Baking Some Love

The yeasty smell of bread baking takes me back to our kitchen on the farm, mom standing over the huge bread making bowl punching down the dough for six loaves of white bread. This was a weekly ritual at our home. You read right. Weekly, she made six loaves of bread. Every Monday laundry and bread making. Occasionally, on a Wednesday, she made buns. My mom was so particular about how her baked goods looked, that she was asked to makes dozens and dozens of rolls for our church dinners each year. At times, when making rolls for the church dinner, a batch would get too brown or be ill-shaped and as we sat down to supper she would explain that these were not good enough for the church. We happily ate the culls, because we rarely saw anything wrong with them.

Many years ago, when my husband first came to the farm to meet my parents, I warned him that my mom was a great cook. Baking was my mom’s way of showing love, or at least one way of showing her love. He gained 10 pounds in 7 days. Keep in mind it was during the winter, much too cold to do any exercising, and that we were the guests. He wasn’t allowed to do anything, but “You must eat. Another slice of bread? Certainly you need another cookie?”

My family ate five times a day. Breakfast came at 8:00 am, after milking was complete. The midday meal, which was our largest meal of the day, was always served at noon and properly known as dinner. Meal three, served about 3:00 pm, was mid-afternoon snack. During the summer, these snacks were eaten on a tractor in the field, and during the school year snacks were consumed while watching some mindless television after a long day at school.

Supper, the proper name for an evening meal, was served at 5:30. At 6:00 everyone headed to the barn to assist with evening chores, and naturally when we returned to the house at 8:00 pm we were hungry again. “Meal” number five was the bedtime snack.

Five “meals” a day x 365 days a year = 1825 meals every year and for seven people. That is a lot of baking and cooking. Is it any wonder baking was equated with love in my mom’s mind? She spent so much time baking and cooking. Even now as I look at those numbers I am flabbergasted. I don’t ever remember my mom complaining about doing all this cooking and baking and we rarely ate out.  Her only complaints were about the quality of the food she was providing.

When mom passed away we joked a bit about mom’s need for perfection in her food. There were so many meals that we listened to her litany of complaints about the meal. “The gravy is too salty, the potatoes are a bit lumpy, the meat is not as tender as I hoped, the buns got a bit dark” and on it went. As kids we just ignored it, as adults we tried to break her of the habit, and after she was gone we joked because it had become a memory of our mom that we would carry with us.

I have to admit, I don’t just carry this with me, I do this. I must tell myself to stop talking or I will sit down to a Thanksgiving dinner mumbling about how my gravy is too thin and the potatoes got cold. The scariest thing to me is that my daughter is starting to do the same thing and she didn’t spend that much time with my mom. She got it all from me. She isn’t channeling grandma, she is mimicking me. It seems a horrible thing to pass on to a daughter—a terrible desire for perfection. Or is it?

When I carefully consider my mom’s desire for perfection in her cooking and baking, I wonder if it wasn’t an expression of her desire to be a perfect mom, a desire for perfect love. I think all of us have an area of our life where we desire perfection. God created us that way. We long for the perfection that was the Garden of Eden. We long for the perfection that only God is. We long for perfect love, and it is not found in a perfectly shaped, perfectly browned bun—it is only found with God. Seek perfection, seek HIM!