>>>>Some years, I even skip the bakery and make my own challah (using my grandmother's recipe) that day, but I was still feeling pretty sick Friday, so buying was much easier. Fortunately, there's no real gift shopping in the little area near here where the bakery is, so parking wasn't a problem.
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>>>There is nothing better than home made bread. I sometimes make my own Challah too. Beyond the obvious glory of the aroma permeating the house (even just from the yeast rising the dough), there is also something theraputic about the kneading that is quite enjoyable.
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>>I confess that I let my mixer (I have a KitchenAid stand mixer) do the kneading. But you're right about the smell.
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>>Plus, for me, using my grandmother's recipe brings her back vividly. This is her own recipe that she worked out over time and it has all kinds of comments from her about the process. I actually have a one-page version and a three-page version.
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>>Tamar
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>And did Bubbe use an electric mixer for kneading? ;)

She would have if she'd had one available. My grandmother (who was _never_ called Bubbe--she wasn't that sort) had a sideboard in the dining room entirely covered with gadgets. She loved machines.

I wrote this after making the bread some years ago; looks like I last edited a couple of years ago:

I'm baking bread today, my grandmother's bread. My grandmother was an avid baker; over a period of years, she refined her recipe for the bread to feed her family of seven. My instructions tell me how to make either three loaves or six, far more than my little family needs.

If a friend told me this much about her grandmother, I'd paint a mental image of a tiny woman in a long dress with her hair pinned up and an Eastern European accent. But that wasn't my grandmother at all.

Grandma Sarah was a modern woman. She had no accent, wore fashionable clothes, styled her hair according to contemporary trends, smoked, and even had a job. She raised roses and cats in addition to her five children. Most of all, she loved gadgets, manual and electric, especially the ones that made it easier for her to do her favorite things, bake and knit. The sideboard in Grandma's dining room was loaded with her version of toys, gizmos of all sorts; her house was the first place I ever saw an electric can opener or a toaster oven. In the living room sat two knitting machines to help her with the complex patterns she designed.

The bread recipe isn't fading on a note card in hard-to-read old-fashioned handwriting. It's neatly typed on three 8½ by 11 pages. Grandma Sarah loved that electric typewriter. She'd write long letters to her far-flung family with many carbons and numerous asides directed at individual children or children-in-law.

Like the letters, the recipe is detailed and has a number of digressions. It calls for Teflon-coated pans and says that, if they're not available, regular pans should be scrubbed until they're shiny. Later on, it instructs me to grease the pans and parenthetically adds that even Teflon pans must be greased.

As I work through the recipe with my 12-year-old son, I can hear Grandma Sarah's voice in my head and see her in the kitchen of the big old house I loved to visit. As I read the instruction to brush each ready-to-bake loaf with a mixture of egg and water, then feed the leftover mixture to the dog or cat, I can only smile. I can't remember ever visiting my grandmother's house without there being kittens underfoot.

Watching my mixer whip the dough round and round, I think of my grandmother kneading hers by hand in the large, flat pan the recipe recommends (small enough to fit in the oven to raise the dough, though). I want to ask her how to raise the dough properly in my pilot-less oven and why the crust gets done before the inside is thoroughly baked. I wonder what she’d think of the cooking spray I use to grease the pans.
Cleaning out my desk recently, I found one of those carbon paper letters; I must have grabbed it before my mother threw it out. This missive, written a month or so before my Bat Mitzvah, asks my mother how many loaves of bread she should bring and what cakes would be needed for the party.

My grandparents were there the night I chanted Haftarah to become Bat Mitzvah; less than six months later, Grandma Sarah's heart gave way to decades of smoking and rich food. Thinking about her today, I remember my tears. Nearly thirty years later, writing this, I can feel the tears coming to my eyes again. But while I'm baking her bread, it's almost as if she's with me.

(c) 2005, Tamar E. Granor