Flour, Yeast, Water, and Salt: How Breadmaking Helped Me Get Through My Divorce

I baked my first loaf of yeasted bread on December 9, 2016, the day that I retained a lawyer to represent me in settlement negotiations with my soon-to-be-ex-husband. Until then, my baking capabilities had only extended to brownies and banana bread; I thought of yeasted bread as fickle and temperamental. My mother, my first teacher in the kitchen, did not bake yeasted breads because they were not a part of her repertoire of South Asian dishes. I learned to make flatbreads from her instead—puff pastry-like paratha, crispy puri, soft and pliable roti.

My then-four-year-old daughter and I had just moved into my parents’ nondescript suburban home in central New Jersey two months prior. Before that, we had been living overseas and had no other home in the United States. I was nervous about living again under my parents’ roof, mostly because I had assumed they carried cultural baggage about marriage and separation and divorce, despite being relatively progressive themselves. I grew up in a culture in which happily-ever-after was the expectation, and didn’t yet have the language for the dissolution of my own fairy tale.

As it turned out, I didn’t need many words. When I let our suitcases fall to the kitchen floor after an interminably long around-the-world flight, my father said, “You’re home; we’ve got this.” Within days, my parents had refashioned the guest bedrooms into our bedrooms and made space in the basement for all my daughter’s toys and my books. One night, my mother sat on the edge of my bed and wished for me a new and vigorous rebirth. By December, we had settled into a sometimes sublime, sometimes awkward multi-generational living arrangement. My daughter and I immediately benefited from my parents’ emotional and financial support, and they drew joy from her exuberant presence.

One day I chose to make my father’s favorite bread, a whole-grain cinnamon swirl bread, partly out of gratitude, partly as a distraction from the day’s events. Whole grains can make for dry, crumbly, dense bread when improperly handled, and perhaps aren’t the easiest for a novice to use, but I didn’t know any better. To make the whole-grain cinnamon swirl bread, I used whatever flours and grains my mother had in her pantry: rye flour, rolled oats, quinoa. I followed the recipe exactly—I weighed ingredients twice and thrice, and set multiple timers to leave little room for error.

I had beginner’s luck. The bread was airy and moist and sweet and beautiful. We slathered slices with sweet cream butter, and enjoyed it for breakfast the rest of the week.

*

Months of breadmaking followed, mostly because it made me feel purposeful, instead of feeling as if I scarcely had control over anything. There were dozens of failures in as many weeks: loaves that didn’t rise, loaves that collapsed upon themselves, loaves that emerged from the oven soggy. I became obsessed, almost frantic with energy and a sense of emergency, to determine the causes of these kitchen catastrophes. Was it the humidity in the air? The yeast? The oven temperature?

When sleep was elusive, I read cookbooks at two and three o’clock in the morning or trawled baking message boards and Facebook groups. I made mental notes on gluten, autolyse, preferment, crumb, hydration, proof, fermentation. While reading books and scrolling through social media was a welcome respite from the maddening anxiety that threatened my health, it soon created another—and perhaps equally unhealthy—preoccupation: a desire for mastery in the midst of chaos, a sublimation of my grief into bread.

I had always had a deep-seated need for certainty that was often satisfied by imposing order and, at the time, there seemed nothing more orderly than baking bread. My ex-husband and I had met when we were eighteen years old and married when we were twenty-six. I was single for the first time in my adult life. This seemed, then, the ultimate uncertainty. During the final years of my marriage—when I subconsciously knew, but had not admitted to myself, that it was slumping towards its demise—I attempted to wrest control of so many uncontrollable things, from my daughter’s mealtimes to my own conflicted feelings.

Users at r/breaddit swore that croissants are the most challenging bread for the home chef to make, so I became determined to bake these crescent-shaped pastries, despite not knowing even the basics of French pastry-making. Lamination? What is that? Baking croissants for the first time was an unmitigated disaster. The butter was too warm, and the laminated dough was oddly shaped and uneven. Once the croissants were in the oven, they oozed butter all over; after baking, they were gummy inside. I saved one halfway decent sample. The rest of the batch went directly into the kitchen trash can.

My mother is a fount of kitchen-related, life-applicable aphorisms. She also cooks without measuring, using only her experience to guide her. “You have to bake with patience, wonder and joy,” she said, when she saw butter smeared all over the countertops and flour all over the floors. “You are lacking all three—especially joy.”

“Breadmaking is precise,” I said. “And I will make those croissants.”

She handed me a sponge, a broom, and a carafe of cheap Cabernet Sauvignon. I hadn’t drunk alcohol in years. “Breadmaking is precise, but bread is also alive,” she told me. “You are far too intense. Whatever happened, let it go—it’s in the past. When you find your joy, your croissants will be good.”

We cleaned the kitchen together, and she retreated to her bedroom early, as she usually did. I nursed the wine for a few hours, reflecting on my marriage’s slow descent into a mere transactional relationship, devoid of all joy. Instead of growing together over a dozen years, my husband and I found ourselves engulfed by the ordinary and relentless unhappiness that comes with growing apart. I would text far-flung friends: I think I’ve forgotten how to be happy.

I ran my still-floury fingers through my hair—hair that was, until recently, falling out in clumps due to extreme stress. I collapsed on the sofa and fell into a long night of dark, dreamless sleep.

*

Slowly, over months, with time and therapy, with the support of family and friends, with pleasure from meaningful, artistically challenging, and prestigious work, I came to not be so terrified of the unknown. Once freed from the wrong partner, I let my hair down—literally. I had kept my curly brown locks coiled in a severe bun every day for years; now, I let them fall onto my shoulders. I was spontaneous: I bought new lipstick for no reason. I was unabashedly quirky. I often pinched myself on especially happy days, fearing this state of being was ephemeral. When this true, unrepentant, boundless joy eventually came, I found the ability to produce edible bread.

In the kitchen, I relied far less on timers: The feel and sour aroma of proofed dough guided me instead. I adjusted recipes by observing my environment: adding more flour on humid days, using cooler water on warm days, allocating for longer proofing times on cold days. I improvised successful recipes for curcuma (turmeric) bread—soft, sweet baguette viennoise flavored with turmeric and walnuts—and for multigrain bread made from flours, grains, and seeds that I had on hand: whole wheat flour, bread flour, rye flour, barley, millet, quinoa, bulgar, and oatmeal, topped with rolled oats, flax seeds, chia seeds, and sesame seeds.

Breadmaking allowed me to become a more uninhibited and unselfconscious person, qualities that had been quashed in me for some time. I also found tremendous pleasure in baking bread for other people: fougasse for a cousin’s Diwali party; caramelized onion, cheddar cheese, and thyme bread for visitors and neighbors; and daily bread—whole wheat—for my daughter and my parents. “I’m never buying store-bought, pre-sliced bread again,” my mother told me.

*

On February 28, 2018, a judge in county court issued a decree of divorce that terminated my marriage. As I walked out of the courthouse, I decided to try my hand at croissants again, using a recipe from a well-loved copy of “Baking with Julia” from the library. I found myself reverting to older, manic baking behaviors: reading half a dozen recipes; watching YouTube tutorials; visualizing perfectly laminated dough.

But on the day of baking—after documents were signed, money was transferred, congratulations were wished—I let go. I kneaded, folded, rolled, proofed, rolled, shaped, proofed and baked. The croissants were perfect: perfectly shaped, perfectly golden-browned, perfectly flaky. I knew they would be; I could feel it as soon as I made the smooth and pliable pre-dough in the wee hours of that morning.

Like bread, grief cannot be entirely controlled. The hard days are rare, but they do come, often unexpectedly—triggered by an old photograph, a fleeting memory, a legal bill. There are days when I have to close my office door and lay on the floor for a few minutes, before summoning the wherewithal to get up and back to work; there are days when I am confronted with a cacophony of emotions: irritation, combativeness, confusion, exhaustion. On these days, I tend to return to my most finicky bookmarked recipes—100 percent rye or sourdough—that have yet to produce something edible.

But my natural inclination is no longer to try to restrain, either the bread or my feelings. I tried that for years, and nothing good came of it. Now I push my hair back, I recite my mother’s mantra—“patience, wonder and joy”—and bake.

• 0