By Mark Guydish [email protected]

The ingredients for home made white bread.

For TL test cook, homemade bread is a Good Friday tradition

I doubled the recipe and divided it all into four balls of dough after proofing. Here one is formed into a loaf and set in the bread pan, one is rolled out to be rolled up into a loaf and placed in a pan, and two rest and wait for further work. In keeping with the family Good Friday tradition, I made one of the remaining balls into a loaf and rolled the other out to be cut and fried as the sugar-coated kreppe for desert.

Three loaves allowed to rise a second time and ready for the oven.

Fresh out of the oven and brushed with butter, giving the bread a temporary shine and a bit more flavor (and keeping the crust from getting too hard)

For me, nothing matches the flavor of fresh, home-baked bread cut and buttered while still warm. It has been my Good Friday dinner, with no sides, since I could sit at a table and feed myself.

The bread never mattered less, or more.

At 97 years old, frail yet still the epitome of selfless love, Mom went to the hospital Good Friday (April 15).

Brother Jay, eldest of Mary’s kids, was in our West Hazleton homestead for the holiday and called me shortly after 8 a.m. to say mom’s doctor suggested we admit her after hearing she took a health turn (don’t worry, things worked out).

At her best, mom stands and walks short distances to and from her bedroom to the large dining room table where she fed a family of 11 for decades and now eats meals prepared by her adult children. She also detours to the bathroom connected to the dining room. She sleeps much of the day.

I remember dad the plumber updating that small first floor bathroom — in a house his father built — when I was not yet a teen. He included a folding-door closet, shower for the tub, tiled walls and two sinks to accommodate the endless demand of nine kids washing hands before meals.

On Holy Thursday, mom stopped standing. She just wouldn’t support herself. That night she slept poorly. Phoned for advice, her doctor suspected a bone fracture (none were found). Thus the hospital Good Friday. Jay called to give the news, adding that he would be at the hospital and unable to prepare the family’s traditional Good Friday dinner of home-baked bread and “kreppe,” fried dough coated with sugar. I wrote about kreppe for my April 8, 2021 test kitchen.

For about two decades or more Jay has baked the Good Friday bread, so I faced the first Good Friday of my life without said tradition. I had to work. Jay had to be at the hospital. No one else in the family was around to sustain the tradition.

I embrace change. I learned “keyboard” skills on an old Remington manual typewriter in my parent’s basement using one of mom’s high school lesson books and improved the skills decades later with a computer tutorial program. I’ve made digital family videos and slide shows from old movies and photos. I used a slide rule in high school and now crunch numbers in Excel. I’ve owned computers from Intel 8086 to Core i9 chips. I’m shopping for my fourth digital camera. But in knowing how to make bread, I’m very old school.

Baking bread is not only one of the earliest cooking skills I learned, it’s one of the most ubiquitous skills humans developed, with some sources claiming baked bread goes back at least 14,000 years (for perspective, that’s 12 millennia before the first “Good Friday”).

Our family doesn’t know the origin of our “bread and kreppe” Good Friday tradition. We are of Slovak heritage. Modest efforts to trace our family backwards collapse in the many redrawings of borders.

But the home-made bread tradition matters to me. Hours after Jay called, I decided I had to bake bread and fry kreppe that afternoon, despite any other commitments.

Working from home, I finished my must-do assignments and turned to baking. I finished well after 6 p.m. MT came home when the bread was hot out of the oven, and we both had some with butter. We traveled to my West Hazleton homestead (mom’s home for some 75 years) with bread and kreppe in the car.

I sliced a few pieces of the still-warm loaf and brought them on small plates to the large dining room, sitting in the space I had occupied as a child, MT to my right, everyone else in my family elsewhere.

I’m confident that was my 65th Good Friday in that room, though of course I have no recollection as an infant. I’m also confident it was the first Good Friday in that room with mom absent.

And that’s what this week’s recipe is about.

Cooking certain recipes can be so much more than the food. It’s tradition. It gives old realities contemporary meaning. It’s sharing a spirit with others steeped in the custom, both present and elsewhere, both living and passed.

My meal complete, I filled a small plastic bag with kreppe and headed to the hospital, arriving to find Jay had just left. Mom, as frail as she is, had sat up and was working her way to the edge of her emergency room bed with no staff knowing it. She was intent on going home, even though she was in the ER because she couldn’t stand.

I gave her a kreppe. She calmed, let me help her lie back down, and had a few more pieces while waiting for the hospital people to decide what to do.

Cooking isn’t just about eating to live. It’s about what that life means.

White Bread (Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book)

5¾ to 6¼ cups all purpose flour

1 tablespoon shortening, margarine or butter

In a large mixing bowl combine 2 1/2 cups of the flour and the yeast. In a saucepan, heat the milk, sugar and shortening/butter and salt, stirring until warm and shortening/butter begins to melt. Don’t overheat, if the liquid is too hot it could kill the yeast.

Add milk mixture to flour mixture. beat with an electric mixer on low for 30 seconds, scraping bowl constantly. Beat on high for 3 minutes. Add as much of the remaining flour as you can. Turn out onto lightly floured surface and knead in enough flour to make a moderately stiff dough that is smooth and elastic (6-8 minutes kneading).

(Note: I find using dough hooks in the mixer, if you have them, reduces the manual kneading time).

Shape into a ball. Place in a lightly greased bowl. Turn once to grease entire surface. Cover and let rise in a warm place till double, about 45 minutes.

Punch dough down. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and divide dough in half. Cover and let rest for 10 minutes. Lightly grease two 8 x 4 x 2 inch loaf pans. Shape each half of the dough into a a loaf one of two ways: Pat it into shape, tucking edges underneath; or roll dough out to about 12 by 8 inch rectangle and roll up tightly starting at the narrow edge and sealing with fingertips as you roll. (I learned to bake bread by using the latter method, and still do).

Place shaped dough in prepared loaf pans. Cover and let rise in a warm place till nearly double (30-40 minutes). Heat oven to 375°.

Bake about 40 minutes (if necessary, cover loosely with foil the last 10 minutes to avoid over-browning). Bread is done when you tap the top and it sounds hollow.

Minor note: Mom’s recipe, coming from a Betty Crocker book I think, was slightly different, but the finished product tastes the same.

Reach Mark Guydish at 570-991-6112 or on Twitter @TLMarkGuydish