Bread

Which sometimes I make all the time, and lately I make almost never...

One year there was a snowstorm (this was south Texas!) in February in Goliad, and school was called off because the dirt country roads were impassable, and the house was cold, and we had no television out there, and I decided to make some bread. I think I may have been in seventh grade, but I'm not certain. I found a recipe for Egg Twist Loaves in Mother's stuff, and we had all the ingredients, and I made Egg Twist Loaves. The County Fair was happening that week, and I entered one of my loaves of bread in it (I was in 4-H Club and you did things like this), and won a RED RIBBON, which carried with it a $2.00 prize, at least I think it was $2.00. When your weekly allowance is $0.35, $2.00 seems like a LOT of money.

So I started making bread. One problem we frequently had was the oven. Out on the farm, we didn't have natural gas, only butane, and the range was electric. The house was a frame house up on blocks and, while we never actually had a fire in the house because of it, we were struck by lightening a number of times (lightning?). More than once it toasted the range, or part of it, don't know why exactly, but it happened. And so the oven wouldn't work properly--we'd just have a broiler or whatever, until we managed to get a new coild, or get somebody out to fix it, or whatever. It was an off-and-on problem...

And I got this stuff about bread and rolls and things from the County Extension office (Mother was a truly dreadful cook, if the truth be known. She had a cookbook somebody had given her when she got married in 1947, and some thing that was a notebook she'd kept when she took Home Ec in high school, but nothing that would qualify as an actual respectable useful cook book. I started making these things called Swedish Tea Rings that I got a brochure about at the County Extension Office. Actually they were nothing more nor less than cinnamon rolls made into a ring instead of individual rolls. Put icing on the result after it's cooked, maybe nuts and/or cherries, and people seemed to think it was wonderful. County Fair again, won a prize, and the Girls' Auxiliary at church started raising money to go to a convention. I said I could bake bread and tea rings, and got a LOT of business and that's how I paid for my trip.

And the next thing I knew, I had a (very ad hoc, underfunded) business going around town, and I charged far, far, FAR too little, for my bread, tea rings, etc. But I sold a lot of bread. So there. And that is how I started to cook.

The problem (one problem, at least) was that women weren't chefs in the 1960's. Women who wanted to do more than just marry some guy and have babies and keep house had pretty much three options: they could be secretaries somewhere; or they could go to college and become teachers or nurses. I wanted to be a mathematician. I did NOT want to be a secretary, or a teacher (!) or a nurse (God forbid!) or JUST somebody's wife. So I never considered a career in food, and if I had, it wouldn't have proven to be a reasonable course anyway.

And then I graduated from high school and went off to Rice University, for which I was hopelessly unprepared.

Lillie