Words and Photos (and bread) by Stefanie Goldberg
There’s something about bread.
Admittedly, that sounds a bit like the would-be title of a 1990’s Nora Ephron rom-com starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Bu just imagine: Our two bread baking protagonists, sworn enemies, fall in love when fate forces them to work at the same bakery. Halfway through the film we’ll see a pivotal montage where he steals glances as she folds her dough; she discreetly marvels at his gentle and swift boule shaping; their hands accidentally touch as they reach for flour to dust their workbenches.
Throw in some jazzy Harry Connick Jr. underscoring and plenty of sophisticated wit, and the rest is history.
Maybe I have given this non-existent film too much thought, and maybe it’s a bit over the top. But that is the power of bread, it can truly transform life in unexpected ways. I tried to get to the bottom of the specialness of bread by speaking to different bread bakers all over the world. “The experience of [baking bread] is very profound in ways I can't totally put words to,” said Dr. Maria Trumpler, a bread baker and professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Yale University. For me, magical is the descriptor that comes to mind.
There has been an explosion of bread baking during this pandemic. It feels like we are living through a bread revolution. We are returning to naturally fermented yeasts, exploring new flours and new techniques, baking our very own bread. People of all genders, races, and creeds are folding, kneading, shaping, scoring. But I have noticed a particular emergence of a silent sisterhood across the globe as women spiritually bake en masse. Women I’ve known throughout my life who have sworn off carbs, began cultivating their own starters and creating Instagram accounts dedicated to their bread baking journeys in the wake of COVID-19.
It’s peculiar, this relationship between women and bread. Messy. Touchy. Sticky. As if the magic of bread was withheld. There is an unspoken rule among women that bread is the enemy. Truth be told, that all carbs are the enemy. Atkins, Keto, Whole 30, South Beach – no matter the diet, carbs are the unanimous feminine kryptonite. I became a member of this carb hate club when I was eight years old. Being fat was the ticket for entry, and I was a shoe-in. I have since rescinded my membership, although I still instinctually bristle when a bread basket is passed my way. In speaking with Apollonia Poilâne, CEO of the world renowned Parisian bakery Poilâne, she puzzled over this fraught relationship: “What does it mean about our society that we shit on bread because we say it makes you fat, it's bad...and then shit happens in the world and we bake bread?” I don’t know that I have an answer to Apollonia’s question. But I do know that this uproarious cross-cultural cleaving to bread that I’ve observed through the pandemic, not only defies the attempts to separate women from bread, but reinforces the innate link between females, flour, water, and yeast.
Bread and bread baking have been staples of civilization for thousands of years, and women have been at the heart of that work. Look at the book of Genesis, for example (18:6, to be specific). After Abraham receives three unexpected visitors at his home, he rushes back into his tent and says to his wife Sarah, “Quick! Get three measures of the finest flour and knead it to make some bread.” In Greek Mythology, Demeter, goddess of the harvest, teaches humanity the secrets of agriculture and the art of bread making. Women’s connection to bread is deeply rooted and undeniable.
Women didn’t solely bake bread, they also ground the grain for it. In her paper Maids at the Grindstone: A Comparative Study of New Kingdom Egypt Grain Grinders, Dr. Elizabeth Lang identified through the study of archaeological data, art, and ancient texts that women were the sole group performing grain grinding. Not only was this an important maintenance activity in Egyptian households that contributed to the labor force and economy, but “[t]his situation parallels nearly every other society in which grinding cereal was a crucial daily food-producing step,” Dr. Lang explained.
Short of writing a history book on women and bread, suffice it to say that the necessity of women in bread production was woven into societies and cultures at large through the evolution of time. But if we look to the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, we will see a chasm and a noticeable shift away from women’s overt connection to bread.
In the 1890’s, as Aaron Bobrow-Strain writes in his book White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, 90% of bread was baked in the American home. “There's just lots of intellectual and sensual pleasures that women had baking bread before 1880,” said Dr. Trumpler, whose most recent bakes include her favorite rye wheat sourdough bread and a Harvest Apple Challah. Grain grinding was a socializing and social activity, whether women were grinding grain themselves or taking it to their local miller to have it stone ground. An understanding of fermentation and leavening was required when women collected yeast from their own hard apple cider, adding molasses and rye when they needed to re-vivify it to use it as a starter. There was a lot of knowledge and skill in tending the hearth or wood-burning oven to make the bread. Saturdays, specifically, were dedicated to day-long bakes that produced multiple loaves of bread for the entire week. “And that's the life that most women had...most women did their work in their home so that keeping things going along the day was not something that was onerous,” Dr. Trumpler concluded.
However, by 1930 in America, Bobrow-Strain identifies that 90% of bread was baked in factories. Industrialization changed the world in a major way, and with it the nature of bread. Local mills making stone-ground flour dwindled with the rise of the roller mill and automatic milling; white flour displaced whole grain flour because it was considered more sanitary and pure; the invention of the electric oven limited baking to only one loaf at a time as opposed to the fulfilling and efficient Saturday baking bursts; commercial yeast and commercial baking powder became the ideal as opposed to the former wild yeast starters; our understanding of leavening and how to use it changed. In the process of commercializing what had been a way of life for women, baking went on to become, by and large, the monetized work of men. Baked into this evolution (pun intended) is the fact that women aren’t choosing to make bread because it is no longer pleasurable.
Until recently, I can’t say that I’ve ever truly understood the pleasure of baking bread. My inner eight-year-old had been too focused on the displeasure I would feel if that bread made my physical body undesirable in society’s eyes. I imagine that is how so many women got divorced from bread—the sick, twisted, nonsensically crafted social and cultural ideals of the female body that hang over our heads. Roxane Gay says it best in her book Hunger: “It is a powerful lie to equate thinness with self-worth. Clearly, this lie is damn convincing because the weight loss industry thrives. Women continue to try to bend themselves to societal will. Women continue to hunger. And so do I.” And so do I.
So much of why we demonize bread is wrapped up in a self-serving diet industry that offers a monetized solution to something they have deemed problematic; we are the puppets and they are the seemingly all-powerful puppet master. But baking bread is an act of resistance against this culture of fear. It is a symbol of power and worth, and a way for women to shift the conversation about their bodies away from public discourse and, literally and figuratively, into their own hands.
“If you think about, say, the 1850s, women's lives were pretty hard, but that sense of having control over the making of bread, and the making of other things, you know, the making of clothes, for example, I think was a powerful thing that we've lost,” said Dr. Trumpler. When the bare shelves of March 2020 left us without the now traditional all-purpose flour and commercial yeast, we looked to our ancestors, to ancient grains and fermentation. It is through bread that we have continued to seek control in a situation that is completely devoid of it.
The question flashing on the ticker-tape circling my brain is: why bread? Why not seek control through gumbo or flan? From a purely practical standpoint, bread has a low barrier to entry. You really only need three ingredients (flour, water, and salt, which have a relatively nominal cost if you don’t already have them at home) and the desire to try. From a more cerebral angle, bread is a unique vehicle through which women can grapple with the notion of taking up physical space.
Society and the diet industry tell us the following: the less space women take up, the more they matter. Bread, however, is the antithesis of this. It goes through multiple proofing processes where the yeast is activated and the dough doubles, even triples, in size. It is wild, unapologetic, and wholly autonomous.
When I spoke with Zoe Kanan, a master baker proclaimed by Vogue as “one of the women changing the way we think about bread”, she hypothesized about the visual aspect in the act of consuming bread: “I mean, it's a sponge, and it's full of air...it really fills your mouth when you eat it.” There’s something incredibly satisfying, powerful and rebellious about that fullness. “I wonder if there's something even visceral...about this idea that eating bread expands your body,” said Zoe. I wonder, too.
Eating bread is a commitment. And it’s really rugged. There is nothing dainty (read: small) about it. To get a bite out of a nice, crusted piece of bread, you have to open your mouth. Wide. With great conviction. Your upper lip will rise. The world will see your front teeth. That little area around the bridge of your nose might even scrunch up and threaten wrinkles. You’ll need force to tear away from the slice. The sheer volume of the bread fills the mouth, a space that is expected to look empty. Be empty. It’s an act of defiance, eating bread. Women can luxuriate in largeness instead of shrinking away in shame and self-doubt.
I can’t help but notice the catharsis here, how each bite can be a reclamation of ownership over the female form. Similarly, I think there is great healing to be found in making something (a loaf of bread) out of almost nothing (flour, water, and salt).
“It’s the process itself,” Zoe said. “This transformation...that you create, you know, this dough, this paste, into something that’s extremely tangible and beautiful to look at.” Bread becomes a companion, both for the baker and for those who get to share in eating the creation.
This companionship feels rooted in “this impetus in women to provide...to keep the world going” says Cheryl Holbert, a tapestry artist and the owner of New Hampshire’s Nomad Bakery. Despite the stake that has successfully been driven between women and bread, that instinct to nurture is almost hard-coded. We can even look to the namesake of the sourdough starter for proof. As legend has it, the starter is called “the mother” because when a woman was getting married, her mother would send her off with a piece of sourdough so she could bake bread the very next morning without having to create her own starter from scratch. As Apollonia put it, “It's something that we've been doing...for so many moons that it becomes something that is second nature.”
In this most recent time of crisis, we didn’t see a movement of women making fancy French entremets (truth be told, that would be sensational). Women chose, and were chosen by, bread. Bread is a symbol of life, and wherever we may be in our journey with bread, it sustains us. It has the power to not only withstand the test of time and tenuous relationships but to challenge them.
Perhaps this particular conversation is new, but it pulls from antiquity. It reminds us that wherever there is flour, water, and yeast, there is ineradicable femininity.
Stefanie is a creative, a bread artist, and a food studies student based in NYC.