Reprinted from the Zingerman’s Newsletter, January-February 2009

Based on everything I’ve learned here’s what goes into a good Jewish rye bread:

#1 A Good Rye Sour Starter
The old style, Jewish rye starter is made by taking the previous day’s fully baked rye bread—what Michael and the bakers of the era in which he grew up used to straightforwardly call “old.”

The general wisdom of course is that the consumer can’t tell the difference. We’ve never agreed with that, and I certainly don’t think it to be true about the rye bread. But…. others don’t always agree. Michael told me the story of one of running into one of the guys whose family had one of the best old time Jewish bakeries in the City. To Michael’s taste though the bread wasn’t as good as what he remembers. So Michael, who’s rarely afraid to hold back his opinions, asked if he was still using the old style starter. “Na!” he said forcefully. “Nobody knows the difference!” And then, Michael went on, “He took out this wad of bills, waves it front of me says, ‘Remember Michael, this is your best friend.” Yikes. That’s a bridge I don’t ever want to cross. Keeping the rye bread and its crust and flavor intact is not a ball I want to let drop. There’s so little left—the Bakehouse is the bridge that people can walk over to cross back to the way that bread was when Michael was growing up!
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Reprinted from the Zingerman’s Newsletter, January-February 2009

Bridges break. My mother died this year.

It’s a strange feeling, this death of a parent thing. Everyone who’s been through it, I’m sure, has had some sense of what I’m talking about, though, of course, we each work with it in our own way, and I can only speak to my own experience. While there are many layers of grieving for me to get through (I’m only about eight months into it), and I’m sure that the process will continue for many years—most likely, I guess, for life—I think the hardest part so far really has been this sense of a bridge having broken. I know that the “land” on the other side, where I lived my life until this past May is very real. But it’s equally real and all too true that I’ll never be back there again.

Mind you this isn’t an essay about death so I’m a bit wary to get into all this. But bread and life, and hence bread and life’s absence have been linked for many thousands of years as they have been this year for me. In honesty, my grieving process hasn’t been one of tragic turmoil. It’s very hard and very strange but it has not really been heart-rending in the way I often imagined it to be. My mother lived a full life and made a positive difference for a LOT of people. She substitute-taught in the same Jewish day school (where I went as a kid) for probably nigh on 40 years. There were like 600 people at her funeral, many of whom were former students who loved her. She died at 78, which, I know isn’t so “old” any more, but it’s not like the friend of a friend who died last month in a helicopter crash—he was forty with young kids.
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