He leaned across the table. “That French idiot — he is totally insane.” His eyes were over-bright, his hands flat on the table. “He thinks that his cooking—his meat—is what’s important? I feel sorry for him. I feel pity. He doesn’t know that everyone is waiting for dessert?”
I thought about this sharp, hot energy years later when I began to rethink my character. I wanted her to have the same sort of nature, with that blend of male and female, ambition and comfort. Still, I tried to imagine all sorts of other pursuits for her: teacher, nurse, illustrator, tour guide: nothing fit. There seemed to be an obvious solution and yet I avoided it.
Perhaps the problem wasn’t simply about gender bias or status symbols but my own familiarity with the subject. I became a writer out of a state of crisis: as a child, I was drowned out by my loud relatives. My family was too insistent, too restrictive, too traditionaclass="underline" the spoken truth was dangerous. But if I wrote things down, I could take risks, just about get to the truth of things, my own truth. Writing gave me a sense of creativity, openness, and audacity — which meant everything to me. I had a dread of telling the same stories over and over — worse, of being expected to tell the same sort of story. I’d already written a novel about a chef in a Lebanese restaurant and a memoir filled with family recipes. How could I write about a baker and not repeat myself? I feared the story couldn’t possibly stay rough and strange and new enough. It seemed inevitable that those deep planes of discovery and emotional risk would be smoothed away, polished by repetition into familiar old ideas. And so few American novelists seem to lavish much attention on eating and cooking in their stories — perhaps there was something inherently limited about such a basic human function. Just how far could I get with a baker?
An editor told me: It isn’t necessary to reinvent the wheel with each new book.
I found this thought both reassuring and terrifying.
My new novel was about parents and children: as I revised I started to think about the way children teach themselves the things their parents fail to give them. I knew several women with unstable, unavailable mothers, and these daughters had become wonderful cooks, as if to supply themselves with the essential nutrients for living. Was the corollary true, I wondered — if you grew up with an unstable father were you drawn to baking? It seemed to be true in my own family, with its several generations of erratic fathers and daughters who loved to bake. I considered: so much of baking is a meditation: resting, rising, measuring. In the absence of a steady, trustworthy breadwinner, do children learn to make their own bread?
I was skittish when I met Scott. I’d been married and divorced, twice, and at the time I no longer trusted anything or anyone — least of all myself. In the beginning, I thought of our relationship as a kind of play: Even though we were in our thirties, we were still children, the two of us, broke, without houses, cars, or savings. But one day, about a month into our relationship, I woke up and the apartment smelled soft and sweet: he’d made biscuits — pillowy rectangles to eat with jam and butter. These were followed over the next days and weeks by cookies, loaves of whole wheat bread, and a dense chocolate cake dusted with confectioner’s sugar. A few weeks before Thanksgiving, Scott made an apple pie. He peeled, sliced, and layered the apples with cinnamon, nutmeg, and butter. He cut lard and butter into the flour and kneaded it just to the point of smoothness. As he slid it from the oven in a plume of fragrance, I noticed the lid of crust was topped with a pastry cut out: a heart-shaped apple sprouting leaves. Wearing two elbow-deep oven mitts, he held it up. I snapped his photograph: he appears to be ducking slightly inhaling the aroma, a trace of a smile on his face, his expression says: come hither.
I loved the measured pace of our courtship, like the waiting patience of baking itself. It seems Penelopean: kneading, braiding, weaving the dough, only to devour it later and begin again in the morning. My husband won me over, in part, through his baking. My grandmother, I think, would have been won over too. When he met my father, of course, Scotty avoided the too-gentle topic of baking; instead they talked about guns and knives, racehorses and whiskey. And cooking. Manly things.
If I were going to write about a baker, I realized, I would be writing very close to the bone. The greatest challenge became one of perception and interpretation: how to avoid the sweetness? The sentimentality of baking, of something drawn straight from childhood? My character would have to be someone who worked with the blackest of chocolate, the kind with the barest traces of sugar. She would work in bitterness. I wanted the desert of dessert. I knew there was plenty of darkness within the glittering whiteness.
Slowly, carefully, I began to research baking in much the same way that I researched the occupations of my other characters: visiting libraries, interviewing professionals, visiting workplaces. I haunted the floury kitchens of bakeries, studied cookbooks, and invited a baker over for dinner. He showed me how to fold butter into puff pastry and talked about the reasons he became a baker:
He liked to get up in the dark.
He hated offices.
He wanted to meet women.
I realized I needed to come closer to my subject, if I could. I’d been a fixture at my grandmother’s side throughout much of my childhood, which meant that I learned how to use a rolling pin, a balloon whisk, a candy thermometer — all without her ever admitting to teaching me. It was just something we did together as we talked. She showed me how to fold melted chocolate into stiff egg whites, to keep every last speck of yolk out of the whites, to invert the angel food pan on to the neck of a bottle so it would hold its loft as it cooled. In this understated way, she showed me the connection between baking and identity: It seemed that our hands were innately shaped to the curve of the dough; the motion of our arms lengthening and folding was the natural movement of kneading.
In my summer before college, Gram took me to Europe. We went, she said, so I could get “culture.” Looking back, it seems the actual purpose of the trip was to investigate French boulangeries and patisseries. We glanced at the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower on our way to bake shops. We entered tiny places with polished stone floors and wooden counters where customers lined up for a few simple yet indelibly delicious cakes. We crouched over cases glittering with bright fruit aspics and twirls of meringue like whipped hairdos and mousses shaped like birds and starfish. Both treat and art object, these delicacies seemed to have a presence, an enduring nature that savory food did not.
Now, years later, I started remembering as I began rewriting. And I knew I’d have to go just a little further: I’d have to start baking again. I wanted to feel the dough under my palms, to remember the scent of butter, the taste of a vanilla crumb fresh from the oven. It had been months since the last time I’d poured batter into a pan. I had a baby now; I was teaching as well as writing; it was hard to find the time to bake. Cooking dinner was a necessity but baking had started to seem a luxury.
I decided to return to flour by starting with chocolate gingered cookies. A friend in my writing group had introduced these to me — decorative little disks — pretty, laborious, gingery-hot and wickedly seductive: just the right balance, I thought, of light and dark. As I whipped the butter and egg, I thought about how writing is a bit like baking: assembling the ingredients, mixing them, hoping it will all turn out. With each step of the recipe, a bit more of the main character revealed herself to me: when I grated the hot ginger I sensed her anger, scraping out the vanilla bean I felt her compulsiveness and perfectionism. Once the pan was in the oven I felt her anguish, the loss of something dear, the faithless wait for the impossible. She would be, I knew, the darkest character I’d ever written. I hadn’t known this before I’d turned the oven on.