At the end of the night, after she had finished sipping on her perpetual brandy Manhattan—a wise routine that involved watering down her drink in pace with the dwindling hour—she covered it tightly with a small square of plastic wrap, smoothed down the edges so tightly that a dime could bounce on its taut top, and put it in the refrigerator.
What strikes me as funny now about this habit was not the obvious Depression-era thrift but instead the hope it held for future good times. The assumption contained in the watered-down refrigerated elixir was that it would get consumed during some upcoming happy hour. Maybe tomorrow’s.
—
Like a pack of professional female cooks, the women in my family are tough on the ladies. They expect a lot of one another. Even though I was unshowered and unsteady, I plodded into a loose skirt, kneesocks, and a vintage button-up shirt and strode into the kitchen. I was hungover but ready.
The winter sunlight shot low through Addie’s kitchen and bounced off the shiny white Formica, calling the day to order. At the counter she was apronless. There were so few ingredients before her—just a sack of flour and a can of Crisco—and she moved so quickly that I feared the whole operation would be over before I could shake my eyes open. I knew she never measured anything, so I had to watch closely. I took out my notebook.
Still in my senior year of college, I was accustomed to taking detailed notes. “How many cups of water is that, Grandma?” I asked her as she poured cloudy liquid into the bowl.
“Stick your finger in this. As warm as a baby’s bath,” she said, and I stuck my finger into the water. “And it’s potato water,” she said, and then looked up. “Jesus Christ, put the pencil down and just pay attention.” She pawed out a lump of Crisco and threw it into the warm water. It started to melt into a reflective ivory pad on top of the water, as pretty as a cheap opal. “You don’t write out a recipe for bread.”
She crumbled a moist-looking plug of fleshy cake yeast into the water. Below the surface it dissolved quickly and smoothly. “I bought this cake yeast at the bakery in town. That dry yeast in the grocery store doesn’t always work. I buy it and bring it home and half the time it’s as dead as a fart.”
I made that mental note. Two rounded cupfuls of flour went into the bowl and she started stirring forcefully, whipping the batter until a shaggy lump rolled woozily in the middle and stretched out arms of dough that clung to the inside of the bowl as if holding on for dear life.
“You’ve got to beat it,” she said, exhaling, “until you see the gluten working.” Her arms were a blur. “You try it.”
I was surprised by the force required to stir from the bottom. My arms, not strong with experience, were feeble.
Addie baked by feel and eye rather than by formula. She added more flour, even more flour, and then suddenly came an amorphous flop. A puddle of dough was on the counter. She started kneading, yanking the outer edge and suturing it to the middle, sealing it with the force of her palms. It was like braiding, but from only one side. As she worked it, the dough started to perk up. I poked it and it felt alive, like it had muscle tone. Its surface was as smooth and cool as well-hydrated skin.
“You want to knead it until the gluten gets tight,” she said, leaning into the dough, “until—do you hear that? You have to knead it until it starts to squeak.” The middle of the dough emitted a high-pitched eek. Now I can recognize this sound as the reaction of two tense sheets of dough slapping together, like a valve squeezing out pent-up air, but back then it sounded like the lump was hiding a lost mouse that’d taken a fatally wrong turn.
As she flipped and pummeled the dough, I was well aware that this was the bread that so many immigrants had made from their bumper crops of wheat. Crusty brown on the outside, with a white interior sponge and tiny even pores, this white bread posed no chewing challenges to children or seniors; it was as easily digestible as their new American life, and its high, caramelized tops just as photogenic.
To my knowledge, few immigrants came bearing recipes for this lofty white bread in their trunks, and yet this was the one that so many Plains-state Americans, no matter where they came from, learned to make once they got here, from the flour that they grew and milled and the boiled potatoes that accompanied the noon roast. Unlike in the old country, Addie explained, in America they ate meat for lunch, usually with mashed potatoes, without exception. When the milky potato-cooking water was drained off, they saved it. What wasn’t added to the gravy was set aside at room temperature where, after being fed a little flour and left to sit, the potato-water slurry turned into sourdough starter. Any surplus potato water that remained after that, they fed to the pigs. Nothing was squandered. While hers wasn’t a yeasted starter, my grandma’s porridgy potato water contained an underground history, a pretty clear record of what it felt like to “make do” out on the prairie in Pierz Township. I had always thought the phrase meant you settled for what was subpar, as in making do with a hill of cornmeal and a chunk of salt pork, but I had never before considered the obvious: When you grew your own corn and cured your own side pork from your own barnyard hog, you didn’t settle for something dodgy on your table. Making do was more literal: It meant making and doing. Creating something uncommonly beautiful from the honest country materials you had on hand.
After this I felt like I had to ask about the origins of everything. “White flour then, Grandma?”
“Yes, of course white flour!” she said, as if whole wheat was not to be trusted.
But then she tipped her head. “Back on the farm in Buckman we used to get our white flour with the germ in it. Big twenty-five-pound sacks of it. It spoils in the summer, though. That’s why we switched. The bleached never spoils.”
“I bought some of that last week!” I bleated.
“Good! Yes, with the germ. The flavor’s better. You’ll see flecks in the bread. It’s the germ, not bugs in the flour.
“But most of the time,” Addie continued, rubbing the bowl with Crisco until it shined, “I don’t even do all this. I make my bread with Rhodes dough. And it has to be Rhodes! Not that other garbage brand they sell at Coborn’s that doesn’t rise.”