Baking Comfort and Love

WITH apologies to our gluten-intolerant readers, there are few aromas as wonderful as the yeasty smell of freshly baked bread. I still remember that when we would drive past Gardeners’ Bread Bakery (our local equivalent of Wonder Bread), I would stick my head out of the rolled-down car window to better breathe in the factory’s heavenly fragrance in those pre-air-conditioned days.

I also have fond memories of the tantalizing smell of my mother’s baking drawing me from my bedroom to the kitchen, just like the characters in my beloved cartoons portrayed with their noses leading the way.

Mom didn’t bake often, so her warm bread rolls fresh from the oven slathered with butter were a special, eagerly awaited treat. (You can therefore imagine my dismay, many years later, when I studied in Florence and the in-house cooks baked the local no-salt bread every day but refused to let us taste it until it had totally cooled down—in the traditional belief that it wasn’t good for us to eat warm bread!)

Many of us turned to bread baking in the early days of the pandemic—some from necessity, some to knead out nervous energy, but most for comfort. We now have an opportunity to put those well-earned skills to good use for our community. See our Bread Angels story (link below), bake a loaf and inhale.