Breaking Bread: A Cautionary Tale

Reader Contribution by Carolyn Evans-Dean
Published on January 19, 2012
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I’ve always been the type of person to read books with rural settings and watch old-fashioned television shows. You know the ones I mean…They were always set way back in the days and would feature Paw hitching up the wagon to go fetch Doc when someone was injured. Though the shows rarely featured anyone that looked like me, I always imagined myself living back in those times. Of course back then, the gender roles were pretty well defined and there wasn’t much leeway in them. Rather than being the one going into town to fetch the Doc, I’d have likely been the one sweating over an open fire to make dinner out of whatever varmint Paw had managed to snare.

As an adult I embarked on a more self-sufficient lifestyle, trying my best to recreate some of those moments for my family. Making bread was one of those key elements that I desperately wanted to bring into our home. I mean how hard could it really be? Breadmaking has been going on since the beginning of recorded time, right? On tv, the woman of the house would start the breadmaking at the crack of dawn. It had to be easy because she likely hadn’t had any coffee and was probably dozing as her hands found a familiar rhythmic kneading pattern in the dough. The family would gather around the dinner table at the end of a long, hard day of eking out a living and they’d break bread, often sharing the meal with a neighbor or a passerby.

I’ve found that even after more than 10 years of making bread, both by hand and with a bread machine, things still go awry. Most of my bread failures fall into two sports categories: bread that resembles a football in both size and texture & yeasty dinner rolls that resemble hockey pucks. There was that one unfortunate incident where the bread… Oh never mind…That story is just too embarrassing to share! Needless to say, I have become quite proficient at both making and breaking bread.

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