I Baked You a Loaf of Happiness

Years ago I bought a 9inch black pot at an antique store just because I liked it. I could visualise where and how this small detail could add to the complete picture in our country kitchen. All the iron pots added to the ambiance of an iron oven door and pot ratchets in the kitchen. The kitchen could not only look like a country kitchen it had to smell like one too.

The dough doing what dough should do

 

For me it had to start with the smell of baking bread and I decided to bake it in the black pot, a country "potbrood". How does one describe the smell of baking bread to someone that has never smelled it. It starts off with a yeasty smell while your dough rises and while the bread is baking it fills the kitchen with a smell of comfort and happiness. Where homemade bread is baking there is a sense of family, sharing, warmth and love.

Freshly Baked Bread

The bread in the black pot has become a Towerwater tradition never changing because you do not need to change or adapt a good thing. Some days I have to bake more because friends can finish a loaf in no time. The experience start with the slicing through the crisp crust into the warm soft heart of the rustic loaf and then you let the butter melt into your chunky slice.

I can smell this from memory

It has gone beyond a loaf of bread and has become a symbol of love, sharing and the essence of Towerwater's kitchen. It turns a meal into an experience. Now when I want to invite happiness into our home I just bake a 9inch loaf of bread.

If Pablo Neruda could write an ode to bread how can I deny the poetry of bread to fill our house?

Ode to bread

Bread,
you rise
from flour,
water
and fire.
Dense or light,
flattened or round,
you duplicate
the mother's
rounded womb,
and earth's
twice-yearly
swelling.
How simple
you are, bread,
and how profound!
You line up
on the baker's
powdered trays
like silverware or plates
or pieces of paper
and suddenly
life washes
over you,
there's the joining of seed
and fire,
and you're growing, growing
all at once
like
hips, mouths, breasts,
mounds of earth,
or people's lives.
The temperature rises, you're overwhelmed
by fullness, the roar
of fertility,
and suddenly
your golden color is fixed.
And when your little wombs
were seeded,
a brown scar
laid its burn the length
of your two halves'
toasted
juncture.
Now,
whole,
you are
mankind's energy,
a miracle often admired,
the will to live itself.
......

Pablo Neruda

If you liked this excerpt you will love the complete ode.