The Willow Glen Resident

Point of View

Carl Heintze

The latest sport: bread baking

In the social circles in which I move there are three big topics of discussion among the men: automobiles, football and golf.

I can hold my own talking about cars and the National Football League, but when the subject gets around to golf, I cringe.

The last time I seriously undertook the game of golf was a good 30 years ago. At that time, I reached the same conclusion as Winston Churchill: it seems silly to pursue a little white ball around, trying to get it into a series of tiny holes in the ground.

So when it comes to golf, I am worse than a rank amateur, I am helpless. I have only a vague idea what a birdie and an eagle are, what's par, and how to figure handicaps.

I try to steer the conversation in a different direction, into some avenue where I have at least a smattering of ignorance. But every now and then I get trapped. Not long ago, for instance, after golf had come up and I had issued my usual disclaimer, one of my male guests said, somewhat grimly, I thought, "Just what do you do? For sport, I mean?"

For a moment or two I was struck dumb and then I said, "I bake bread."

Clearly this was the wrong thing to say. It produced a lot of laughter among both the men and the women present, although not from my wife, I might add, who would like me out of the kitchen.

"What's your handicap?" someone snickered. I didn't find this funny.

I tried to bring up the subject of the North American Free Trade Agreement without much luck and finally slunk into the kitchen to get a drink of water.

But it's true. One of my avocations is baking bread. I do it in our bread machine, but I also bake in the oven. I collect bread recipes. I made my own cloture, a French ceramic vessel, in which to bake my bread so it has more moisture. I have oven tiles so I can bake on them for a better crust. I buy bread flour, not all-purpose, and look for multigrain recipes. I like dark breads best, but I'm still trying to perfect my French loaf. It looks like French bread, but I still haven't got the crisp hard crust down right. (I know, I know, you're supposed to spray the oven with water, put a pan of water in it and so on, but I still haven't gotten it down right.)

I'd like to have a wood-fired oven--which bakes the best kind of bread--but California's air pollution controls make this unlikely. Wood-fired ovens depend on being able to burn wood openly in the backyard, something the neighbors and the Bay Area Air Pollution Control District look upon with distrust and dismay.

I realize, of course, that baking bread does not involve as much exercise as nine holes, but at least you have something to show for it when you're done: a nice crusty, brown loaf with that wonderful flavor and aroma. If I were golfing, all I'd have would be a 110 for 18 holes and sore feet.

But I have to admit that not many of the men in my social circles bake bread or even know how to boil water. They were raised in a time when men didn't learn to cook, only to eat. I remember being with one of them over a weekend when his wife had flown off to be at the bedside of a sick relative.

He dumped a can of tomato soup in a frying pan, put a slab of raw hamburger in it and tried to cook it.

We ended up going out to McDonald's.

My friend lives in a retirement community and plays golf almost every day. He can shoot 72--he tells me this is pretty good (how would I know?)--but he can't open a package of canned biscuits and bake them.

Well, I suppose in the long run we are even. He can shoot a good round most any day. I sure can't. But left to his own resources, he'd starve to death. I'd always have something to eat, but I wouldn't be filled with the virtue and certitude of an expert golfer.

Then I reflect that my grandfather didn't know one end of a golf club from another. I can't remember that he ever engaged in any sport, unless, perhaps, it was pitching horseshoes.

Horseshoes was the equivalent of golf in my family. The males got together, clanged their shoes against one another, issued wild challenges and boasts and tossed their horses into the dust for hours on end. Definitely not a woman's sport. I never saw any women in our family pitch a horseshoe. It just wasn't done.

On the other hand, I don't remember that my grandmother ever kicked my grandfather out of the kitchen.

I'm not sure if he could bake bread, but he was good at pancakes and biscuits and made pretty good applesauce. Beyond that, he loved to soak and cook New England codfish, a "delicacy" which came dried in little wooden boxes and looked and tasted like cardboard.

So maybe it's genetic. Maybe I inherited the bread-baking gene from Grandpa. Certainly I never inherited the gene for golf.

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