the baker
necessity as the mother of all invention
the cook, the baker, the mama, the bread maker
Here I am above, halfway through baking my first and most important loaf: Rylee Lou, little dove.
I’m an avid reader. It calms me, helps me focus my mind on something other than racing thoughts and worries. There’s really nothing I won’t read, all books interest me. The classics, smut, autobiographies, random green beret history books my father-in-law sends my husband. There are limited places to buy books in English in Italy (shocker), but recently I was lucky enough to check out Adriana Trigiani’s latest novel, The Good Left Undone. Without getting into a full book report, it takes place between present day Italy and during WWII. In the first chapter she describes the small, Italian town her main character lives and grew up in. She writes,
“You didn’t need a clock to tell time in Viareggio; you lived by the bells and the baker.”
The bells and the baker… Now, I don’t live in Viareggio, nor have I ever visited (yet) but if there was ever a way to summarize the town I do live in: that would be it. Naturally, it inspired a resting place for me to write my own words about this experience living here a la this blog.
The bells part I probably don’t need to explain to you, but the baker? In any Italian town, il panificio or il forno, means "the bakery” and if the church is the first central anchor of the town il panificio is a close second. Any time of day can be marked by the smells coming from the bakery. Brioche in the morning, ciabatta in the afternoon and so on. Not to be confused with la pasticceria, or pastry shop, where you can find bomboloni (fried dough, tossed in sugar and filled with pastry creams), tarts, cannoli, sfogliatella, biscotti. Typical finds at your local bakery include a variety of naturally leavened breads, foccacia, rolls, brioche, pasta. At many you may find at the counter different beans, cereali, and grains due to maximizing their resources of heating the ovens so early and often. Throughout history, bread has been a sustenance of nourishment around the world and Italy, certo, is no different.
Avoiding getting too serious and too “body of Christ” so early in the day, but the baker owns a very important place in the Italian community. Rising well before dawn, well before the first church bells ring, they are busy at work warming the oven and proofing the dough. It is the morning errand grabbing a loaf and a bag of beans to soak throughout the day for that evening’s primi. It is the afternoon spot where Nonna takes her grandson to get a treat on the walk home from school. The smells, the warmth… the community supporting the bakery provide more job security than any corporate contract ever could.
The baker is everyone’s home. Which brings me to one of the largest ways Italy has forever shaped me.
I’ve always been comfortable in the kitchen. I grew up in a household where most weekends it was the place to be for Friday night happy hour. Our home would fill with my parent’s friends and the thick smells of food cooking, bonfires, 90’s hairspray and the sound of laughter and music turned up too loud. My dad loved to be the center of attention be that through conversation or music, and my mom was an artist in the kitchen. I can’t think of a single thing she didn’t make from scratch, and that’s either because she was crafty at hiding it from me or she really was that good (it’s the ladder). She always joked that the party ends up in the kitchen. And it always did, whether that was because of the food or because she was cute and fun to be around (it’s both).
Once I was grown and on my own, influenced by the environment I was raised in, I jumped at any opportunity I had in my 20’s to entertain a group. Creating a menu and feeding people is a gift and a pleasure. Nourishing them is an art form. The better part of the decade that followed I lived alone, which believe me was preferred to the alternative at that time. But living alone means cooking for one and I yearned for a day when I had a constant in my life to care for. After a long week of working fifty, sixty hours or more and staying up until midnight answering e-mails I would survive on nothing but a glass of wine and a bowl of stovetop popcorn. I was an avid InstaCart abuser. I ordered most dinners on UberEats and revolved eating around a tight schedule based on convenience rather than pleasure.
And then I moved to Italy and all that went away. Our idyllic home, while it has given us so much in terms of privacy… it has also taken from us any form of those digital conveniences. Don’t get me wrong, food delivery services like UberEats and Deliveroo do exist in this country, but none reach our doorstep. There is one pizzeria down the street, but they are only open three nights a week (maybe, you have to check their facebook page). If you want to grab lunch, it has to be between 12:00pm - 2:00pm (which happens to also be my daughter’s nap time). If you do want to go out to dinner, everything opens at 7:00pm at the earliest, (her bedtime is at 7:30pm). And while the pandemic made takeaway more common than ever, some restaurants simply don’t have the porta via packaging on hand. “Why would you want to rush eating this gorgeous meal we just made you?”
Two years later the concept of getting takeout feels more like a foreign idea than living in a foreign country ever did in the first place.
So we adapt! We cook! We bake! We make every meal we eat. Sometimes it’s full of pleasure and sometimes it’s downright annoying and inconvenient. It’s just another reason why it can feel like I’ve gone back in time by living here. Culture shock can surprise you when you pluck yourself out of obscurity into a new place. You’re never fully prepared for what will be the hardest parts to adjust to. The romance of a new home, no matter where, can fade and leave you frustrated at times, even on something as silly as not being able to grab a bite to eat at 3 o’lock in the afternoon. I grow weary at times of preparing every meal, everything from start to finish. But the slowness and patience it’s forced me into has chipped away at some of my rougher edges. For years I rejected the idea of being so domestic. The picture of my life right now isn’t how I saw things going. This wasn’t my plan for motherhood. I was always going to be the full-time-working-mom, still focused on my growing career while being my child’s hero and an awesome wife at the same time. That was the example I wanted to set. Period. No negotiation.
In so many ways I’ve been forced into the shape of something I always fought, and then expected to rise.
But the stress of motherhood, and raising a baby so far from “home” has surmounted any fifty, sixty hours or more work weeks from my past. Through this experience I’ve found that my way to decompress was the chopping, the measuring, the mis en place. The smell of garlic and onions sautéing in a pan. The inevitable blend of Louis Prima and Chaka Khan playing in the background. The endless kneading and folding of dough by hand. Even a good ol’toddler tantrum can’t get in the way of the meditation I feel when I’m the cook. When I’m the baker.
I guess you could say I’ve been faced with the truest form of necessity being the mother of invention. I don’t really believe in a person “re-inventing” themselves by a place, an event or a circumstance. You’re still you. I’m still me even though much of the values I used to place on my life have changed. I didn’t move here thinking I’d spend time perfecting a sourdough starter or seeking out apprenticeships with Italian bakers when I barely speak Italian. But this is where we have arrived on the other end of this huge shift, in this one little life. I can’t decide if this happened slowly or quickly over time? Or where it even began in the first place?
But these days when I close my eyes and imagine my future, the box that I used to put myself in and the one I thought I was so comfortable in, no longer fits.
I can more clearly see myself as the old lady bread maker at your favorite bakery over developing marketing presentations for billion dollar corporations. I guess you’d have to really know me to know just how crazy that sounds. That doesn’t mean I can’t go back there, but somewhere along the way the most unexpected and fundamental change has happened to me when I wasn’t even aware it was underway. I certainly don’t remember seeking out this new path. But bubbling under the surface of me, slowly rising until the process was done, something completely new has formed. How can that be happening behind the lens of your eyes in your own life without you knowing?
I often joke that this is my daughter’s doing. After all, she was the first loaf in the oven that broke the camel’s back (or whatever). Having a child and seeing them mimic your every move back to you can easily result in some hard inner conversations with yourself. The corporate world has a way of making you feel so special when it needs something from you, and so replaceable when that need is gone. I sometimes wonder if these Italian bakers have ever even come close to feeling that way by their community when they hold such a holy place in their daily routines? Somehow lately I’ve landed in a place where I relate more to that old baker at il panificio than I do to my old self.
