Three circumstances have inspired this nostalgic encomium—it’s also a eulogy—on freshly baked bread: the current fad of baking one’s own bread, my still keen memory of an experimental ten-week gluten-free diet, and the recent birthday of my late mother.

I grew up on wheat, the natural wheat, not the über-processed forms of wheat that now appear in almost every item in the middle aisles of the grocery story. My father grew wheat, sold it in the local elevator, then brought some of it back home again in the form of flour. No additives, no complex processing, just plain milling.

We ate white bread in all its clean goodness, so perfect with butter and my mother’s homemade jam. We ate brown bread (not totally whole wheat but close) and rye bread. We ate her lovely white dinner rolls, most often the Zwiebach that were traditional for Mennonites. I loved popping off the small top and slipping butter into the hollow beneath. I have no idea who thought up Zwiebach; I was content to eat them, especially when I came home from school to discover racks of them, cooling on the kitchen counter.

 Not only buns and bread were created in my mother’s kitchen. She loved all varieties of baked goods: cinnamon buns with raisins and just a trace of icing across the top; sweet rolls with a delectable filling made of cooked prunes, chopped nuts, and orange rind; fancy, twisty rolls with cottage cheese in the dough yielding a sweet-savory treat with darker flecks in the crust; golden loaves of Easter bread with icing on top; schnetkje – soft biscuits rich with lard that opened up easily to accept the gooseberry jam. There were cakes and quick breads, pies of many kinds, waffles, pancakes, dumplings, biscuit crusts over baked sausage.

 I did not then always appreciate my mother’s skill and hard work; I particularly did not understand her emotional connection to the works of her hands, her pride in what she made.  

Back in the early grades, we school children were clearly divided into two social classes: the farm kids who had their lunches at school and went straight home after school on buses or in parents’ vehicles to help with the chores; and the town kids who could walk home for lunch and could play with one another all over the town in their more abundant spare time. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the townies were privileged and thus superior.

So perhaps it was inevitable, given my social insecurity, that I came to view my mother’s bread with some embarrassment. My lunch sandwiches were roughly sliced dark bread and egg salad, or some leftover cooked meat. I felt nothing but envy for the neat sandwiches one could make with store-bought sliced bread and precisely shaped baloney. Exactly the kind of differences that become fuel for small-time bullies.

One occasion, an end-of-school picnic, still haunts me. These picnics usually happened on someone’s farm or near a river. The menu never varied: hotdogs with unbelievably yellow mustard, bright red ketchup, and unbelievably green store-bought relish; some delicious potato chips (a rare treat for me); marshmallows for roasting; and watermelon for dessert. Oh, and jugs of KoolAid to drink.

 Children must have been responsible for asking their parents to provide some of the supplies that year, or why else would I have brought dozens of hotdog buns—not purchased but lovingly made by my mother, complete with a perfect egg glaze on the top of each? I remember being ashamed of those homemade buns.  I do not remember how it happened that there were already enough hotdog buns and that it was the store-bought ones that were taken to the picnic. Very likely, I wasted most of that precious afternoon, trying to fabricate some story that I would tell my mother to explain why her buns had not been eaten.

What I do remember with painful clarity is my mother’s stormy anger. She was furious that her buns had sat in an empty classroom all day and probably dried out; she was outraged that her efforts to create just the right shape of buns to hold a wiener (food she didn’t really consider food at all) had been entirely wasted. Time has mercifully blunted the full force of my tangled emotions: shame and embarrassment, fear of what the next days would be like at home, terror of being made to deliver an angry message to the teachers, deep uneasiness concerning how I might behave among the rest of the children among whom I never seemed to belong, relief that there were only a few days of school left and then the long summer could begin.

 Mercifully, there came a time when my attitudes changed, and my taste buds began to hold greater sway over my choices than what peers, in whatever circle, would think of me. I began doing my own baking, and very quickly discovered the sheer pleasure of kneading dough and watching it rise, the creative joy of experimenting with new recipes and new ingredients, and the simple richness of the taste of homemade bread, and other baked delicacies. I loved it all.

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I watched our children go to school, make friends whose families had different customs and values. I often thought ruefully that I was being made to relive some of my mother’s frustrations as our children sometimes seemed embarrassed about how we lived. I delivered some of my precious creations to various potlucks and saw them ignored because they looked different or weren’t made with familiar ingredients.

 These days, “home-made” and “store-bought” have reversed their status. At least among my friends and acquaintances, homemade food is valued and the taste of homemade bread treasured above all else. In fact, since the advent of COVID-19, everyone is baking bread again. I’m pleased, especially now that it seems possible to find yeast again.  

 My mother has been gone for almost 25 years. That’s long enough for me to have re-evaluated so many of my memories in light of the understanding that comes when one actually lives through the stages of life once not understood at all. No 10-year-old can expect to fathom the emotions of the unknowable parent. But a 70-something can look back and grant absolution to that shy school girl who failed to claim pride in genuine creativity and skill and generosity. She can also say, with unfeigned sincerity, “I’m sorry, Mama. I didn’t know what you had given then. But I think of you when I turn the dough over in my hands.”

All bread must be broken / so it can be shared. / Together / we eat this earth.

Margaret Atwood