Apothecary News: Last call for the 2024 planner! We are working hard to get the 2025 edition of the planner finalized and printed early this year before baby comes. Even though we are more than halfway through the year, there are still many great writings, recipes, and spaces to plan and reflect that you can utilize year round in the 2024 planner. Plus the final handful of planners are 50% off!
“The modest reverence of our ancestors, picking up and kissing slices of bread when they happened to fall on the ground; the utter disgust I caused my grandmother when throwing out uneaten bread – mouldy or dry, inedible for anyone; the customs that are still cultivated at weddings or official ceremonies, such as inaugurations of public buildings and end-of-summer harvest festivals (“dożynki”); the mysterious link to the spiritual, the divine, the (super)natural – suddenly appeared perfectly proper after (tasting bread made by hand.”
~ Klara Czerniewska-Andryszczyk on the traditions of bread in Polish culture
Chaos has a way of circling, a shark that smells blood, closer and closer until there is no space to move, to breathe. So much to do, but hands don’t seem to move, mind doesn’t know the next step forward. Instead we sit, we scroll, we stare at a screen, praying this faceless predator passes us by eventually.
There is a cure though for thoughts that won’t stop and bodies that won’t start. A survival method for when we are lost at sea, watching as the next wave threatens to capsize.
There is bread. There has always been bread. At least 30,000 years of it. Back then, rocks were used for pounding the starch from the roots of plants such as cattails and ferns. Placed on a flat rock and cooked over the fire, these simple concoctions of plant fiber and water created the first breads, one of the earliest prepared foods.
Our hands remember what it was to be those early humans. Grinding, mixing, baking, (and eventually kneading once leavened bread was invented). They remember what it felt like to sit by a fire shaping a dough, passing it from person to person in communal solidarity.
Once grain could be grown, bread rose to divinity. Now this seed we could plant in the soil, we could also tend throughout the spring and summer, harvest in the fall, process for the winter, simply to make this staple. The scythes used to harvest grain became a peasant’s sole defense as they fought for freedom during uprisings. Each piece of the bread puzzle shaping life, land and religion.
It was a year round devotion that birthed a new kind of god. A god that could physically sustain us through the lean months. It made its way into sacred ceremonies, as offerings, as talismans of magic and intention.
After all, the term zboże in Polish denotes cereal grains, but refers to something coming “straight from god”.
Each culture created its own bread gods, for times of celebration, mourning, prayer, survival. This our spirits remember. It remembers standing in a crowded kitchen full of laughter, baking braided bread for a new bride, in the hopes of a long and prosperous marriage. It was a time of magic making. It remembers breaking off a piece of the daily bread and setting it at the hearth for the house spirits, a symbol of our hardest labors.
So, when chaos spirals in, snapping its teeth at our toes, we can make bread. As you awaken the yeast, you call on something much older than our current burdens. When you mix in the flour and salt, you pay homage to those who mixed them first. As you knead, you destroy all notions of helplessness and overwhelm.
You are taking direct action. You are making something good and divine and nourishing to the body and spirit. You may find as the bread rises that your mood also rises, your thoughts clear, your path forward becomes certain, if only for this day.
The bread bakes and that ancient sacred aroma fills the kitchen, drawing in anyone else the house holds. An old echo of those communal bread making fires. See their eyes close as they take it in, connecting to their own ancestral selves.
In the end, once the bread is pulled from the oven, you realize the lines have blurred. The bread itself, the land from which the grain originated, the divine threads that weave past to present, and you and your hands are all one and the same. All equally as holy and integral to the process of bread making, wheel turning, life living. You are pulled back into the flow of things.
It will be a steady reminder over the next few days as it is consumed that even when the world burns, you can always make bread.
A simple sacred recipe…
To be honest, I haven’t had the time or courage to tackle sourdough like everyone else, but this recipe includes whole wheat flour which makes me feel like I’m being at least a bit healthier. I try to use as many organic options of the ingredients listed below, but use what you’ve got. This has become my foolproof recipe for baking delicious fresh bread and for digging my mind out of dark places.