Tool:
As I’ve written about before, food is a way to connect with culture. About once a month (or maybe a little less, but who is counting), I make challah on Fridays to prepare for shabbat. As I do it, I’m always mindful of the ways this ties me to my great-grandmother, her mother and mother-in-law, and countless generations of Jewish women. This feeling of connection is much needed nourishment when the writing gets difficult.
The Story:
I woke up with a lot of work to do on the manuscript and the absolute certainty that I am a fraud who cannot write a meaningful word. (This isn’t an uncommon experience for writers to have; it’s akin to writer’s block, except that it’s only writer’s block if you let it stop you, which you shouldn’t. As I say often enough to annoy others, “It’s not like plumbers get to have plumber’s block, so just get to work.”) My way out of this feeling is always to put the writing aside long enough to go do something I know I can accomplish.
This morning, that was to make challah for the sabbath.
I have a recipe I use often with great success, all the ingredients, and last night’s dinner was a disaster (do NOT waste your money on Trader Joe’s cauliflower gnocchi, trust me) and so a win in the kitchen would be just the thing. Plus, who isn’t heartened by the smell of baking bread? Perfect plan, right?
Well, maybe not.
It’s ridiculously humid here (91% officially, but Schnitzel came in from the backyard with condensate on her fur, so I’m going to guess it’s actually even higher than that), and of course bread dough absorbs a lot of ambient moisture while you’re making it. Here is a picture of my dough with the amount of flour called for in the recipe:
Clearly, this is too moist. I eventually added an extra cup and a quarter of flour (one quarter cup at a time), kneading as I went along. At that point, the dough still seemed too moist to me, but I also couldn’t imagine how adding almost 50% more flour than the recipe called for could work, so my moist-but-maybe-workable? dough is sitting in a bowl on my counter, doing through the first rise. I won’t know until after the second rise if it’s even worth trying to bake it, and won’t know until after I bake it (if I do) whether or not the thing I’ve made is worth sharing.
So, it’s a lot like writing is what I’m saying. You start out thinking you know what needs to go into a piece, but you discover that it needs more than you thought. You add that more, but it still seems a bit off, so you let things sit for awhile. You come back to it. You add or take away something when you see how things are after you’ve let it sit. Sometimes you discard the piece at that point, sometimes you let it rise again and see what happens if you bake it. And sometimes, even if it seems like everything worked, you let someone else sink their teeth into it and discover it didn’t, in fact, work at all.
So, here is hoping your challah rises and your stories and essays cohere, friends.
Shabbat shalom!
Sometimes the challah rises and sometimes our frustration rises. Just remember that our East European forebears didn't have to worry about humidity! Although given that with which they had to deal (Cossacks, antisemites, Nazis), I think they might have preferred humidity. Thank you for the great insight! One thing that Judaism has taught me and something I try to convey to others: Judaism doesn't demand perfection. It's a tough world and sometimes, no matter how hard we try, things just don't go the way we want/hope/need. But that's OK. Judaism teaches that the effort, the attempt, the try is what is most important. Rabbi Tarfon in "Pirkei Avot," a wonderful book in the Mishnah filled with Rabbinic wisdom and wit, states: "You don't have to finish the work, but you can't ignore it" (my very loose translation). I like to think that Rabbi Tarfon was teaching don't let the perfect get in the way of the good. Do your best (emphasis on do). The rest is commentary.