"The poor yearn for bread,

the rich yearn for everything."

As a child I had the idea that bread was purchased, not baked. I loved the pillowy confluence called Wonderbread, mild and satiny in its festive plastic wrapper.

I loved it fried with Velveeta in margarine - the way my mother made it - or torn into pieces, mixed with rice, lamb, onions, toasted pine nuts and goat's milk yogurt sauce - the way my father did.

Pita bread was still elusive in Syracuse, N.Y., back in the late '60s. Denied the traditional ingredients, my cook-father had to work with what was available on the grocery-store shelves. Baking bread was "women's work," he said - not that he agreed, but his women kin had kept the rites and practices of bread baking as private as they had the secrets of childbirth and the body. He'd always wanted to learn, but it never occurred to him that he actually could, any more than he might have assumed he could know, even briefly, how it felt to be a woman.

I didn't learn how to bake bread until I was in college, and then it was from the pages of "The Enchanted Broccoli Forest," (follow-up to the venerable "Moosewood" cookbook series.)

I painstakingly followed Mollie Katzen's kindhearted and infinitely patient line drawings, and I can remember coming to the line where she says that one good way to tell that the bread is sufficiently kneaded is when it feels like an earlobe. I felt an inner stirring - it seemed like something I'd been born knowing. The bread I baked that day - a plain, simple white loaf - was a revelation, nicely formed and somehow soul-satisfying. After that, I made fresh bread nearly every week for years.

I was 8 years old; we were living in Jordan, and we were going to visit my great-aunt Zizia. The sky was brilliant, clear-cut as glass, and the Bedouin men were standing in their immense tent having the usual argument about politics.

The women were seated together outside, watching their flocks of sheep from a sedate distance and sipping mint tea. Zizia was on the fringes of this gathering with another group of women. Eighty years old, she sat barefoot on the ground before a collection of immense heated rocks. While one woman stirred water into a flour paste, another woman patted and flattened the dough. She passed this on to my great-aunt, who tossed it onto the rocks, where it quickly roasted, and she then passed this on to another woman, who stacked the thin, fragrant loaves for dinner.

Afterward Zizia plucked a loaf from the stack, blew on it, tore it open and offered it to me. The rich aroma filled my head, and my knees went weak. This was shrak - the bread that was meant for my father's lamb dish. After we moved back to the States, I would never again taste anything like it.

I was having dinner at Hoda's, a fine Portland Lebanese restaurant, taking in the rare smells and tastes that still conjure up my father's kitchen, my own lost childhood, when Hoda's husband, Hani, appeared at the table with a fresh basket of bread. Rich, round and golden, the bread released a breath of steam when torn open, like the spirit escaping from a body. I asked if Hoda made the bread, but it turned out that Hani himself was in charge of baking. Amazing. And how did he come to divine the secret of these exquisite loaves, I asked. Had he secreted himself under the table while the women worked or hidden himself in the folds of his mother's skirt? "I found recipes on the Internet," he said, grinning.

I called my father the same day to report this news. "Oh, I've always known how to make bread," he confessed, adding to the continual stream of childhood assumptions and adult contradictions that have made up my family education. "But I never thought I was supposed to know."

Years ago, Dad stopped tearing Wonderbread into lamb dishes and Mom lost interest in fried Velveeta sandwiches. Pita and shrak have become available in both Syracuse and Portland, and I have since baked and consumed baguettes, tortillas, matzo, injera, chapati. Although baking bread might prompt fancies of some connection between traditional women's work and women's bodies, I've come to think that it doesn't matter who has made the bread, just as long as they've made it themselves.

 DIANA ABU-JABER
The Sunday Oregonian
September 10, 2000

Italic quotes are Arab proverbs
Music by Andy Klapwyk ~ "Sunrise"

Index of Simply Sharing

Links to Share