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I was six years old when I first tasted homemade bread.

In the hills of Western Maryland, in a cramped kitchen with outdated appliances and faded wallpaper, my grandmother filled Mason jars with fruit preserves, pickles, tomatoes, and green beans. She grew salad greens in her tiny backyard and baked her own cakes and pies. When it was turned on, her oven warmed her otherwise drafty little house.

Grandma didn’t like the pre-sliced, stark white, crustless confection that was commercially produced bread of the time. She called the grocery store loaves in their garishly colored plastic sleeves Old Puff. None of the regional commercial bread producers—Lewis Ort, Grandpa Stroehmann, Peter Schmidt—could win her favor. 

“Let me show you real bread,” she told me as I stood at her elbow while she kneaded and kneaded, kneaded and kneaded, then placed the formed loaves into her oven.

My mother, a self-proclaimed excellent cook, fell silent in Grandma’s kitchen. She sat with her hands in her lap as Grandma measured out the flour, warmed the yeast in water and sugar, heated the milk and butter, and mixed all these ingredients into a dough. 

In Mother’s kitchen, we ate Wonder Bread. Mother used the pillowy slices to make chipped ham sandwiches or grilled cheese. Wonder Bread, the commercials said, helps build strong bodies twelve ways. It was quick and easy. Just take the slices from the bag.

Mother’s uncharacteristic silence in Grandma’s kitchen seemed a kind of reverence.

We had to wait for the loaf to cool a little before Grandma cut the first slice. Butter melted quickly on its surface and sank into its crevices. Grandma opened a jar of pickles.

When I think of my grandmother’s kitchen, I remember warm bread and sweet pickles.

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Nearly ten thousand years ago, in the steam of one of the earth’s hottest regions, a place teeming with green growth and rich soil, someone collected the kernels from tawny shocks that stood amid the wilds.

And someone planted them in a chosen place, a place where they could be raised and tended, where the shocks could be grown year after year. For this someone, the act afforded a respite from wandering in search of food.

And for the human beings who would come after, born into the idea of planting and reaping, this was the beginning of home.  

And someone, a man or a woman, took harvested kernels from newly grown shocks and with a stone crushed them to a fineness. And to the fineness added water, made a paste and then a dough, and heated it over a fire until it blistered and surrendered its gentle aroma.

Imagine later, the first time leavening occurred and the dough began to expand and move and seemed to breathe. How it felt warm and flesh-like to the touch.  How it could feed the maker and those important to the maker.

Bread came before written language. Before one could record a recipe to pass on to others.  It came before farming, before human beings made a science of providing food for themselves. 

It came before settlements, villages, cities. Before the concept of history. Before culture. But it provided a means for all of those things to be. And in its many forms, it has sustained cultures.

Bread takes us back to our origins. It signals a beginning.

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When I was nineteen and newly married, I decided to make home-baked bread the way my grandmother had shown me. My early attempts were disappointing. Sometimes the dough failed to rise. Sometimes a large bubble of space formed inside the loaf. Sometimes the dough rose a bit, but when the loaf emerged from the oven its dome was concave. All of those disappointments, however, didn’t prevent me from continuing to warm yeast in liquid, add flour and salt, knead and knead, bake and hope. I tried again and again.

After my children were born, my mother gave me a bread machine for Christmas. “Bread is the perfect accompaniment to any meal,” she lectured as I opened the box. “You just put the ingredients in the machine at night before you go to bed, and in the morning, you have bread.  It’s foolproof.”

The bread machine produced its bread-like block reliably, time after time. But, fool that I am, I could not give up feeling the warm acquiescence of bread dough on my fingers. Real bread is massaged into being by hands. Real bread reveals itself a living thing to its maker.

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The breaking of bread joins people. The sharing of an experience at the table, the nurture of an intimacy. In the process, a loaf is parted, its integrity torn. Breaking reveals what is beneath the crusty surface, a soft interior. Similarly, people who gather at a table open themselves to each other, allowing themselves to be vulnerable.

No wonder bread has assumed religious significance. I am the bread of life. No wonder the sharing of bread at a table is a kind of communion. Take, eat. This is my body. When we come together at a table to share a meal, we may, even if guardedly, offer ourselves up to those gathered. We become, for others, the bread of life, even as we drop a morsel torn from a loaf onto our tongues.

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After my children were grown and left home, I stopped making bread. I had other things to do, other lives to live. I lived on grocery store bread, or no bread at all.

Then, a few years ago, I remarried. My husband and I bought a house together and began the work of making a shared life. I started baking again. It seemed a way to begin. I christened our new house with the aroma of bread.  I felt again the silken cling of dough in my hands.  In the oven, it gave its richness to the air.

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The air is rich with the promise of bread.  On the surfaces of things, even on the grains that we dream will be loaves—the spirit that enlivens bread is everywhere.  All we need is flour, water, and time. To capture that spirit, to set it in motion, we wait.

According to family legend, my grandmother kept a sourdough starter alive and working for twenty years. She gave some of it to each of her six daughters when they married. 

This could be true. For physicist Seamus Blackley is reported to have used a starter containing 4500-year-old yeast to bake a sourdough loaf. And history tells us that a jar of sourdough survived the voyage with Christopher Columbus to the New World. My grandmother’s starter could surely survive there in her kitchen in Western Maryland.

To capture the spirit, mix flour and water.  Set it in a place where it can collect the yeasts that inhabit the air. Wait.

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Researchers tell us that twenty volatile compounds contribute to what we experience as the aroma of bread. They create eight to twelve different aroma notes.

Researchers say that the aroma of bread evokes memories of childhood, of family, of comfort. It allows us access to our earliest recollections of our mothers. It takes us back to our origin.

For me, bread’s aroma has only four notes: the sharpness of salt, a smoothness like the smoothness of butter, the tang of fermentation, and from the grains that give their flavor to the loaf, the metallic sting of freshly turned earth.