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Stones for Bread
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Acclaim for Christa Parrish
STONES FOR BREAD
“A beautiful story of love and friendship, of redemption and forgiveness, Stones for Bread is uplifting and hopeful. It satisfies like a warm loaf of freshly made bread.”
— Lynne Hinton, author of
Friendship Cake and Pie Town
“Christa Parrish has once again proven herself to be a powerful voice in inspirational fiction. Stones for Bread is delivered in Parrish’s trademark lyrical style, and its content—a mix of spiritual journey, history, love story, and cookbook—is expertly woven together with Truth. An excellent choice for book clubs and individual readers alike, Stones for Bread does not disappoint.”
— Alison Morrow, author of
Composing Amelia and The Heart of Memory
“No one knows how to plunge the depths of what our souls hunger for like Christa Parrish. Stones for Bread is a masterpiece, a story that is more than a story. You’ll never look at a loaf of bread the same way again.”
— Susan Meissner, author of
The Girl in the Glass
THE AIR WE BREATHE
“A fast-moving, suspenseful, enrapturing novel . . . Fans of Christian fiction with kick and psychological depth will be engaged and touched by Parrish’s exciting third novel.”
— Booklist
“The Air We Breathe is a compelling and emotional novel about identity, redemption, and faith. Expect it to be popular among women of all ages.”
— CBA Retailers & Resources
“If you are a fan of Jodi Picoult or Anita Shreve, Christa Parrish will be your new favorite discovery . . . Likewise, if you have experienced loss or heartache, or just want to be assured of God’s transcendent presence, you will certainly find solace here.”
— Rachel McMillan on Novel
Crossing blog
“Parrish has created an exceptional look at trauma and its aftermath, as well as hope and recovery from grief at its best. Readers will love it for sure.”
— Publishers Weekly
WATCH OVER ME
“. . . Christa Parrish writes a compelling story that is filled with real-life problems and raw emotions.”
— 5MinutesforBooks.com
“Parrish’s deft characterization pulls readers into a storyline filled with raw emotion . . . comes together seamlessly for an unforgettable conclusion.”
— Romantic Times Book Reviews
HOME ANOTHER WAY
“. . . written with heart and soul. It is always refreshing to read books with imperfect characters; they seem more real.”
— Romantic Times Book Reviews
“Parrish . . . adeptly avoids the clichéd happily-ever-after ending while still leaving the reader satisfied.”
— Cindy Crosby, FaithfulReader.com
“Christa Parrish manages the rare accomplishment of telling a very good story peopled with flawed and very human characters.”
— Lynn Spencer, All About
Romance (LikesBooks.com)
“With its vast array of richly imagined characters, its humor and its substance, this debut is sure to resonate with a wide and appreciative audience.”
— Publishers Weekly
STONES for BREAD
© 2013 by Christa Parrish
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson.
Thomas Nelson titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].
Scripture quotations:
Genesis 3:19 appears in chapter 1; Luke 1:46–47 appears in chapter 11; Romans 8:14–17 appears in chapter 20; excerpts from John 6:67–68 appear in chapter 22; excerpts from Matthew 7:9–11 appear in chapter 23; John 6:49–51 appears in chapter 23; all taken from THE ENGLISH STANDARD VERSION. © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.
Romans 7:15 appears in chapter 3; Matthew 25:40 appears in chapter 12; Matthew 4:3 appears in chapter 22; 2 Corinthians 12:9 appears in chapter 23; all taken from the HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Parrish, Christa.
Stones for Bread / Christa Parrish.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-4016-8901-8 (Trade Paper) — ISBN 1-4016-8901-9 (Trade Paper)
I. Title.
PS3616.A76835S76 2013
813'.6—dc23
2013023669
Printed in the United States of America
13 14 15 16 17 RRD 5 4 3 2 1
For Chris
If I could choose again, I’d choose you.
Contents
Liesl’s Glossary
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Recipe Index
Reading Group Guide
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Liesl’s Glossary
baguette: a long, slender loaf of bread, approximately 3 to 4 inches in diameter and 24 to 36 inches in length with an almost even ratio of crust to crumb.
banneton: a proofing basket; traditionally made of coiled willow or cane, the basket holds the dough’s shape during the final rise.
bâtard: an oval or torpedo-shaped bread, shorter and wider than a baguette.
biga: a pre-fermented dough, commercially leavened, used in Italian baking to make the bread’s flavors more complex since sourdough is not being used. It is drier than a poolish.
boulanger: a French baker.
boule: a round loaf of bread, from the French word for ball.
brotform: the German term for a proofing basket, literally “bread mold.” couche: a proofing cloth; traditionally made of linen, the cloth is used to shape and/or cover the dough during its final rise.
crumb: the inner, soft part of the bread.
culture: the flour and water used to make the wild yeast (sourdough) starter before it is ready for use in baking.
degas: to deflate the dough.
dough trough: an oblong or rectangular container for holding larger amounts of dough; traditionally made of stone or wood, but now available for the commercial baker in sturdier materials, such as stainless steel.
lame: a handled razor used to score bread dough.
Maillard reaction: the chemical process by which bread browns.
miche: a large boule of French country bread, weighing more than 4 pounds, most often made with whole wheat flour.
peel: a paddle-like board with a handle, used for taking pizzas and breads in and out of the oven.
poolish: a pre-fermented dough, commercially leavened, used in French baking to make the bread’s flavors more complex since sourdough is not being used. It is wetter than a biga.
proof: the dough’s final rise.
rooms: the holes in the bread’s crumb.
starter: the flour, water, wild yeast, and bacteria mixture used in sourdough breads.
One
I’m young, four, home from nursery school because of snow. Young enough to think my mother is most beautiful when she wears her apron; the pink and brown flowered cotton flares at the waist and ruffles around the shoulders. I wish I had an apron, but instead she ties a tea towel around my neck. The knot captures a strand of my hair, pinching my scalp. I scratch until the captive hair breaks in half. Mother pushes a chair to the counter and I stand on it, sturdy pine, rubbed shiny with age.
Our home is wood—floors, furniture, spoons, bowls, boards, frames—some painted, some naked, every piece protective around us. Wood is warm, my mother says, because it once was living. I feel nothing but coolness in the paneling, the top of the long farm table, the rolling pin, all soaked in January.
At the counter, the smooth butcher block edge meets my abdomen, still a potbellied preschooler’s stomach, though my limbs are sticks. Mother adds flour and yeast to the antique dough trough. Salt. Water. Stirs with a wooden spoon.
I want to help, I say.
You will, she tells me, stirring, stirring. Finally, she smoothes olive oil on the counter and turns the viscous mound out in front of her. Give me your hands. I hold them out to her. She covers her own in flour, takes each one of mine between them, and rubs. Then, tightening her thumb and forefinger around a corner of dough, she chokes off an apple-sized piece and sets it before me. Here.
I poke it. It sucks my fingers in. Too sticky, I complain. She sprinkles more flour over it and says, Watch. Like this.
She stretches and folds and turns. The sleeves of her sweater are pushed up past her elbow. I watch the muscles in her forearms expand and contract, like lungs breathing airiness into the dough. She stretches and folds and turns. A section of hair comes free from the elastic band at the back of her head, drifting into her face. She blows at it and, using her shoulder, pushes it behind her right ear. It doesn’t stay.
She stretches and folds and turns.
I grow bored of watching and play with my own dough, flattening it, leaving handprints. Peel it off the counter and hold it up; it oozes back down, holes forming. I ball it up like clay, rolling it under my palm. Wipe my hands on the back pockets of my red corduroy pants.
My mother finishes, returns her dough gently to the trough. She places my ball next to her own and covers both with a clean white tea towel.
I jump off the chair. When do we cook it?
Bake it. Mother wipes the counter with a damp sponge. But not yet. It must rise.
To the sky?
Only to the top of the bowl.
I’m disappointed. I want to see the dough swell and grow, like a hot air balloon. My mother unties the towel from my neck, dampens it beneath the faucet. Let me see your hands. I offer them to her, and she scrubs away the dried-on dough, so like paste, flaky and near-white between my fingers. Then she kisses my palms and says, Go play.
The kitchen is stuffy with our labor and the preheating oven. The neighbor children laugh outside; I can see one of them in a navy blue snowsuit, dragging a plastic toboggan up the embankment made by the snow plow. But I stay. I want to be kissed again and washed with warm water. I want my mother’s hands on me, tender and strong at the same time, shaping me as she does the bread.
I watch their hands, thinking I may be the one to discover the next Lionel Poilâne, as if the knowledge of bread were some sort of gifting imbued before birth. Instead, I see only kindergarteners clumsily stretching the pizza dough, ripping great holes I try to fix for them, saying, “Don’t worry, the cheese will cover it.” Seven of them from the Montessori school in town, along with their young teacher, stand at the long farm table at the back of Wild Rise, white paper chef hats perched atop their heads. That’s one of their favorite things about the cooking class, their names written around the band in black Magic Marker. They spread cornmeal over their pizza peels as if feeding chickens, flicking their wrists, granules bouncing everywhere.
The sauce is next. “You only need a little,” I tell them as they splash spoonfuls onto the raw crusts, their shredded mozzarella cheese floating in a puddle of red. Most of the children add pepperoni in a smiley-face pattern, and then my apprentice, Gretchen, gathers the peels for baking.
“How long before it’s done?” they want to know.
“About ten minutes,” I say. “Until then, who can tell me something about bread? It can be something you learned today, or even something you already had tucked in your brain.” I tap my index finger against my temple as I say those last four words, one word for each beat. The children laugh and waggle their hands in the air, above their heads. I begin by motioning to a petite, flame-haired girl.
“Bread can be made from beans and nuts,” she says.
“I’m allergic to nuts,” the girl next to her whines, her flat face pink and indignant.
“Ooh, ooh, ooh, pick me,” the dark-eyed boy at the end of the table calls out. He’s bigger than the other children, and his thick brows meet in the middle.
“Yes . . . Kalel,” I say, reading his hat.
He clears his throat and stands. “Yeasts go into bread at the start. The more they eat, the more they—”
“Thank you, Kalel,” the teacher says, but the other children have already filled in the missing word. They giggle and whisper to one another.
I give the teacher a sideways look. “He’s six?”
“Seven. He started school a year later,” she says, voice puckering with familiar exasperation.
I gather the remaining answers, calling each child by name. The last girl to respond—Cecelia—says, “Jesus fed lots of people with only five loaves of bread.”
More nudging and tittering. Cecelia melts into her chair, reaches behind her shoulder to find the end of her long, blond braid, and sticks it in her mouth.
“Who wants to eat?” Gretchen asks, returning from the kitchen with seven plates. She remembers who belongs to which pizza and warns them to wait for their food to cool. “There’s nothing worse than burning your tongue on hot cheese.”
The children drink fresh-squeezed lemonade, slurping the last drops from the bottom of the cups and scooping out the ice to eat, some with their fingers, some with their straws. Kalel uses a fork. Gretchen and I slice their pizza into wedges. The two boys sit at one end of the table. Four of the girls huddle together in the center, so close their elbows keep tangling. And Cecelia at the other end, alone.
“I liked your answer,” I tell her, taking the chair between her and the gaggle of girls, my body a fortification between her and the others.
Her hazel eyes shine. “Really?”
“Really, really.”
“I learned that in Sunday school last time I went.”
A customer comes into the bakehouse. Elise Braden, devoted librarian and Thursday regular, because she loves the Anadama sandwich loaves sold only one day each week. I make twelve and she buys three. “I don’t know why you can’t have them all the time, Liesl,” she says as she hands me eleven dollars.
“Because I’m only one person,” I say, giving her two quarters change.
Elise Braden grins. “You could hire better help.”
“Hey, I heard that,” Gretchen calls from the back of the shop. She’s soaking up spilled lemonade from beneath Kalel’s pendulous sneakers. “I’m wounded. I thought I was your favorite library patron.”
“Convince Liesl to have this bread every day and you will be. And,” the slightly stooped woman says, “I’ll cancel your overdue fines.”
“You don’t need it every day,” I say. “You buy plenty of it to last all week.”
“Ah, yes. But it tastes much better fresh.”
A few more patrons come for lunch. I wait on them, though it’s usually Gretchen’s job. She relates better with the students, no matter the ages, ste
pping into their worlds, drawing them out, connecting. Perhaps it’s her college coursework in anthropology. Perhaps it’s who she is, relaxed and round and fizzy. I have too many angles for people to get close.
It’s one thirty when the kindergarten class finishes eating. I thank them for coming on the field trip and give them each a loaf of chocolate sourdough to take home with them. I pack the bread in paper bags. Six of them are printed with the shop’s name in the center. The seventh has the words I am the Bread of Life stamped in front of a simple line drawing of two umber ears of wheat. I give that bag to Cecelia.
Until the most recent of human history, bread came with a price. Touted as simple wholesomeness, it is deceptive in its humility, requiring more painstaking labor than any other basic food. Fruit and vegetables are planted and harvested, and some indigenous types require only to be picked off the vine before eating. And while it’s true meat animals must be raised and fed and cared for before slaughter, the option of wild game exists. Milk flows and is consumed, pasteurization a relatively newfangled innovation good for increasing shelf life but not required for drinking. But bread has no raw form. It begins as seed sown, the grasses then reaped, the grains threshed, winnowed, ground, sifted, kneaded, fermented, formed, and baked. Modern home cooks think nothing of tearing open a bag of silken flour and a package of active dry yeast, and pouring the dry ingredients into a machine with a couple measures of water and a two-hour wait for a fresh loaf. Bread’s dark history is unknown to them.
And the sacrifice.
By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken.
What can man do but toil under Eden’s ruin? Those who work the fields know of the stinging sun, the dust in their nostrils, the ripping of soil to create a warm, dark cradle for each seed. And when the wheat grows tall and gold, the reaping comes, sheaves cut and tied. Early wheat is hulled, the grains imprisoned in toughened glumes requiring extra pounding to free them. Threshers beat the wheat with a flail, or oxen walk round and round over it, loosening the husks. This chaff must be blown away during winnowing, by fan or fork, leaving behind the heavier grains.
Stones for Bread