When I first heard of the Bread Houses Network, I was taken with the idea’s simplicity, naiveté almost, and I was taken with memories. On Christmas Eve we make a round bread with “fortunes” – an old silver coin symbolizes the best of everything one may wish for, there is also a dogwood twig for health, a bean for fertility (both of the earth and the person), and a button for travels. For Easter we bake and braid sweet bread. Then, there are breads for weddings, funerals, baptisms, to celebrate a kid’s first steps. There are also the breads on cold winter evenings – aromatic, sweating kitchen windows and filling the whole house with the smell of home; warm, liquefying the butter, turning golden. These are my memories, my childhood in Bulgaria. These are also my present, my presence in my son’s childhood in the U.S. When I knead and bake bread, I am here and there, now and then, together and whole. The simplicity turns out to be quite complex and I am even more taken. So taken, in fact, that we – I and two others, Dr. Leda Cooks and Emily Polk – start a Pioneer Valley Bread House. It is only the second Bread House in the United States, but, around the world, there are Bread Houses on five continents. They serve as cultural centers, as places for learning and community, where people, who may otherwise never meet, come together and knead love. The founder of the Bread Houses Network, Dr. Nadezhda Savova, calls it a “high-touch” way to connect, share knowledge, and learn – to be and become together. Kneading is a nice metaphor for the not-always-gentle coming together of community. But we also make no-knead and gluten-free breads and they, too, are conversation starters. Bread itself is the metaphor and it is also very materially nutritional. Bread is a process of mixing, of care, of rising, of sharing, of physical and social sustenance. Whether it’s made out of wheat, rice, potatoes, corn, nut flours, etc., bread feeds bellies and imaginations around the world. One does not have to have made bread before to have a bread-story. We’ve all held bread, tasted bread, maybe even hungered for it. Bread connects us, while honoring the multiplicity of our differences. It opens us up to the telling of stories, desires, unmet needs, hunger and possibilities. During a typical Bread House kneading, we make bread, of course, but this is not a culinary class. A Bread House is a context – for storytelling and creative activities. We make bread puppets and tell our stories with them. We draw and write on paper and in flour. We learn from our children how to let go of our fear of “mistakes” and that playfulness makes bread sweeter. Out of five basic ingredients – flour, yeast, water, salt, sugar – and a repetitive motion, comes out sustenance and learning. Bread teaches. It has taught me that
transformation needs touch and engagement – under our hands, out of disparate ingredients comes out a wholeness, a loaf, waiting to be shared. Bread has taught me that growth needs patience and interaction with the surrounding contexts – like bread, communities need time to ferment and rise, a process that is always different under
different environmental factors. Bread is forgiving and teaches me to let go – recipe or not, bread always turns out and satisfies hunger. Bread is sweeter when you smile, play, create with it. Bread has taught me to knead both joys (sugar) and tears (salt) into life ... Then life itself will have the shape of bread, deep and simple, immeasurable and pure. – from “Ode to Bread” by Pablo Neruda
Lily Herakova ’05 (left), who is the co-founder of Pioneer Valley Bread House, helps Ilana Polyak, Florence, Mass., and Polyak’s children, Stefan Maitinsky, 3, and Jakob “Kobi” Maitinsky, 2, make bread at B’nai Israel in Northampton, Mass.
Photo above: Reprinted with permission of the Daily Hampshire Gazette. All rights reserved.
Lily Herakova ‘05 is a mother, baker, scholar and writer. She holds a doctorate in communication from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and teaches at Western New England University in Springfield, Mass.
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