Bread in a Time of Cholera
By: Cassandra Schoon
Tags: Covid 19, Denver, Mental Health, Baking, Adhd

Baking is quickly emerging as a popular coping mechanism in these chaotic times. But I’ve been baking as a way of mindful nourishment for my whole life.

This week I have baked the following:

A recipe for coffee cake that comes from my nearly-30-year-old American Girl doll cookbook. Tartine’s Country Loaf using my six-year-old sourdough starter, Bread Favre The scallion and sour cream biscuits from the latest Bon Appetit

These three choices (and the fact that I undertook all three in the span of less than 7 days) are shorthand for the kind of person I am, the kind of times I am currently trying to live through, and the way baking figures into my routine of coping, feeding myself, and generating focus.

Cake for company

As a kid, I grew up watching PBS cooking shows like “Yan Can Cook,” as well as celebrity chefs like Julia Child and Martha Stewart. I always wanted to learn to make my own food, and as a teenager I began scrapbooking recipes from vintage magazines and collecting vintage cookbooks, dreaming of the day I’d have free reign of my own kitchen. My mom often talked about my grandmother’s favorite recipes, and how she made impressive loaves of beautiful bread from a starter that she shared with other women in their town (Idaho Springs). I wanted badly to bake, to cook, to entertain, and to have a home and homemaking responsibilities. It was an essential and alluring part of how I imagined adulthood.

My American Girl cookbook, which featured recipes that would have been contemporary for my doll, Molly’s life in World War II, included recipes meant to approximate ration-restricted 1940s cooking. To be frank, the only one that looked remotely appetizing was the Quick Coffee Cake, which I started making with my mom’s help when I was about 12. It’s nothing more than a simple sponge topped with cinnamon streusel. But the way the raw batter tastes and the way the house smells when its baking is pure, familiar comfort. And also, when you’re done, there’s cake you can eat. I made it today so I could eat it while having a video chat with my sister and a couple of girlfriends, one of whom I’ve known since sixth grade. When I was growing up, coffee cake was something you made for company. It felt right to have it when I was going to have people over, if only virtually.

Baking can be a way of reminding oneself that there was a past. There’s the past of your own memories: of your mom letting you lick the mixer beaters and remembering the Sunday morning smell of hot streusel. And there’s also the bigger past, a past of war and tragedies and uncertainties. Baking this cake reminds me that there were people before us who made do with what they had, and they made it to the other side of something that felt unimaginably hard and chaotic at the time.

I add a half-teaspoon of garam masala to the streusel. It is the only change I make to this otherwise perfect, comforting recipe.

Naturally Leavened

In 2014, the New York Times published an article about a home baking method from baker and author Chad Mitchell, which promised crackly-crusted, open-crumbed, bronzy-burnished European-style bread using only tools available to the home cook. This, given my previous experience, felt too good to be true. I had spent most of my early adult life attempting to recreate bread I’d tasted in Europe and which, in the America of the early 2000s, was almost impossible to find in stores even in cosmopolitan Boulder or Denver.

In my attempts at becoming a baker, I killed moldy sourdough starters, baked dense, inedible doorstops, and uselessly attempted tricks like putting a pan of water in my shitty apartment oven or spraying water onto baking loaves to obtain authentically chewy crusts and open, billowy crumbs. The only successful bread I’d really baked was the classic Betty Crocker white bread from my copy of the reproduction of the 1950 Picture Cookbook. And I baked this a lot, because it was a way to make a lot of food for pennies, and to stock my freezer with some kind of nourishment when I was broke and unemployed.

Despite this, I tried the Tartine recipe. My first attempt was hilariously bad. I fed the flat, unappealing loaves to the compost (and, by extension, the neighborhood squirrels) immediately. But the second was a little better. So was the third. By summer of the next year, I entered my bread into the county fair’s baking competition. I won a blue ribbon that year. And the year after. A hobby that rewards you with incremental improvements, and provides room for tweaks and customization, is vindicating for so many reasons. So, I’ve been baking naturally-leavened bread ever since.

The process to bake home-baked bread, whether it’s the Tartine loaf (which, from starting a starter to cutting a cooled loaf, is about a three-week endeavor) or the Betty Crocker classic (about a half day, start to finish), requires a key ingredient: attention. To bake well, a baker must notice and interpret smells, sights, feelings, the passage of time. As someone who medicates for ADHD, this is often the hardest ingredient to find but the one that absolutely cannot be left out. When I am able to give my process the focus and attention it deserves, things usually turn out OK. When I can’t, small things fail, which means everything will fail.

Baking bread is a ritual and a meditation for me. It is time and attention that I must give to a single task. This is sometimes incredibly difficult for me, but also an exercise that reaps great psychic rewards. I am someone whose mind often resembles a browser window with a dozen open tabs. But the baking process, from smelling and tasting a starter for ripeness, to judging if another five minutes in the oven is enough, is a time when my mind is clear and expansive, using sensory input and generating choices and outcomes. The end result is a true affirmation: look what you can do, when you put your mind to it.

Things worth doing are worth doing well

Baking onion biscuits is not a choice I would have made ten years ago. I have only recently acquired a taste for savory baked goods like this, and I’ve only recently become brave enough to challenge some of the things I’ve talked myself into about what I am good at, or what I’m able to do. I thought for a long time that I just wasn’t very good at biscuits, because the ones I made were often hard and too salty and didn’t puff up the way I wanted them to. But this has been the kind of week where it makes sense to ask more of oneself than usual. To try and transcend the limitations we’ve placed on our abilities, our talents.

This past week of working from home also happens to be the second week of a new job for me. This would present challenges in the best of circumstances, but this week’s work was conducted under some of the worst circumstances of our times. My role has been to support teams working under unimaginable stress to communicate the emergency of COVID-19 to a fearful public. As a municipal employee, it has become very clear that we cities and states alike must rise to the challenges created by a derelict federal government in these times. For the first time in my career, I feel as though I am prepared at least to face these challenges and strategize a response, and work with others to make strategies work. Now is not the time for imposter syndrome, for self-imagined limitations, for second-guessing.

I’m a baker. I’m a child of the 90s. I have ADHD. I’m a hard worker and I’m getting better about doubting myself. Like all of us, at this time, I’m everything I always am, and just a little bit more: I’m in survival mode.

Now is the time for scallion biscuits. And they were incredible.