Bread

Flour furnishes most everyone’s kitchen. If you’re a baker or breadmaker, you will probably have several five-pound bags of it in the pantry alongside the yeast. If you don’t bake or don’t bake much, you will probably have at least a cup or two of it in the canister on the kitchen counter for thickening the gravy, frying the chicken or making the roux. Most likely, most of it will have come from wheat. Wheat has been with mankind for 10,000 years or so and was first domesticated somewhere in the Fertile Crescent, or, as our old geographies used to say, Mesopotamia, which also, it was hinted, was the neighborhood of the Garden of Eden. Wheat’s genetic diversity made it adaptable to a variety of climes and continents.

I cannot claim the gift of prophecy, but early in 2020 — before lockdown panic-buying and the warnings of a dire wheat harvest causing bread-price rises — I became a bread-maker. I dug around on the internet for a good recipe for sourdough, and found one padded out with the usual bloggery and waffle. Absent the philosophy and the pious musings, it gives a clear, sensible route to bread self-sufficiency. Sourdough doesn’t need bought-in yeast, only a ‘starter’ of flour and water. This is often called a ‘mother’, and attracts wild yeasts as it develops; after five days in the jar it is a gently bubbling ferment of living yeasts, and you keep it going by adding flour and water to it day by day.

I don’t remember my grandmother, Anna Olson Nelson (Nelsie to her grandchildren), ever measuring out anything for her divine Swedish bread. The recipes must have been kept under the thick, blonde braid that she piled expertly on top of her head. What I do recall, as if it were yesterday, is helping Nelsie bake fläta and limpa every other Sunday in her small kitchen. The heavenly smells of cardamom and fennel wafted throughout her apartment while she tried to improve my Swedish. My mother, Mimi, often spoke Swedish to me and my sister, Chris, when we were babies and my father was with the Office of War Information as a correspondent in China, Burma and India during World War Two. Nelsie was our ‘Swedish nanny’.