In Memory of Bread Read online

  —

  No doubt about it: Bec and I felt rich, compared to where we had been a year ago. I had even found the courage to offer slices of the ATK bread to Sarah, who pronounced the flaxseed loaf good, just like real bread (“Yeah, I’d eat this for sure”) and to our friends Jon and Jess, whose perspective may have been swayed by the generous dollop of chicken-liver mousse that came on top. Still, these were the first times that we shared “our” bread with any of our friends, and it gave me hope to see it so well received. We had pizza back, if we were willing to go to the work to make it; with a lot of help, we had reclaimed crêpes and pasta, and would eventually reclaim cake. There was no more Stone in the house, but there was plenty of Omission—I saw to that whenever I had the chance—and plenty of Glutenberg, as well.

  The fact remained, though, that the ATK bread was unpleasant to make. We baked it regularly, but late in the summer I had come to look at the task of making bread as drudgery. Bec saw it in much the same way. And then, a sudden turn of bad luck: the psyllium that I bought at the health-food store stopped working. I couldn’t say how or why. The dough refused to rise even though the yeast was alive. I made several flaxseed loaves that looked as flat as the breads entombed in the ashes of Pompeii. They smelled a little loamy—fibrous, I thought, remembering the Metamucil connection—and they tasted fibrous, too. I kept on with the defective psyllium, because it was all we had, but as I measured flours, opened cans, and created a pile of dishes, it was far too easy to think that I would be going through none of this if I could still walk into a bakery and buy a loaf of good bread like a normal person.

  Normal-person days were over, though. I had two choices, and I acted on both of them. The first was to have my mother ship me psyllium from a health-food store in Maryland. This did, eventually, do the trick, though now there was another step to go through, since the psyllium she sent was not powdered: I had to get out the food processor and blitz it into a powder myself.

  The second option was to track down Eliza Hale—which I did. I found her e-mail address, contacted her, and drove down to Chelsea, Vermont, in the middle of the state, on a Monday morning in the late summer. I climbed twisting roads until I punched through the fog surrounding the base of the Green Mountains, then drove several miles on a dirt road and found myself in smooth green swells, under a sky that was incredibly blue, and among white clapboard structures like something out of a New England pastoral dream. I was in a town so small it made Canton look like Chicago. And yet, the celiacs who lived here—all two or three of them, according to the statistics—had access to a great loaf of GF bread.

  Her bakery, compared to the others I’d visited, was no-frills: clean but spare, no steamy windows, no hidden kitchen area where the magic happened, and no display cases of loaves, rolls, bâtards, and baguettes. Eliza’s kitchen was the smallest part of the building, which had formerly been a tavern and, after that, a neighborhood grocery store. There was a stainless baker’s rack on which work bowls sat inverted, large containers of spices and oils, a standard KitchenAid, a commercial mixer that looked big enough to me but apparently already was too small, and a powerful Garland stove vented through the old woodstove thimble. The place looked more like a rebel outpost than an idyllic bakery.

  As if to prove the point, when she had finished putting dough into tins, Eliza cued up Notorious B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize” on her Spotify mix. I asked her about her flour blend, and was surprised to find that unlike other bakers I’d met, she leaned heavily on sorghum and flaxseed meal. Nobody, it seemed, solved the bread problem in the same way. She wouldn’t tell me the other ingredients or the proportions.

  “No rice flour,” I said, fishing a little. “That’s unique.”

  She was quiet for a long moment as she reached down into her tub to get a scoop of sourdough starter for the next batch of bread. Biggie rapped a verse and then, in the pause, she said, “Yeah, I don’t fuck around with rice.”

  She started Up the Hill Bakery in 2012, naming it after the cabin in the Vermont woods where she first began experimenting with flour blends, loaf types, and, eventually, her sourdough recipe. Now she was baking several days a week, producing upward of seventy-five loaves. A few of them stayed in Chelsea or went to nearby towns. The rest she hustled down the hill and across the interstate to Montpelier. She had recently begun to mull internet sales.

  I hadn’t met anyone else who made GF sourdough—Stephanie at Whisk had it on her wish list—and I asked Eliza if she had any idea why. One reason, she said, is that sourdough is high-maintenance. Eliza thought of her tub of starter, which lived in the corner of the kitchen a safe distance from the oven, as a little farm animal. You need to feed the sourdough and watch over it. You need to keep the temperature constantly agreeable. This requires time and focus (especially in the mountains of Vermont). The starter will let you know if you’ve gone lax by dying on you. Thus travel is nearly as difficult when you’re feeding and looking after sourdough as it is when you have a rabbit or a dog. People who have sourdoughs tend, for this reason, to be fanatically devoted to them.

  While the first batch of loaves baked, Eliza and I debated a pet question of hers: whether or not her finished products could even be called bread. From the moment I first tasted her mock rye, I never doubted that I was eating bread, but she didn’t think she was making bread.

  “Bread,” she explained, “especially leavened bread, is wheat. You can’t separate the two. If you don’t have wheat, you don’t have gluten. No gluten, no bread.”

  I’d been chasing after these questions myself for more than a year, and I had come to find them wearying. I should have asked, Why is it so important to call it bread, then, even if it’s not? People had been calling ersatz bread by the same name as the real thing for thousands of years, for what seemed to me a simple reason: we cannot bear not to have bread. We would probably always continue to do so. Nobody wants to be excluded from the fellowship, the history.

  “Maybe ‘bread’ is an ideal,” I offered. “The gold standard.”

  Eliza looked at me doubtfully, as if to say plenty of people who knew far less about baking than she did baked every day, and they achieved the ideal. Why? Because they had gluten.

  “So what about just calling them ‘loaves’?” I suggested. The etymology was proximate, at least.

  Eliza tried it out, saying the word repeatedly under her breath.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It doesn’t seem right. You can’t have a loaf of anything but bread.”

  Later in the day, we finally ate some bread. Eliza liked her breads best when toasted, with generous pats of butter. First we had the mock rye, the bread that had hooked itself into my brain, refused to leave, and brought me here. The sourdough brought a pleasing depth and intensity to the sorghum (which makes a far better bread than a beer), yet the crumb was light and airy, filled with the little air pockets that I’ve come to know foretell good GF bread. The sourdough was a magical component, a flavor so full, so commanding, so incontestably itself, that combined with the caraway it deflected my attention away from all that wasn’t there to its vibrant, heady center. I felt like—no, I knew—I was eating the real thing, no matter what Eliza thought. A man could make a killer Reuben out of this. I kept thinking of pairings: eggs, of course, but also smoked salmon. Turkey. Bacon.

  So how many loaves of bread did I leave Vermont with this time?

  Three: a mock rye, a cinnamon-raisin, and a sourdough. Which was plenty of bread, I told myself on the drive home in a car redolent of freshly baked grains. I did indeed want every loaf she had made that day, and I remembered my mission, but I didn’t know how many orders Eliza had committed to filling. Now I knew where to find her. I could come back anytime, though driving four hours to stock the freezer with bread seemed a little, well, desperate. Perhaps she would do mail-order. She was thinking about going in that direction anyway, and she could use me to work out the issues with packaging.

  Once again, I was wrong.
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br />   A few months after my visit, I learned that Eliza had decided to close her bakery for a while, possibly permanently. The reasons were health-related—a resumption of allergy symptoms connected to Leaky Gut Syndrome, a complication of celiac disease in which the intestines refuse to heal and malabsorption continues. It’s not refractory celiac disease, because the antibody counts have usually dropped, but more of a slowness or resistance to healing. Such a diagnosis strikes fear into the heart of every food-loving celiac. I hear others talk about it and I flinch, knowing my lot could get worse at any time, and for no apparent reason. When this trouble arrives, it is usually a final blow to bread-eating. Yeast gets stripped from the diet, along with dairy, legumes, grains, and any proteins that are difficult to digest.

  When she made the decision to close, Eliza’s business, like Whisk—like many great GF bakeries across the country—had been booming. She had more orders than she could fill. But health was more important, and sad though it made me to know that once again, the object of my quest was receding further away just as I was closing in on it—one of these days, I swore, I was going to fill the trunk of the car with great bread and just be done with it—I was glad to hear that she was feeling better. She sounded optimistic. Healthy. That was all that mattered.

  * * *

  * Here, once again, I feel the need to explain the weird idiosyncrasies of the place I call home. There are no fish markets within a few hundred miles outside of the grocery store, and an entrepreneur made himself a good living by picking up fish from Boston in an F350 box truck (complete with an image of a smiling lobster) that he filled with coolers. He parked outside the post office on Fridays, making sure to keep feeding the meter, from 9:00 a.m. to noon. Eventually he retired. For a while there was no fresh fish. Then a gas station picked up where Larry left off, filling its deli cooler with dry scallops, wild salmon, halibut, flounder, haddock, and the best smoked salmon I’ve ever eaten, also trucked in from Boston once a week. You can’t make this up. Did I find it curious, and more than a little annoying, that we could contrive an arrangement to get sushi-grade tuna to my area, but we could not get good GF bread and beer? You bet I did.

  The harvest season comes to the North Country sooner than it comes to most other places in the United States. Killing frosts can arrive as early as the end of September—six months, more or less, from the week that the first thunderstorm comes in the early spring, according to some of the farmers I’ve spoken with. And by early October, the heat that fueled the fruiting and plentitude of the iconic summer vegetables—the tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, chiles, and corn—dies off quickly. It is almost as if someone flips a damper in the sky. We’ve seen snow in October.

  Over on our CSA farm, Dan, Megan, and their team of workers were furiously harvesting vegetables. They froze some of the perishable ones for the winter shares, and stashed the storage veg away in the giant cooler. Some went to wholesale. The rest they toted to the market for CSA shares and retail sales. It was a mad dash until the air and ground turned too cold for anything to grow. That could still take a while; in November, I was often still pulling kale, leeks, and hardy onions from our raised beds.

  When this harvest season came around, I had been gluten-free for almost two years. I was still running, but not nearly as much as I had been the year prior; maybe I wasn’t as angry, not as afraid. I’d learned to trust my body and didn’t feel as if I had as much to run from. I’d transitioned back into a life that for the most part felt measured and balanced, both in my mind and at the table.

  In the village park, the farmers’ market was filled with a polarity of seasonal foods, and when I visited on Friday mornings in the early autumn I reflected that, for this brief time, I did indeed have it all. There were both tomatoes and apples; pumpkins and the last of the sweet corn (less, that year, because a black bear had been ravaging the fields of our largest local grower); shiitake and oyster mushrooms; raspberries, watermelons, fennel, carrots, onions, turnips, and beets. Only cucumbers and strawberries and peas were long gone, already memories except in pickled or frozen form.

  The list kept expanding as I walked past the tables: new potatoes in red, blue, yellow, purple, and white; leeks; greens; freshly dried black, kidney, and navy beans; herbs; acorn and butternut and many of other squashes; pears; and the last of the cantaloupes. There were people selling pastured chicken, Cornish hens, eggs, and turkey. Heritage breeds of pork, lamb, beef. Honey. Molasses. Maple syrup that had been boiled down and bottled in the late winter. Preserves, apple cider, and offbeat items like Cape gooseberries (ground cherries), spicy black radishes, and North Country wines. Ours was not a big market, either—about a dozen growers in all, from within twenty-five miles of town.

  The market always had bread for sale, as well as pies and cookies. Doughnuts, too. But I didn’t begrudge these loaves or the people who made and brought them. At other times of the year I might have. I knew that I had given up trying to give up bread. Something deep in my brain, in my heart, refused to surrender. I still wished weekly if not daily for a bakery like Whisk or Up the Hill, or any of those that were popping up across the country, to come to our town. Recently I had heard rumors that someone was thinking of opening such a bakery nearby, but I was trying not to pay too much attention. The path sounded long. I didn’t want to jinx it.

  And for right now, anyway, with so much produce and meat all around, celiac disease felt more manageable than ever. It was the easiest time of year to cook; there seemed to be endless variety, and all you had to do with food so fresh was stay out of its way. Almost everything I saw on the tables at market was, for me, freeing.

  —

  One day closer to the winter, my friend Karen, an anthropologist at a local college, took me to an Amish household where a two-year-old girl had been recently diagnosed with celiac disease. We have several Amish communities in the North Country, and I had assumed, based on the statistical data, that there were likely to be celiacs, either silent or presenting symptoms, in their population. I also knew that if this was true, the diagnosis rates would rapidly increase and even create an upheaval. Amish families are tightly knit, endogamous. They will only marry someone within their own church, or someone from a place where they fellowship. This means that not much new blood, genetically speaking, enters into the area. And their culture is absolutely based in bread, as well as in sweets. They mix bread with their traditional bean soup for their symbolic Sunday meal. They eat more pasta and noodles and baked goods than any people I know or have heard of. Ever the masters of economy, the Amish can the bread they do not eat, in addition to making the usual bread pudding and bread crumbs. It is common for outsiders to know they live several hundred years in the past technologically; but in many respects, this is also true gastronomically.

  I sat in a chair by the woodstove while the mother, Rachel,*1 talked about her struggles to get her two-year-old daughter to eat gluten-free foods. Her siblings continued on with their conventional, wheat-based diet, and it sounded as if the girl had been recently awakening to an awareness of being different, and to the social role food plays. She wouldn’t eat her rice pasta if her father wouldn’t eat it too; she wanted the pretzels her siblings enjoyed. The malabsorption had clearly taken a toll on her both physically and cognitively. She was tiny for her age, and she still lacked the language to even begin to describe to her mother how bad she felt, or why. When they ran out of rice flour, Rachel said, her daughter ate wheat and spelt flour until they got more.

  Later on, Karen would tell me that the odds of this family being able to make a 100-percent commitment to a gluten-free diet were slim. Lifestyle and social factors combined to make full compliance difficult, even impossible. The girl’s mother was doing what she could, though. And the father, importantly, was supportive and flexible about the family’s diet. In a community so patriarchal, a father’s consent was a huge asset, and Karen could think of families that would never change their diet, because the men in the family did not want to. Ther
e was a chance that, over time, broader acceptance of the GF diet might be aided by the increasing number of diagnoses in the Amish community, but that would take a while.

  Some Amish communities were already well versed in GF eating, though. Rachel had a GF baking cookbook written by an Amish woman in southern New York, complete with a medically accurate description of celiac disease and religious poems for inspiration. For a moment the existence of an Amish GF baking book surprised me. But as in so many Western cultures throughout history—as in my own household—the goal of the Amish would of course be to find a way to keep the symbolism of bread alive while making it safe. They weren’t heading in the direction of reclaiming flatbreads, though. This cookbook author was using rice flour, gelatin, seltzer water, and xanthan gum. The recipes were clever, but without even tasting them, I knew they lagged seriously behind even the more disappointing cookbooks Bec and I had sampled.

  Halfway through the visit, I realized that Rachel might have been thinking of me as an expert. I wondered if she viewed me in the same way that I had viewed Lynn McKay and Stephanie Angle, Eliza Hale, Jack Bishop, and the Test Kitchen—as a person who had been navigating the world of gluten-free foods for a little while and had outwitted longing. I didn’t have any quick fixes or easy answers to offer her, though. All I could think was: Here is a situation that makes my own look comparatively good. At least I could drive around, search out, and order the best GF products. I had access to technology and, therefore, knowledge. I was not subsistence farming.

  I had brought with me a loaf of bread I’d made from a bagged mix (Pamela’s) as a gift for the family, but really for the little girl. This too was a moment of weird symmetry, reminiscent of my neighbor Matt dropping by my house with assorted beers of solace from a distance place. I left the bread with Rachel, and then Karen and I went next door so she could catch up with the parents in the “doughty house,” as it was known, where the grandparents lived.