Is timelessness fashionable?
Claire Keegan, small kitchens, and the comfort of bread
I once shared an apartment in Montreal with a friend from university. It was a small space at the top of wide, stone stairs, with thin walls and lots of sunlight. The kitchen was just a sink. An oven and a stove, but if we placed a cutting board across the sink we had a countertop. The fridge was smooth with rounded corners and had a long silver handle that clicked to open. Inside the fridge was a tiny door to a freezer with walls so caked with ice that only a six-cubed ice tray could fit inside. I eventually chipped at the ice with a knife until a strange chemical smell seeped from the inside. An elderly repairman in worn coveralls and sparkling blue eyes came to fix it, then told me in a thick Greek accent not to chip at the insides of a freezer with a knife, ever again.
That winter I sat down at the little wooden table in our tiny living room and wrote a story with pen on paper. I wrote about the snowy walk to school with my sisters when I was little. The particular texture of frozen wool mittens, and the way they steamed on the radiator after school. I wrote about the days my mother would make molasses brown bread, and how sometimes three big loaves would be cooling in a row on the counter when we got home. And how she would rub the tops of the bread with a butter wrapper, coating the warm crust with a slick of sweet saltiness. How the loaves would squish if we cut them before they cooled. And how I’d make her recipe and cool the loaves in my tiny apartment, on that tiny table.
I submitted the story to the Montreal Gazette, in response to a call out for ‘food memories.’ The editorial team chose my story, thinking I was a senior citizen. There were no indications of a time period in what I had written: the walk in the snow, the woolen mittens, the bread, the butter, the coziness of home and the pen and paper were timeless details. I didn’t say that my sisters and I watched Video Hits on CBC after school on our brown corduroy sofa. That I was probably wearing a sweatsuit from Cotton Ginny, or that we had a first generation microwave oven on our counter. The omission of these details wasn’t intentional; I wasn’t practiced in the art of writing scenes at the time. I just knew that the story of my mother’s bread lived in the contrast between cold and warmth, the inside and the outside, and the comfort that comes when these two things exist together.
Up above, I also didn’t mention that I watched the X-Files with my roommate in our little Montreal flat, or that I inhaled Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace every morning on the bus to work. These details would have taken us straight to 1997. The make-shift countertop, the skating, the ice inside the ice box, the Greek repairman with the rare blue eyes - that could have been a grandmother’s story.
Irish writer Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These is a masterclass in the art of concealing time in a story. Keegan, in an interview with BBC radio,1 says this is something she does on purpose. The book takes place in a small Irish town in December. The wind is cold, stores are boarded up and people are out of work. The main character’s wife, Eileen, makes Christmas cake with her daughters. They rake through dried fruit, picking stalks out of sultanas, currants and raisins, while Eileen’s husband, Bill Furlong, tends to the oven. It is not until page 31, when Bill and Eileen are reviewing their daughters’ letters to Santa, that a hint of time is revealed: their daughter Kathleen wants a pair of Levis 501s and Joan, who ‘glued herself to the Live Aid concert that summer and had fallen in love with Freddie Mercury,’ wanted a Queen album. Ah ha! It’s 1985.
“I think it’s something that appeals to me, aesthetically.” said Keegan. “I don’t know that it’s about the 80’s, I don’t feel that the 80’s feels timeless. What I am drawn towards is writing that doesn’t feel at all fashionable. And has that timeless quality. And authors who choose details which could be from 100 years ago, and from now.”
There is nothing fashionable about molasses brown bread. It’s just delicious - at once sweet, soft, and warming. And it remains that way in any kitchen - granite countertops, white marble, or a cutting board placed over the sink.
Trying again, this time with complete recipe! My apologies.
My Mom’s Molasses Brown Bread
from her notes:
1 1/2 c. rolled oats
1/2 c. Wheat germ (corn meal has been substituted over the years)
1/3 c. Butter
1 Tbsp salt
1 c. Molasses
2 packages dry yeast
2 c. Whole wheat flour
5 - 6 c. White flour
Butter three loaf pans and set aside. In later days, my mom would line the tins with parchment paper, letting the paper pop up over the sides. No fancy trimming.
Begin by filling a small bowl or glass measuring cup with ¾ cup warm water. Sprinkle yeast over the water and set aside to bubble away.
Combine oats, butter and salt in a large mixing bowl (your largest). Fill the kettle and when it boils, pour 2 cups of boiling water over the oat mixture. Stir, add molasses, and stir some more.
Check on the yeast - by this point the water should be cloudy and full of bubbling yeast. If nothing is happening, the water might be too cold, or too hot. Begin again. If still nothing, buy some new yeast. The bowl of oats etc can wait. But if all is well, give it a quick stir and pour it over the molasses/oat mixture.
Clear and clean a space on your counter. It’s important to do this now, before your hands are covered in bread dough. Add flours to the mixing bowl and slowly stir until roughly combined. Tip the mixture (there will be lots of loose flour at this point) onto the cleaned off counter and combine / corral the dough with your hands. Knead dough for 9 minutes - folding, pushing with the heel of your hand, turning a quarter turn, push, then turn again. After 9 minutes the dough should be smooth and elastic.
Preheat oven til warm but not hot enough to bake anything. Turn oven off and place a pan of water on bottom rack.
Wash out the mixing bowl, dry it, then grease with a little butter. Place the dough in the bowl, flip the dough so now it’s all buttery.
Place bowl in oven. Raise for one hour (or until double in bulk.)
Remove and punch dough down on sideboard.
Divide dough into 3 lumps. Using a rolling pin, flatten each portion and roll each lump into a rectangle, while pressing out air bubbles. Form into neat logs, pinching ends under.
Place the dough in the prepared loaf pans.
Return to warm oven to raise again until doubled in bulk.
Remove from oven. Remove pan of water as well.
Preheat oven to 375F.
Bake loaves for approx 25 min.
My mom says she knows the bread is ready when there is a ‘strong smell of bread’ in the house. The tops will be a deep golden brown. Tip the loaves, right away, onto a rack to cool. Slather the tops with butter, if you’d like.
Ohh this sounds so delicious, I have so many questions though. No moisture, like water perhaps?
Oh dear- it’s missing A LOT. I will repost!