Ode to My Bread Bowl

I am old enough to remember the last time the nation went through a bread baking craze.  It was the 1970's, when some of us went back to the land, some of us went off the grid, and many more of us baked bread.  Back in those days, many grocery stores sold only white bread, the kind that has very little in the way of nutritive value.

I remember the first time I had homemade bread that wasn't my grandmother's rolls.  We went over to a seminary intern's house, and she served us bread fresh from her oven.  It tasted like no bread I ever had before.  She gave us the recipe for Milk and Honey Whole Wheat Bread from Ellen Buchman Ewald's Recipes for a Small Planet. 

My mom knew that our standard mixing bowls wouldn't hold all that dough, so we searched for another one.  At the time, we lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, which has a downtown section closed to car traffic, or it did in the late 70's.  At one end, there was an old-fashioned hardware store, the kind that sells everything.  There in the window was the bowl we needed--and it only cost $6!  We bought it, and it's since traveled with me to many states.

Here is the bowl, next to my grandmother's large Pyrex mixing bowl, the kind that's the largest of a set of 4:

Over the past decades, I haven't been baking the mass quantities of bread that require my largest bowl.  But I haven't been able to give it to a thrift store either.  I know how hard it is to find a bowl this big.  Through the years it's held cloth scraps and picnic paper products and all sorts of stuff that wasn't bread dough.

This morning, I realized that I wasn't going to have enough room in the yellow bowl for all of the dough, much less a place for it to rise.  Here's what the bowl looked like before I finished adding all the flour:

I thought about getting out additional mixing bowls, and then I thought, why would I do that when my big bread bowl is right here on top of the fridge?

So I got it down, gave it a quick wash, and finished mixing the dough in it.  The sight of the dough rising has been an unexpected delight to this morning.

I know many people who can tell all sorts of horror stories about how their parents never supported them.  I am not one of those people.  As I look back, I realize more and more how lucky I am that my parents almost always encouraged my native interests, while also trying to make sure I considered other possibilities too.

When I think of my favorite example of their support, I think of my mom and a cold night outside of a window of a downtown hardware store.  I think of summers spent experimenting with bread recipes and my mom taking me to health food stores where I could get some of the stranger flours that the recipes needed.  I think of my family hungry for good bread and full of praise for my efforts.

I realize that I am a lucky woman in so many ways.