Made some soda bread yesterday. We like it. It's quick and easy. No multi-day fermentation of poolish and all the other wonderful yeasty complexity that goes into practically all other forms of bread-making.
We'll make yeast bread from time to time, but it takes time -- generally all day or overnight or in some cases a couple-three days to get things just right. I think about the housewives who made their own bread daily or every three days or every week or whatever, and I truly wonder how they did it, how they kept their sanity, how they kept their energy level high enough to oversee their yeasty dough, to knead it, to shape it, to patiently let it rise, to bake and cool it, and then to slice it for toasting and serving. They made their own butter to serve with it, too.
Skill is not the half of it. Much more needed to go into it than merely skill. That's the quality of the bakery in town where skilled bakers create dozens of loaves of simple-same bread every day. They are fine. But they also lack some of the character that the home baker gives to their bread-products. So, my admiration goes both ways, toward the home baker and toward the bakery-baker. Skill and character.
Soda bread is our preferred option when waiting for yeast dough would take too long. A soda bread has no yeast, just bicarbonate and "buttermilk." Well, you can't get real buttermilk at the grocery store in our little hamlet, so we make a substitute by putting a tablespoon of white vinegar in two cups of whole or 2% milk (we almost always use 2%). It works fine. 4 cups of AP flour, 1 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp salt (or to taste), 2 cups "buttermilk"; mix thoroughly but gently. Do not knead. Put on floured or cornmealed parchment on a baking sheet. Form into a round. Cut an X or cross into the top. Bake at 425 for 20 minutes, then 375 for 20 minutes more. Check for doneness by tapping on the bottom of the loaf. Sound hollow? It's done. If a little dull sounding, bake another 10 minutes or so. Cool enough to be able to slice without crushing-mooshing. Slather with butter. Eat.
No skill required. Not much patience, either. Character? Sure.
I don't know whether any of my ancestors were into bread making. Probably not. I know my mother never made bread in her life, and I doubt her mother or grandmother did either. My father couldn't be bothered, and his mother had servants to do the housework. Did they make bread? Maybe. Then going back a little farther to the Irish and German immigrants who started my father's line in America: did they make their own bread? I think probably they did. The Irish ones probably made soda bread. The Germans, yeast bread.
I don't know enough about their lives in Ireland and Germany, and apart from the Great Famine and all the wars, I don't know why they left for America when they did c.1849-1854.
My father never talked about it. My impression was that his grandparents -- the immigrants -- never talked about it either. I know his Irish grandparents made up stories about who they were and where they came from and sometimes those stories changed so much they by the time they got to my father and me they were so tangled up they were little more than nonsense. When I started untangling those stories and got rid of some of the fantasy, the "real story" was perhaps much sadder than anyone wanted it to be -- thus the many made-up stories of some grandeur. As for the Germans, I never knew much of anything about them except that my father's German grandmother never learned English, so it was hard to communicate with her, and my father's mother was deaf, so it was hard to communicate with her, too.
Karma enters into the equation when I consider who these people were and who I came from. Jack Kerouac wrote a biography of the Buddha called "Wake Up!" in the years before he became famous after the publication of "On the Road" in 1957. It's very simple and straightforward, something like the Lives of the Saints (for children) in Catholic literature. In it, Kerouac proposes that what's called "karma" is in reality mostly a matter of genetic inheritance. Your past lives are for the most part the lives of your ancestors and your genetic inheritance comes through them to you. And that is the basis for your karma; but it may not be the whole of your karma. There may be other elements, known and unknown, that shape who you are. The Buddha, after all, discovers there is more to his Being than simply what he inherits from his ancestors. Oh, so very much more. He has karmic inheritance through many twisted, tangled paths. Lives upon lives. Buddhas upon Buddhas. Universes upon universes.
Becoming aware of it all can be overwhelming.
And so for most of us, we live our lives without becoming aware. It's easier and safer in some ways. But in others, it's unsatisfying. One still has questions; one still wants to know.
I've found out, though, perhaps more than I wanted to know. But only so much, in the end, that I could handle.
The inheritance from my ancestors is very twisted and tangled, and some of it, I think, is very tragic, horrible, and deeply sad. This comes through both parents. For a time, I wondered if my father was actually my father, for we seem not to have hit it off as father and son at all. How could he be my biological father if we were so distant from one another and never truly connected? Well, but that's part of the karmic load, I came to realize, that I inherited, and not just from him.
Why, I wondered, was my mother so... disturbed and often cruel. What had I done to trigger her rage? But then, I came to understand that she, like me, carried a karmic load she could not dispense with, nor indeed could I undo the karma I was born with.
My mother's maternal grandfather was murdered by his mistress. Her father may have been murdered, too. Her insight into these events was that both her father and grandfather were "bad men." Both her husbands were equally "bad" -- or maybe worse. And that all transferred to me and my sister. My mother couldn't help the way she felt about us and them. It was her karma.
Lord knows how far back any of this stretched. I would say as far back as any of her ancestors could be traced, and just so with my father's tangled ancestry. Who these people were is as complicated as the most complex bread-making we can imagine.
I think of a sourdough starter for example that takes literally forever and lasts forever -- or it can. The yeast from the air which starts the process goes back to the origin of yeast, whenever that was, and the process, when done correctly, can maintain the "starter" indefinitely, indeed forever. Creating the Perfect Sourdough Bread is seen as a goal in life for some bread-bakers, to the point of obsession, of trying over and over and over again to get it Just Right, and never quite succeeding. Perfection is just out of reach. Something wasn't done quite right, so try again. And again. And again. Karma is a lot like that.
And then there's me and my soda bread. One and done.
It doesn't have to be Perfect. It doesn't take Forever. It's Good Enough.
All this is vaguely related to our study text for this Practice Period/Ango, "The Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi." At some point, I think I'll try to delve into what it meant to me 50-some-odd years ago when I first absorbed the teaching. How it affected and led to a profound change in the course of my life, and yet how strong and heavy is the karmic load I carry.
One day.... 😉
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