The earliest memories I have of writing take place in the kitchen of my parents’ house, at a pine-topped table with blue legs, now painted green, sometimes with my brothers there, too. The lamp over the table has a design of stars punched into the metal shade, and it’s been there since before my parents bought the house in 1985. We did our homework in the kitchen because it was heated (by the oven), whereas the rest of the house, even in the depths of Minnesota winters, many degrees below zero Fahrenheit, was usually around 58° (52° at night). So my earliest memories of writing are inflected by a kind of glow from the hanging lamp, and by the feeling of warmth and comfort that comes from being in a room heated by a stove, and by a feeling of accompaniment—of being around others who are doing their own work. This was before any of us had headphones or Walkmans, so if there was music it came from the radio on top of the fridge, probably set to Minnesota Public Radio. If it was the weekend there was a chance (not huge but present) that my mom or dad would be baking something—soda bread or cheesecake, molasses cookies, shortbread. The kitchen became not only a warm and warmly lit place, but a place of good smells. Of course, it was already a place where we ate and the place where we were, for better or worse, together. No idyll, the kitchen was the scene of many fights, arguments, tantrums, and much bad behavior that my mother will assure you still takes place whenever my brothers and I are together there. This was the place—complex, layered, full of sense data, passed-through and occupied by many people and their desires/plans/actions/objects—that I learned to read and write.
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There’s an anecdote that says that Virginia Woolf used to tell her cook how to make bread (recounted in the cook’s memoirs). It garnered criticism from Angela Carter, who wrote that it was “just the sort of pretentiously frivolous and dilettantish thing a Bloomsbury would be good at” and who dismissed baking as part of her own “misspent youth as a housewife”. Carter went on to write that she “used to feel so womanly when [she] was baking [her] filthy bread. An ecstasy of false consciousness”. And I feel a thrum of indignation kindred to Carter’s when I read blogs that lionize an attractive and edited domesticity, a ‘womanly’ life (it is almost always women writing and photographing and baking and cleaning and sewing on these blogs) that seems to find everything ‘lovely’ and ‘wonderful’, in which every surface is clean and bread is baked daily.
But at the same time I know that baking bread is not frivolous, or pretentious, or dilettantish, necessarily. That it is no more essentially pretentious to make bread than to buy it, that criticisms can be leveled regardless of how one goes about getting one’s food (not to mention which food, exactly, one chooses to eat). I know, for myself rather than as a general proscription, that it feels good to make bread, and that making bread has helped me, just as printmaking has helped me and sewing has helped me, to restructure the world and see it differently. Baking has given me ways of connecting my thoughts and my body, my ideas and my feelings. It has also given me bread itself, and the pleasure of eating it, which is no small thing.
I think about a friend in England, an Italian woman who lived down the street from me, who baked bread at least once a day. She has a doctorate in film, she wants to write books. She is one of the most driven people I know. Baking bread for her family did not fall outside the arena of this drive, although, as with any case of multiple ambitions, it sometimes prevented her from doing all she hoped. Her kitchen was messy, full, transversed by adolescent children, a shambles. I loved it. I loved the warmth, the light, and the smell of bread or brioche or crostata baking. I needed to write, but I also needed to eat. In that kitchen I felt very much that both were possible, and indeed that they were linked. The work of the body good for the soul, etc. It was no false consciousness. I witnessed my friend’s struggle with her desire to do other things while she baked (and her desire to bake while she was writing, her desire to make clothes while she was tending her allotment). She was very aware at each turn of the possibilities there and of what she would give up by her choices. I gained a sense of interconnectedness and simultaneity from her. I also learned to make bread standing at her table.
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The thing about making bread, as opposed to writing, is that it has definite stages and a certain outcome. You never doubt whether or not you have bread once you have made bread, and even if it is not good this time, you can make it again for an investment of a few dollars and a few hours, much of which is waiting time. (See, here, too: the multiple.)
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Our tiny house faces north and has windows only on that side; as a consequence, there is not much light. But I recently discovered that in the kitchen, where the table abuts the window, there is much light. Not only that, I have plenty of room (no clutter on the table, whereas my desk is piles and piles surrounding my laptop), a fairly neutral space (no slips of paper, no notes, no postcards on the wall in front of me), and access to things that aid my writing: food, a kettle for tea, a door to the outdoors if I need to walk around, water, light, a view (only of our footpath, but still). There is something very pleasing about working in the kitchen that must come from my childhood.
I would sit in my Italian friend’s kitchen in England as she worked, with my notebook out, writing idly and without intention—just noticing. Making sketches. Enjoying the light from her west-facing windows. Enjoying the warmth and the smell of yeast in the rising dough.
In the kitchen I feel that life goes on. Some pressure is released and the work is not so urgent: not that I no longer feel the drive to do it, but that time is exposed to me in such a way that I can feel it as expansive rather than contracted. Cooking in general, not only baking, has given me an understanding of process and order-of-operations; like other complex work, it has taught me to observe consequences and to retain multiple strands of directions and ideas at once. Maybe it’s just being away from the sometimes-fraught space of the Desk, where I Must Produce Something and in the kitchen, which was one of the earliest sites of possibility for me—the possibility inherent in writing and reading—that changes my attitude about and ability to work.
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My father would bake cheesecake mostly on Saturday mornings, because it needed that long—a whole day and overnight—to bake and sit. My youngest brother, when he was in his teens, became very invested in the process of cheesecake-making as well as in making shortbread (another favorite of my dad’s). My mother made the cookies and the Irish (soda) bread. We sometimes had cakes from boxes. She also made pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving and for my birthday. My paternal grandmother made soft rolls with oat flour, I think. This is the limit of baking in my family. It was by no means daily, but it was done by many different people. I did not grow up with the sense that it was something one’s mother did. My mother was just as likely to be elsewhere in the house or outside of it.
I know that any activity one is reduced to by account of one’s gender or any other attribute is stifling. I don’t know, reader, whether baking is an oppressive chore for you, a bourgeois distraction in an age where sliced bread in grocery stores means more time to work on whatever else you prefer to do—but I am trying to speak, in my limited and fallible way, about what it has been to me, as a writer, and specifically as a writer who often struggles to write. Because of the way that being in kitchens has formed me as a writer, and because of the things that baking in particular has given me, I resist the reduction of my baking to an annihilation of my feminine creative desire. While Thou Art Woman Therefore Shalt Thou Bake is insulting, small, and limiting, the largeness I sense in myself wants more alleys to run down, not fewer. I find myself more stultified and more limited when I have closed off these other alleys, only allowing myself to think of Sitting At The Desk Writing Or Reading as Work. Not only do I work less efficiently and make less thought/writing when I force myself to limit what ‘work’ can encompass, I find my writing less vivid when I divorce myself from the kinds of tactile experiences that feed it. I wouldn’t want to be reduced to those activities—but I want to acknowledge how access to them is not exclusively limiting. How, in fact, it has things to teach me, too.