I like bread and butter . . .

The sister-in-law, Kim, who lives up in Washington (and is a writer of some accomplishment—her last book is Ruby's Imagine) posted a tentative first chapter the other day for The Cookie Club. Reading it got me to thinking about my father, and working with him in the bakery.

My father was a baker, my two older brothers were bakers and I discovered that my great grandfather, my father's paternal grandfather, was also a baker before he enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War. When I was in high school I would work with Dad in the summer when his assistant didn't show up which seemed to be at least twice a week.



The phone would ring at about 10:15 and I knew I wouldn't be getting any sleep that night. Dad would pick me up, and when we got back to the shop it would be about 10:30 and we would have to hustle because we'd already lost a half hour. A few minutes before 7:00am the two ladies who ran the front would come in, and about a half hour later we'd go home. I would be exhausted.

Baking, especially then, was hard, physical work. Lifting a fifty pound batch of bread onto the table was, for me, almost impossible—the bowl alone weighed close to thirty pounds add that to the fifty pounds of dough and you were getting within thirty pounds of my own weight at the time. Then you had to chop it into one pound chunks (no more than half an ounce under or one over) with one hand while your other hand rolled the dough into a smooth ball. You got to do that four times each night. Two batches of white, one of whole wheat, and one of the days specialty bread. Monday was Rye. I will never forget that Wednesday was Cheesebread. It's smell while it was proofing was absolutely disgusting. Friday was cinnamon bread, and meant the weekend. For the life of me I can't remember what Tuesday and Thursday were.

When the breads were proofing you'd start on the breakfast rolls, and then pies, working on them as the rhythm of the bread's chopping and proofing and kneading allowed. Cakes and doughnuts were usually started last because they took the least time.

But I digress.

In Kim's story the young lady is trying to rediscover her mother's recipe for gingerbread, and cannot quite capture it. This reminded me of a mystery in my family. My brothers and I have been trying for about thirty years to recreate Dad's cinnamon knots. They were similar to what are now generally called sticky rolls, but were baked separately in muffin tins and had a much lighter, less bready taste.

The formula is in his book. A three inch thick 6"X 9" binder which is filled to overflowing with the formulas for dark rye and light rye, pecan rolls, and everything else you would need to know to run a bakery. I got a look at it a couple times, and most of the formulas start with "50lb bread flour" or something similar. I didn't think at the time to find the cinnamon knot formula; but my older brother, who owns the book now that Dad has passed on, has told me that that formula is missing two or three vital ingredients or steps. It took a while, but we are fairly sure that one of the ingredients he 'forgot' to include was potato buds, but the exact proportions are still unclear.

I've been talking about formulas because that was the way I was taught. For my dad cooking was, or could be, an art. It's highly intuitive and you can freely modify a recipe without compromising the quality. Cooks use recipes. Baking was a science. Changing ratios or adding new ingredients or changing the proportions and timing are all short cuts to useless product, or worse. Bakers use formulas.

But I'm still digressing. Sort of.

What started all this was cookies. I don't remember us ever making cookies. If the bakery sold them the day crew made them along with decorating the special order cakes. Our primary job was bread, pies and doughnuts. We also did sweet rolls, and early in the morning when I was cleaning up Dad would make some sheet cakes and cake layers, but he didn't really like doing cakes; and I never once saw him, at the shop or at home, make a cookie.

I've been trying to figure out why. I think it was partly because cookies were still considered a home/family product. Bread, even pies and sweet rolls take a lot of time and manual labor, but cookies are a relatively quick product and easily done in the home. There may have also been a little sexism involved, but I think it was more of a professional snobbery kind of thing. Dad considered himself an artisan, a craftsman. He made a product, and he made it well.

Cookies were edging into that territory governed by pastry chefs. Pastry chefs were temperamental artistes who made petit fours, and he often warned me not to turn my back on one.