On Baking

Leaning over the sink, I glanced out the window, peaking at a chubby spring robin, breast of burnt umber. Flipping the knob to 350, removing the wok and cornflower blue cast iron skillet, I set about organizing some counter space and to begin baking.
I find the art of baking does not take much effort. It’s actually quite simple—follow and or create consistent directions, contribute to your local economy by investing in really good ingredients, and almost just as essential as organic, free range eggs, [please] ensure you add a healthy dose of ‘good guys’ (as my dear friend Ben refers to ‘good vibes’)… what I mean to say is when baking, ‘commence with a happy heart!’
I have learned (the hard way) over the years, that no different than a teaspoon versus tablespoon misstep, if you come to the kitchen with a kink in your attitude, you might just as well ‘fuggetabout it’ and go buy your prospective gift recipients a hearty box of Newman-O’s!
I am keen on using separate bowls for dry and wet ingredients. Ideally, I enjoy using my shorter, stouter, sea-green ceramic bowl (a gift from my aunt) for dry ingredients, and my sister’s deep indigo-blue ceramic piece for wet. About two years ago, I treated myself to the purchase of a large sterling silver bowl that is perfect for extra large batches of dough—lately though, I have preferred the handmade pottery to the hammered metal.
Due to some serious issues with procrastination and an inability to prioritize what I would like to do with what I think I have to do. I typically do not plan in advance to bake. It’s often a spontaneous reaction to the reminder of an important date of some kind. In this haste, the butter is never at room temperature and I usually slow-melt it in one of my blue saucepans.
I’ve found that baking is its’ own form of therapy. In particular, I enjoy the method to this art, the grace of bouncing around the kitchen, listening to some good music, or perhaps Car Talk on a Saturday morning. I dig the ritual of putting on my apron—I have an assorted collection, small but sentimental. Customarily, I am baking for someone or something—some kind of communal event—or a birthday, a thank you, and every so often, as a way to repay someone, barter-style, for a service they offered to me. Sometimes my aunt will edit some of my ad copy or a short piece of marketing collateral, and although I do not have the budget she deserves, she’s happy to receive my thanks and a dozen chocolate chip cookies.
Another little idiosyncrasy of my baking practice includes amassing all of the ingredients and the properly sized measuring cups and spoons so they are sitting on the counter in little groups—the dry with the dry, the wet with the wet. At some point, I will need to add a colorful, ceramic collection of ramekins to this arsenal…making this seemingly OCD activity as harmonized as possibly… ostensibly synchronized appropriately.
For some reason, I always start with the wet ingredients—maybe it’s the way I was taught or the way all of the recipes I’ve ever perused are written. Maybe it’s because I find that if you slowly add your dry ingredients to the wet ones that mixing is simpler, and you know right away if something is off with your dough consistency. It also aids in not producing a white, puffy cloud of dry ingredients during a plot of wet into dry.
The last time I baked, as I went from preparing wet ingredients to dry, I realized I had not grabbed the all-important sifter for my baking stockpile and reached into my baking-pantry shelves to grab it. When I did, I pirouetted from one side of the kitchen to the other (my kitchen set up is two long strips (including sink/stove/refrigerator and countertops) separated by a narrow piece of hardwood floor. The baking pantry is on one side and the space I was using for preparation was across the floor, next to the sink. So in this movement—one that I do almost repetitively while baking, was a moment. In it were my grandma’s hands.
As memory often does, it sneaks up on you, sensorily… the fragment of an image or sound or scent reminds and transports. In my moment there, I had traveled from my dissimilar, black-counter-topped kitchen with a window overlooking the side yard, to my gram’s kitchen, there on Platte Road, (not the large, white, cavernous grandparent’s home of my youth. It had long-ago been destroyed and traded-in for an expanded bank parking lot and a fat bag of cash; no, it was the diminutive, ‘retirement’ spot, just down the way, where they both came to die that I speak of). Where the out-of-date, gold speckled Formica met the sink and the sink was in front of a window overlooking the backyard.
My grandparents were both wonderful craft persons particularly in the kitchen—my grandma a master pie (crust in particular) and pound cake baker (among myriad other talents) and my grandpa an excellent baklava and rice pudding aficionado.
In fact if it weren’t for my gram’s stellar piecrust, I might not be on the planet! My mom, a spritely 16-year-old waitress at the local diner served pie baked with that recipe to an older, hippie, just home from Vietnam. When he learned that it was her mother’s recipe, he asked if she knew how to bake pie like that. Flirtatiously, she hurriedly answered ‘yes!’ and later begged her mother to teach her, straightaway.
I lived, briefly in my grandparent’s ‘retirement’ home after they both had past away. Even before that though, two of the treasures granted me from their kitchen supplies were the silvery metal measuring spoon set and old-fashioned tin sifter.
Every time I bake I think of her, the worn metal of the teaspoon in her fingertips—she had the loveliest hands and nails—soft and sumptuous. Whenever I pick the spoons up, and they clank together, I imagine the way she may have wiped the last smidge of vanilla onto her apron, so she could measure baking soda next.
Sighing now, with the deep, satisfying inhalation of acceptance that memory has a magical way of stirring and healing the spirit, I realize that in that one iota of remembrance, that I am now writing about, that it is not just gram’s hands to remember… maybe it’s the approach of Father’s Day, but in fact, I recognize that I think of them, for they shared a kitchen for more than 50 years, and Grandpa’s knack was diverse and delicious.