Food was always important to my family, although no one could ever agree about what good food really meant. To my mother, good food meant fresh ingredients; to my father, good food meant that there was a lot of it; and my grandmother thought good food meant that you had taken the time to do all of the little details yourself. I never argued with my parents about it, but secretly I thought that my grandmother was right, and that’s why I always enjoyed helping her make bread.
My grandmother was of French ancestry therefore, her bread reflected that heritage. It was neither the light, fluffy, supermarket sandwich bread, nor the puffed rolls so common at dinner, nor the thin, crusty baguettes that people call French bread. This was pain de campagne (French for “country bread”), a giant, round loaf of chewy, crunchy sourdough.
In the evening, my grandmother would make a sticky, shaggy mess out of the most basic mix of ingredients: water, salt, flour, and starter. The starter was a glob taken from a bowl of fermenting dough that my grandmother always had ready. There was nothing glamorus about the work, but the transformation of those simple ingredients seemed like magic.100
