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Inheritance

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Pictured Recipe: Honey Oat Quick Bread

Learning to make fresh bread on the farm.

By Sue Browning EatingWell March/April 2008

Oven-Fresh Bread Recipes

It was in my Grandma Clara’s farm kitchen, amid a cloud of flour and the heady fragrance of yeast, that I inherited my knowledge of bread making. I can’t use the word learned because that would be an inadequate description. From an early age, my education on what it took to make bread extended beyond our kitchen into the fields where oats and wheat grew, the barn where milk and butter came from, and the chicken coop where I collected brown eggs from disapproving hens who scolded me for my efforts.

On bread day I helped my grandmother gather tools and ingredients on the kitchen counter. The counter ran beneath a window that faced west across land ruffled with fields of hay and corn. Beyond the windowsill, a line of oak trees my grandparents had planted early in their marriage followed a tractor road as it curved between the garden and the machine shed. The oaks stopped at the edge of the garden, but the dirt road went on until it was swallowed up by pasture. In spring, while I created white mountains on the counter with the flour sifter, we watched my grandfather plowing in the distance, the rich soil churning up behind him like black flour.

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