Breads

A friend, the chef of a catering firm here in Houston, brought my son and me a gift of the traditional St. Patrick’s Day Soda bread and some split pea soup to go with it. I didn’t know about Soda Bread being traditional. I always thought it was corned beef and cabbage.

My son thought Soda Bread would be a new taste experience for me but I had eaten it many times during the depression years when Grandma and Grandpa Abbott lived with us on the asparagus farm. Grandma and Mom baked it occasionally but the family really never cared for it so we didn’t have it often. The Soda Bread of my childhood was plain not fancy with nuts and raisins like ‘Chef’s’ present.

It took skill to bake things in the oven of our big cast iron kitchen range. We seemed to have developed a sixth sense when we baked pies, cakes, rolls and loaves of bread. The wood and coal fire would have heated the oven to an unknown degree and we had to guess at the baking time. We timed the baking of bread according to the color. When the crust turned a golden brown it was time to remove it from the oven.

When I got home from school in the afternoons, I often had to finish working up the bread dough Mom had made earlier in the day. The yeast dough would have risen to fill the container and it had to be punched down before forming it into loaves. If bread was needed for supper that night, I might make rolls as well as loaves. I often made ‘fried bread’ too for an after school snack.
I would stretch and pull a small pinch of raw dough until it was about the size of my palm and drop it into a skillet of hot oil. As soon as it was golden brown on one side it was browned on the other then drained on a paper towel.

The kids would hang around the kitchen yelling ‘dibs’ for the next piece and slather mounds of butter on it while it was still piping hot. They would juggle the bread from hand to hand until it cooled enough to eat.

Many years later some girl friends raved about eating ‘squaw bread' at an Indian pow wow and invited me to join them the following week. You can imagine my surprise when I saw that ‘squaw bread’ was nothing more than our ‘fried bread’. I told the girls I had been raised on the same and they refused to believe me.

When my sister, Esther, visited several weeks ago, my son took Esther and me to browse Central Market. When we came to the bakery, the choice of breads was over whelming. Every size, shape, color and ethnic preference was exhibited. The delicious odor of baking bread caused our eyes to get bigger than our stomachs and the three of us left the market with enough varieties to feed a platoon of Marine recruits.

I want to make Boston Brown Bread and have saved a lot of coffee cans to use when I get around to making the recipe. Mom used to make it often for the family and Esther remembers helping her but has forgotten the details. She recalled enough of the recipe and how the coffee cans were used, that I could surf the net for a recipe that fit Esther’s memory. Until I found the recipe I had been unaware that brown bread is cooked on top of the stove and not in an oven. The batter is poured into greased coffee cans, covered with aluminum foil and placed in a pan of water which is simmered on top of the stove.


My brother Mickey taught me how to make Angel Biscuits years ago when I lived in Palo Alto. He was spending the Christmas holidays with me on his weeks of R&R before returning to his job as cook on an oil rig off the coast of Alaska. Mickey was a gourmet cook and was a delight to work with in the kitchen. He was a lot of fun and enjoyed sharing his knowledge, but he could and did use every pot, pan and utensil in the kitchen to serve his purpose then steadfastly refuse to wash them and left the clean up to others.

I am not fond of biscuits and rarely eat them, but Mickey guaranteed that I would like his Angel Biscuits. I was doubtful, but was happy to hand him so and so and give him this and that when he asked. He was right! I was won over after the first bite! They were so delicious I asked him to make them several more times that Christmas holiday.

Recently I have discovered Bread sticks. There is a place here in Houston called, Café Express. They keep a large basket filled with imported Italian bread sticks on the condiment bar. Each packet holds 5 or 6 sticks each a foot long and half the diameter of a pencil. They are scrumptious and I thoroughly enjoy the way they ‘crunch’ as I nibble from one end to the other.

When I first discovered them I took to grabbing 3 or 4 of the packets to nibble on while we waited for our orders, but I made certain there was a packet or two left that I could take home when we finished eating. My purse is too small to hold bread sticks, so recently I graduated from nibbling them while eating there, to getting orders ‘to go’ which allows us to stop at the condiment bar on our way out to grab a really big handful of bread sticks. The other day as I was eating the last of the sticks I had at home, I wondered if there was some way I could, in easy conscience, exchange my purse for a tote bag the next time we go to Café Express. Perhaps the more prudent move would be ordering a case directly from the bakery in Italy.