For years I was a kitchen goddess, in quantity if not in quality. I baked my own bread, made cheese from my goats’ milk, cooked the dogs’ food from scratch. Now, I barely cook at all. The retirement community where I live supplies us with food more varied and sophisticated than I could ever produce.
All I have to deal with is breakfast. A couple of times a week I serve a slice of apple bread, made from a recipe I found on a bag of Pillsbury flour in 1978. The recipe, which is now as brittle and fragile as an Egyptian papyrus, makes two loaves. But I’ve always been a believer in efficiency, and why grease two pans, heat the oven, and all the rest, if you could, with just a bit more effort, have a quasi industrial yield of six loaves?
These days I have to nerve myself up for the project, which requires considerable upper body strength. In addition, as a reader of contemplative and Buddhist writings, I feel that I should strive to stay present throughout the process, paying attention to sights, smells, and textures and treating, as Saint Benedict recommended, every kitchen utensil as if it were a vessel of the altar—and becoming somehow more peaceful and sanctified in the process.
The utensils include six loaf pans, an enormous mixing bowl, and the big spoon with fading 1950s stars on its plastic handle that my mother gave me on the occasion of my marriage. Six loaves require eight cups of sliced apples, eight cups of flour, four cups of shortening, ditto of sugar, nine eggs, and two cups each of raisins and chopped nuts, plus leaveners and spices. No domestic mixer can handle this volume, so I have to do the mixing by hand. This was nothing in the days when I routinely hefted bales of hay and carted wheelbarrow loads of compost, but things have changed.
The recipe says to grease and flour the pans, but fifty years of making this bread have taught me that greasing alone suffices. Breaking the eggs into the bowl, I remember my beloved hens, whose brown-shelled, orange yolked fruit was once the pride of my kitchen. For shortening I use Spanish olive oil, which is, I am convinced, the elixir of life. Then I add the vanilla and, guiltily, four cups of sugar.
Next come the dry ingredients—flour, leaveners, cinnamon, and cloves. My arm muscles are starting to complain when I realize that I’ve forgotten to chop the apples. I wash off whatever poisons they’ve been sprayed with and chop away, making sure the cores go in the compost bucket, as mandated by the State of Vermont.
I add the apples, the raisins and, after more chopping, the walnuts. By now my right arm is about to give way, so I switch to the left and soldier on. I also forgot to preheat the oven, but experience tells me that I still have time because, once the final nut is in, it takes me a while to heft dollops of the dense stuff into the pans. But finally the pans are filled, the oven beeps its readiness, and I slide in the pans, spacing them carefully. They’re done in an hour or so, though not until I’ve burned my hands a couple of times checking their progress. I let them cool on racks for ten minutes, after which I dump them out of the pans to cool some more, wrap them in foil, and stick them in the freezer.
I’m at the sink scrubbing the bowl when I remember the thing about staying present. Did I? Reader, I don’t even know what that means. Sure, I stayed present enough to measure the baking soda, to make sure that the bread didn’t burn. But was I present? Was I reverent? Did I even notice how good the kitchen smelled during the baking? All I know is that during the measuring and mixing my mind was skittering all over, thinking about emails, remembering my goats and hens, adding to my to-do list. Smell? What smell?
In the end, my morning’s work yielded six nice loaves, which should last us for months. The mindfulness effort, however, was a failure—unless you count the intention, which was pure and came from a full heart, and as such is bound to have some value.
