November's Prompt: Family Matters

Cinnamon Raisin Bread for the Soul

Every month, we pull a question from our BreakBread World Conversation Card Deck and offer a reflection. This month we pulled the “family” card.

Why does family (biological or chosen) matter to you? What family story nourishes you to this day?

What pulls me in about this particular prompt is the word “nourish”, for within my family and heritage is a deep connection to food – growing it, making it, and of course, eating it! Mealtime, especially dinnertime, was always important and when visitors came over or we visited someone else, food was always part of the enjoyment. Most of what we ate was homemade and with that came a feeling of home and family that can’t be found in stores or restaurants. Everything had love caringly baked into it as part of my family linguistics – going way back through my grandmothers and beyond.

I have great-grandparents heralding from Poland and Italy. Going further back than this familial octet? Not much. Just a few scant photos, several surnames, and the names of several cities i’ve yet to visit that pepper my familial lore. And yet i know there have been thousands before me throughout untold and forgotten generations.

The ancestors watch, waiting in the wings. Their nourishment coming to me through food.

I’m five or six years old and there’s a large yellow bowl with a towel draped over it resting on the warm radiator. The kitchen is alive with a glowing yeasty aroma. Brimming with curiosity and anticipation i peek beneath the towel and poke my finger into the irresistible doughy mound magically coming to life. It’s sticky and dry and cold and warm and moist all at the same time! “Let it alone so it can rise,” cautions my grandmother. I can barely contain myself in anticipation and in ten minutes i’m back to my peeking and poking.

Time seemed to stop when my grandmother made cinnamon raisin bread.

It was like her kitchen became the entire world and the whole world was dusted with flour and smelled like cinnamon and yeast. The whole morning became an eternal wait for the dough to rise enough for her to knead it down and then put it back on the radiator to rise again. Sometimes she’d let me knead and then use the dull edge of a butter knife to scrape the dough off my hands. After two or three more eternities when the dough was finally ready she’d plop it out onto a giant wooden cutting board that seemed to take up the entire kitchen table. She sprinkled flour as if it were pixie dust and began working the dough with a massive rolling pin with one handle broken off and missing in action. She gradually worked the belly-like mound flat, turning, dusting, and deftly rolling it into a sprawling dusty field awakening to its spring planting.

With flicks of her wrist her glinting knife cast buttery splinters across the doughy span.

Then came a generous sprinkling of sugary cinnamon followed by the sowing of the raisins. She’d let me help with the raisins, cautioning me to not clump them too thickly but from my five year old vantage, there was no such thing as too many raisins! The whole affair was rolled up, then cut to fit for placement into ancient bread pans where they had to be placed aside to rise yet again! At some point in this interminably long ordeal the expectant loaves were finally ready to be placed in the oven where they disappeared for what felt like days as the kitchen’s misty dawn aroma of yeast and flour slowly transformed into a midday air warmed with the toasted scent of melting rivulets of buttery cinnamon bubbling beneath slowly browning bread crust.

Finally, with the dinging of her wind-up timer the loaves were birthed heroically browned and steaming to be put on racks to cool. I don’t recall what transpired while the bread was cooling. Probably lunch. Maybe a nap (afterall, all this bread-baking is exhausting). But i do remember the pale green plates each with a slice of freshly buttered warm raisin bread as we sat together quietly enjoying the fruits of our morning.

To look in the mirror is to see your family. They peer back at us through our eyes and speak to us with our tongue. Whose eyes are these? Whose body is this? The resonances and ripples of parent, grandparent and great grandparent emanate beyond shape, size, and color. They register through forgotten gestures and quirky dimensions of bodily memory. Their stories still read in the pages of our flesh and bone whispering tales of previous generations always present and ever emergent.

There are many tales we tell. Some bound in flesh, some in the bones and some in memory. Not all are happy. Some we wish to forget. This is one i carry that for me is bound in scent — the smell of bread being incarnated from the most basic of ingredients – flour, milk, water, yeast, lots of cinnamon and raisins, a considerable heap of time, and of course, love.

Photo by Vilius Kukanauskas from Pixabay