The Bread and the Dark

This is not, of course, how meteorology works — the days of the week do not in fact somehow self-arrange thus — but it feels like it does in my memory. The first true snow, the one that sticks, the one that changes the garden into something else entirely, comes on a Thursday evening, as the light is giving up. And in the morning on Friday, I make bread.

My grandmother just never used the R word. She would have snorted at the word, rolled her eyes at how precious it was. “It’s only bread,” she would say, but her hands worked as solemnly as in a rite as they shaped the dough. But ritual is what it turned out to be, taught not by teaching but simply by watching, over the hundred Friday mornings I spent in her kitchen while snow piled up on the windowsill and the house filled with yeast and warmth.

Seven years ago, she was gone. The ritual remains.

The Preparation

I start one night before, always. Thursday night, when the dark comes quickly and thoroughly, I pour flour into the big ceramic bowl that used to be hers. Two parts whole wheat, one part rye, lots of white flour that she called “the easy part.” The measurements are imprecise. She never committed them to paper, never measured with anything besides her cupped palm and her intuition. I have tried to re-create this — the casual handful, the eyeballed portion — but I am a product of my generation, fretful and exact. I use a scale. I write things down.

The water must be blood-warm. Not so hot, the yeast dies; not so cold, and it’s slower to rise. I test it against my wrist, like a baby’s bottle, another habit that I’ve learned from watching her. In this warmth the yeast dissolves, blooms into life with a leisure that seems almost aggressive in slowness. There is nothing in the process of making bread that doesn’t tell you not to rush, that you have to accommodate its timeline and not your own.

I stir until something shaggy and rough forms, then I cover the bowl with her damp tea towel (printed with a pattern of faded strawberries) and leave it on the countertop overnight. This is the part that feels most like magic, most like a ritual: the letting be, trusting that something in darkness has known to shift.

The Waking

It’s grey as Friday morning. Winter light in England is an apology, a token effort to be bright that flags by mid-afternoon. I wake to this tentative dawn and slip straight in the dressing gown on, going into the kitchen unshod so my feet are cold against the floorboards.

The dough has risen. It always comes, and I’m always surprised, always quietly relieved. It has doubled in bulk, straining against the tea towel, living in a way that still terrifies me a little. My grandmother would say the dough was breathing. Now I know what she was getting at—the surface heaves almost imperceptibly, pulsing in and out as gases slosh around inside.

I punch it down. This is the fact: punching down. There’s something satisfying about slamming your fist into the pillow of dough and then watching it deflate with a soft sigh. Then I turn it out onto the counter and knead.

This is meditation without the fakery of mindfulness, without someone telling you to concentrate on your breath or empty your mind. When your hands are busy pushing and folding, pushing and folding, your mind empties itself. At first the dough resists, springs back, won’t become smooth. You persist. You add flour when it’s sticky, you add nothing when it’s dry. You read what it needs without being told.

My grandmother kneaded bread the way others pray, using all of her body to press and push, the weight of her body into each motion. I am shorter than she was and less sure in my movements, but I try to feel the rhythm of her motion. I knead for 10 minutes, perhaps even 12. Long enough for me to get cramps in my arms. Long enough that the dough turns elastic and smooth, no longer pushing back against me.

The Waiting

I divide the dough into two, shape it and put in the tins she gave me when I moved into my first flat. They were old already at that time, darkened by the years they’d been used and seasoned in a way new tins never are. The loaves are placed in a warm spot — on top of the radiator in winter, near the window during other seasons — to rise a second time.

This is their second boom, abbreviated in time but not sensation. The first rising is while I sleep, time crashing into unselfconsciousness. This is the one I have to sit through, alert and awake, as the loaves gently rise. I make coffee. I look out the window at the garden, at how snow has softened every edge and corner, how it’s made the familiar strange.

My grandmother would have put this time to good use, making other things — soup, usually, something that could simmer all day and get better. I am less organized. I swipe through my phone, respond to emails, feel guilty about that too. Waiting is the most difficult part of all rituals, a time when doubt can seep in. And what if the bread doesn’t rise? What if I murdered the yeast or added too much salt, or fell short some other invisible way?

But the loaves rise. Slowly, incrementally, they rise.

The Transformation

The oven has to be hot — hotter than you might think necessary for something as tender as bread. I preheat it to 220 and stick a metal tray of water on the bottom rack. It’s the steam, my grandmother said — that’s what makes the crust. Without it, the bread will be pale and limp, missing the crust that shatters under your knife.

Once the loaves have doubled—puffy and tender, touched by the ghost impression of my fingertip when I press one—I slash their tops with a sharp knife. Three short, diagonal slashes on each loaf. My grandmother's signature, now mine. The slits enable the bread to expand upwards in a controlled manner when it bakes, instead of bursting randomly. They also give the loaves beauty, make a pattern that looks intentional and old.

In the oven they go, and that’s when the real magic happens. I can see them change through the oven door. The cuts lead to deep chasms. The crust starts to get a little darker, a bit of character and complexity. The scent is in the kitchen, at first, and then tumbles through the rest of your home — yeast and caramelization, wheat and warmth. It’s the smell of my childhood, of Fridays at my grandmother’s house, mornings in her kitchen, of being small and safe and certain that the world is fundamentally good.

Thirty-five minutes. That's how long they bake. I time it, but I don’t have to. I know when they’re done by the way they smell, by the colour of the crust as it deepens, through some internal clock that’s been adjusted through years and years of repetition.

The Breaking

You need to let the loaves cool before slicing them — this is the rule, one of them that I consistently break. My grandmother used to slap the back of my hand with a wooden spoon if I ever tore into hot bread. "You'll ruin it," she'd say. “It has to finish in here.” She was right, technically. Because slicing hot bread releases steam and may cause the interior of the loaf to become gummy. But I have never been able to wait, at least not completely. Warmth, yielding softness and the melting of butter into the still-hot crumb have far more sensory appeal than technical faultlessness.

I slice thick and while the loaves are still warm enough to demand an oven mitt. I smear them with butter and honey, sometimes with jam my grandmother made decades ago that I’ve frozen, hoarding it like a miser. I stand at the counter eating, looking out at the white garden, at winter comfortably seated for its long visit.

This is the time when you are doing the ritual. Not the bread itself, exactly — it’s good bread, better than any I can buy. But this moment of eating something I’ve made with my hands, something that connects me to her, to the long line of people who have mixed flour and water and salt and waited for magic to happen. There is always the perfect first bite: a crust that crackles, a soft interior with glimmers of tangy fermentation and sweet wheat.

The Sharing

I’ll have a slice, maybe two. Then I wrap one of the loaves in a tea towel, and stroll through the snow to my neighbour's house. Margaret is seventy-six and lives alone after her spouse's death. So she’ll be looking for the bread today, and every Friday morning in winter when the snow is on the ground. I never announce I'm coming. I just turn up at her door with the loaf newly baked and warm, and she puts on the kettle and we sit in her pokey little kitchen (smaller than Jeremy’s sketched one but, if you can imagine it, even more snug) for tea and bread.

We don't talk about much. The weather. Her garden plans for spring. My work. Her grandchildren. The bread is between us on the table, and we keep coming back to it over the course of our talk here, to slice off another piece or spoon on more butter. The ritual stretches beyond my kitchen, becomes communal in this quiet way.

This is something my grandmother would do. She always baked in twos — one for us, and the other to give away. “Bread isn’t bread until it’s shared,” she had told me once, and I hadn’t understood what she meant until I was grown, until I’d spent enough time alone to know the way that winter loneliness went; the snow-muffled streets, early darkness.

The Inheritance

I don’t know how many more winters of this I will do. Life changes—people move, circumstances shift. But for now, this winter and I hope many more to come, I bake bread on Friday mornings when there’s snow upon the ground. I’m kneading a dough with the rhythm of my grandmother. And I slash the tops with her pattern. I post the things I make, because that is what she taught me to do.

The ritual requires nothing of me but time and attention. It returns to us something more difficult to name: Continuity, maybe. Connection. The knowledge that my hands are doing what her hands did, that I’m links in a chain stretching back into the past and forward into whatever future preserves these small acts.

The bread is itself temporary — it will be spent, by Sunday, or stale. But the act of making it, of taking flour and water on a Friday morning and turning them into something nourishing and coherent — that endures. This happens, every time snow falls, every time it is winter and we are given to our own heat.

Never did my grandmother use the word ritual. But she gave it to me just the same, that habit of marking time, of sizing seasons not by dates on a calendar but by what we make with our hands, by the smell of baking bread, by the simple act of making something and giving it away.

It always snows for the first time on a Thursday. And on Friday morning, I bake bread.

This is how I remember her. This is what gets me through the winter. It’s how I discovered that ritual isn’t so much about the words you say or the big gestures you make as it is about the small, repetitive actions you take to form your days and connect yourself to something bigger than yourself.

The bread and the dark. The waiting and the warmth. The solitude and the sharing.

Winter carries its own rhythms. I have learned to dance with them.