Making Bread

Yesterday I went on a sour dough bread making workshop. It was slow, fun, fairly technical. We were grouped in teams of three - three per table, three per set of equipment. So, we talked. I was bundled in with a couple about my age - 50's, 60's. Their first question, why was I there? I said, my late husband wanted to buy this course for me for my birthday in 2023, but less than a week later he was dead, and it fell out of mind. Till now.

Really what they wanted, other than to find a little common ground with a stranger who had been thrust into their tight duo for a day, was to tell me their reasons. Aging. Looking after their health, pushing back against time with all their might. They complained about the impact of anti-inflammatories on kidneys, and I told them about the new one my doctor daughter gave me to solve this problem. Then paused. It's my proud-motherly impulse to launch into the virtues and victories of my tribe of offspring - I could talk for hours and not notice people's eyes glazing over. So I did the INFJ thing. I mirrored them.

I think this was an older dating, perhaps cohabiting couple. He was tall, grey, thin. She was sun bed coloured with expensive highlights and scarlet gel nails. An unlikely pair to have aged together. Regardless, I realised that they were new enough to still need to be impressing one-another a bit, not the comfortable short hand of a long-married couple.

I recognised in them something I want some days - a partner my age, done with parenting of school-going children, time and energy to spare, wanting adventures with someone, but feeling my joints too keenly in the morning. Probably one with a bigger sexual appetite than the other. What to do? Claw back health and youth to enable the building of those wonderful memories that were better built in earlier days with stronger bodies. Note taken.

So, less judgement from me, I told them that one of my daughters who is a GP recommended that I exchange my Cataflam for Vimovo, being less hard on the kidneys. And, hearing that they both tended to want an anti-inflammatory every day, I told them about Posteon for osteoarthritis.

They were grateful. Sweet. The man becoming a bit crabby as the day wore on, seeing me and his partner make silly mistakes like forgetting a step, lacking confidence for a moment. She and I proper products of our biology, menopausal and not really caring.

But they were on the journey my husband had been on since his heart attack in 2007. Long before I met him. Shortly after he found himself a single father of 2 toddlers. So his health adventure began in earnest. Healthier options of everything. Allergy, tolerance and toxin mapping for himself and his children. The frustration of his former wife feeding the little ones on burgers and fried chicken on her rare weekends. He bought the breadmaker second hand during that time. I still use it. But I prefer sour dough, though it's more of a relationship than a recipe.

I've never really been remedial about our food, just always wanting to be close to nature. I have always been suspicious of processed food - beginning with processed cheese, and store-bought cake. Meeting my herbal teachers along the way, I've fed that desire to be closer to nature, closer to myself, less disembodied. Now my entire landscape is my pharmacopoeia. And food is equally my drug and my medicine.

The nice thing about the "relationship" that making sour dough represents is the long-term mindfulness it requires to turn out a loaf. The true relationship is with the culture, which must be woken up, fed, put to bed, pruned, warmed, cooled, all in sequence to keep it alive and have it ready in sufficient quantities for baking. The dough and baking is a mere activity of an hour and a half, or so, or overnight if you want to bake in the morning. But it is a caring and sensual commitment.

As a family we are somewhat dispersed, if over a fairly small distance, but widely enough to create healthy boundaries. So, breaking bread is not something that will make these loaves sacrificial beasts in daily family feasts. I have just one adult child left at home, and we have very different eating schedules. But we connect daily over food - what either of us has discovered in the world - a new ingredient, and new flavour, or the merits and demerits of something one of us made, and left enough of for the other. The bread remains in pieces for either of us to come to it hungry and grateful.

Broken bread means family. Means love. Means, "I thought of you".

So, I'm culturing up some leaven for my first loaf or two of home-made sour dough bread, and I'll cut a slice or two once it's cooled enough in my quiet kitchen, decorate it with cream cheese, and cucumber and basil from my garden, and leave the rest for my son to discover when he returns from work. And we'll be happy, and safe.