchen with Grandma.
I don’t get it right. The dough doesn’t rise as much as it should. I think I didn’t add enough sugar because it lacks the sweetness that makes the bread so good. The crust isn’t the golden brown I remember Grandma’s being. But the memories come anyway, despite the way my loaves are misshapen. I pick up a loaf, put it up to my face and inhale deeply. I can almost feel the flesh of Grandma’s hands as she puts hers over mine in an attempt to get me to move my own hands just right. I can smell her makeup over the scent of the bread. I hear Bob Barker’s voice off in the distance somewhere, congratulating someone on winning the showcase showdown. I feel the warmth of the kitchen, the noise of cousins running in and out of the house, I see Grandma flipping to the religious channel so she can watch the Stations of the Cross. She makes the sign of the cross as she sits down with a cup of tea and a slice of warm Easter bread.
I live in my grandmother’s house now. We bought it a few years ago from my father, who wanted to keep it in the family. It’s both strange and comforting to live in the rooms Grandma inhabited, to watch tv where she watched Wheel of Fortune every night, to walk the same hallway as her, to bake bread in the same kitchen where she worked her magic.
I feel her presence here in everything I do. I wonder if she would like what we’ve done with the place. We’ve changed things, but kept most of the aesthetic intact, so it still in all the right ways feel like Grandma’s house. When I sit out on the breezeway, I think of her sitting out there, yelling at me to put a hat on my kids so they wouldn’t catch cold. I think of all parties, all the relatives who entered these doorways. We landscaped the yard but left her two hydrangea bushes because the flowers always remind me of her.
I have so many childhood memories of this house. The Sunday dinners, cousins running around everywhere, Christmas Eve parties, football on the front lawn, baking Easter Bread in her kitchen.
I’m going to attempt the Easter Bread this year again. I expect I will find the ritual of making the bread especially cathartic this time around. Creating something from scratch, letting the dough rise, baking for others - they are all things that will bring me some form of solace at a time when I need that. Doing all that in the same kitchen where my grandmother taught me to make this bread will connect me to her once again. I will feel her presence, I will channel her skills, I will take comfort in knowing that if she were here she would be telling me to move on, to keep busy, to put my whole self into kneading the dough.
I spread some butter on the bread I just made. No, it’s not the same. But it doesn’t have to be. It’s not the finished product, but the act of making the bread that brings Grandma back to me for a little while.
I make a cup of tea and turn on The Price is Right just in time for the showcase showdown. The bread tastes good after all.