I have escaped to a farm. As I write this, I am sitting by a wood stove, waiting for some sourdough bread to rise, while a fire burns in the brick oven outside. In a few hours, we’ll bake six loaves of bread, and then a big pot of beans that will slowly cook overnight. I don’t have to be anywhere but here, and for me, that is the escape. I’ll be at this small farm for the next seven weeks, tending the wood stove, feeding the dogs, splitting wood and learning to milk Floeckle, a young Milking Shorthorn cow who is, so far, quite patient and lovely. I’ve told everyone I know that I can’t leave, that I must be at the farm every day and every night until the farmers return from a trip to Australia. That is only partially true — it’s not my farm and I’m not responsible for managing it — but while I’m here, I’m choosing to make it so.

Each day I start a fire in the stove, make a pot of tea and wash the milk jugs. Jon, the young man who is responsible for managing farm operations here while the farmers are gone, picks me up at 8 a.m. and we drive through town and down a long dirt road to the farm. We bring the cows into the barn, roll a bale of hay over and distribute it, milk those who need to be milked, let the calves in for their share, and then turn everyone out on the fields again. When we need to, we’ll gather wood. We eat lunch together each weekday at 1 p.m., and dinner a few times a week. And in what is fast becoming my favorite routine, every Sunday we bake bread.

Bread baking is one of mankind’s greatest traditions. Nearly every culture has its own unique bread recipes and techniques, dating back centuries. It is also a tradition that, at least as individuals, we have drifted the farthest from. Most of us eat bread, but very few of us bake it. Here at the farm baking is an important routine, and not just for tradition’s sake. We bake bread for the same reasons that our ancestors did: so that we’ll have bread to eat during the week. Each Saturday evening Jon and I grind the grain and sift the flour and mix it with our sourdough starter. On Sunday morning we knead the dough and set it aside to rise. We start a fire in the outdoor oven using bundles of apple wood prunings that we gathered from the orchard. At a certain hour I pat down the dough and fold it over and let it sit for 50 minutes. Then I do it again. After another fifty minutes, we shape the loaves into tight round balls, place them in proofing baskets, and let them sit for two hours. When the oven is hot and the loaves are ready, we scrape all the coals from the oven, slide the loaves into the 600-degree cavern, close it up, and wait. An hour and 10 minutes later we have our bread for the week. It’s a nearly 24-hour process that requires careful timing and attention. Sourdough is a living, breathing entity that must be cared for and coaxed into the final product. On days that you aren’t baking, you must tend to your starter, feeding it and mixing it gently. It’s like having a child – you can’t just choose when to care for it.

For me, as I said, this is the escape – to be bound to something real and wholesome and wise. It is not hard for me to see, however, that what I am escaping to is precisely what most women sought to escape from 60 or so years ago, during my grandparent’s era. My great-grandmother baked bread as a matter of course. My grandmother wanted nothing to do with it. In the 30s, 40s and 50s, depending on which area of the country they lived in, women began to feel bound to their homes. They were told that they were servants to the kitchen and to the routines of daily life. Women’s magazines and home economics classes told them so. Advertising campaigns told them so. Baking bread, making every meal from scratch and mending your own clothes came to be seen as drudgery; if you could afford to avoid it, you would. Why, women were asked, would you bake your own bread if you could buy beautiful white loaves in the grocery store? Personally, I think my sex was sold a bill of goods. I’m not so naïve that I can’t see the value in the fact that we know longer have to make everything we need and that we can purchase our food and our clothes, but what if we lost something in the process? What if those routines that were seen as tying us down, actually served a higher purpose? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I think we ought to be asking it.

When I mentioned to Jon, while we waited for the bread to bake, that I loved the routine of bread baking, that it seemed so grounding, he replied, “Yes, but I suppose it depends on how you look at it. It’s either grounding or it ties you down.” That is the crux of the issue, how we as individuals and as a society view the traditions and practices that helped to shape our lives in the past, practices that have been fading from use and memory. Baking bread, churning butter, knitting a sweater, splitting wood, milking a cow by hand. Will we look on those tasks as archaic and irrelevant, or essential and grounding?

I don’t believe that we all need to return to life as our great-grandparents lived it. I appreciate the relative freedom that modernity allows. I don’t believe that we all need to bake our own bread. I appreciate that there are artisan bakers turning out beautiful, real loaves of bread every day, each one far nicer than any that will emerge from my oven. I do know, however, that for me, something has been missing in my life. I believe that it might be some sense of routine and rhythm. And I’m here at the farm to try to get that back, one loaf of sourdough bread at a time.

Anne Dailey is a freelance writer and aspiring agrarian who spends much of her time trading labor for food on local farms and gently lecturing anyone who will listen on the the benefits of raw dairy. She maintains a blog and website at poundsweet.net. Her previous articles for Last Exit examined raw cider, farm stands, heirloom tomatoes, forgotten foods, homemade saurkrautand raw milk.

Copyright Last Exit 2010