On optimism
I run warm water into a bowl and spoon over the yeast and sugar. I watch for the first bead of yeast to bloom. I drizzle in the flour, the softest thing in the world to tired hands, and I knead it to suppleness. I cover the bowl with a tea towel and fill a couple of hours, and when I come back, the towel reveals an aerated dome, a million striated strands of dough clinging to the bowl. I knead this tender beast until it holds my touch in its surface. It gets nestled in its tin, or braided into a crown, or cut into flour-brindled discs, before it rests again, as all living things must. When it goes into the oven to bronze, slicked with egg wash or olive oil or strewn with salt crystals, it is held up mostly by air, all the honeycombed pockets of space inside making light of flour and water in what seems, when you’re sad and tired and in-between, like a metaphor.
I have been baking a lot of bread recently. I made floursoft pitas to hold falafel. I made sesame-dipped bagels, fragrant from their honey bath. I made focaccia with the best olive oil I could find and served it for dinner with soft piles of mortadella and olives and red peppers roasted to melting. Each dough rose and bloomed and burst a little of the knot in my chest.
Something about rising bread reminds me of when you’re singing and the conductor tells you to imagine you have a cathedral in your mouth: a high, high ceiling made for wondering at, creating so much space within you that you seem to be floating in it, both smaller and larger than yourself at once.
It reminds me of finding the last Easter egg, inside the fancy tea strainer, many months after Easter.
It reminds me of a line from a Katherine Mansfield letter: “I must answer your letter at once because I like it frightfully.”
It reminds me of reading a sentence that makes a sharp left, into another field of language entirely, opening and opening.
I’m planning danishes set with custard and plum; deep-pocketed ciabatta; freckle-faced crumpets; croissants. A houseful of yeasted goods for a future full of lift.