I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandma recently. She died about two and a half years ago, and she was my best friend all my life. All this thinking about my grandma reminded me of an essay I wrote last spring about her for one of my classes. I don’t exactly know why, but I feel compelled to share it here with you now.
(Okay — I do have one lead on why I’m so emotional about her — on Taylor Swift’s latest album there’s a song called “Marjorie” that’s about her grandma. And oh my, this song is KILLING ME. Here, YOU listen to it and tell me you don’t understand what I mean.)
If you’ve read any of my other content, you also know that this blog is actually in dedication to…well, her (as in my Nan, not Taylor Swift. Although I do love her too). So, having this here is fitting <3
This blog post details my experience baking brown bread, a family recipe passed down through generations, as a way of remembering my grandma and how I came to better understand feminism. I also detail how this experience got me thinking about how society systemically undervalues domestic labour.
A huge part of my childhood was defined by time spent sitting at my Nan’s kitchen island, telling her about my day as I watched her prepare meals for the nursing home that she and my grandfather ran. Lots of times, I would even help her. One day, on the menu was a homemade chocolate cake. She walked me through the recipe, and then when it got to my favourite part — decorating — she unveiled an array of sprinkles and coloured frosting for me to choose from. Although eight year-old me did an absolutely horrible job decorating that cake, my Nan was quick to fawn over how beautiful she thought it looked before slicing it up and proudly serving it to the folks of the home.
My grandmother, or Nan (as I knew her) passed away in August of 2018. She was an enormous part of my life and one of my best friends. Even more broadly speaking, looking back, I was truly so lucky to grow up surrounded by so much of my extended family within arm’s reach — on any snow day I had somewhere to go, and for every afterschool obligation I had someone to pick me up.
There was certainly a dichotomy between my own dreams and the life she led. Throughout my adolescent years, as I started to learn about feminism, my initial understanding was tied to second-wave ideas such as those put forth in Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique. The idea that housewives were inherently oppressed and that “strong, independent women” worked high-level jobs and lived in big cities was ingrained in me. But even though my Nan’s life directly opposed this ideology, I still considered her one of the strongest women I knew.
She told me several times that throughout most of her life, she knew she wanted to be a homemaker. She spent so much time learning how to cook and sew from the older women in her family and her community. My grandfather was a pastor, so when she married him, she dedicated herself to putting forth the most emotional availability for her family and for her church community as she possibly could. She made everyone with whom she came into contact feel special. And if she could have created a new love language, it would have been cooking. For instance, at the last church she and my grandfather worked in, the entire congregation always looked forward to her muffins! That was because directly following every Sunday service, Nan would have the hallway all set up with a whole selection of freshly-baked, homemade muffins, as well as coffee and tea.
Therefore, when I found out about this assignment, I knew I wanted to focus on my grandmother. But I struggled to figure out how I would do it, and I also worried I wouldn’t do it justice. Regardless, memories upon memories kept popping into my head — things that I hadn’t thought about since I was a young kid. At some point, I remembered one specific day I’d spent with my Nan during which she was making bread for the special care home. As she waited for it to rise, I sifted through a jam-packed recipe card holder, filled with very well-used index cards that had important family and community recipes. Upon remembering this, I called my aunt (who was visiting my grandfather’s home at the time) and asked her to send me as many photos of these recipes as she could. After looking through them, I felt confident I’d found the perfect one: Homemade Brown Bread.
Brown Bread: Deciphering the Recipe
Brown Bread is delicious, dark, and sweet — thanks mainly to the copious amounts of molasses and shortening that one must add to achieve the perfect loaf. Looking at the photo of the recipe card, which has been passed down several generations, reminded me not only of eating it in my Nan’s kitchen, but also of making it with my other grandmother and my great-grandmother on my mom’s side. However, I haven’t found anyone here in Montreal who is familiar with the recipe. Therefore, for this assignment, I decided to do some research to pin down where Brown Bread actually came from, and I found out that it is indeed a Canadian Maritime thing. For example, an article on the molasses company Crosby’s website by Bridget Oland details how she grew up in Southern New Brunswick (not far from me at all) and “homemade bread meant one thing to [her]: molasses brown bread.” (Oland 2014)
Especially after understanding that the recipe really did have regional roots, I was so excited to bring it into my new living space and to introduce all of my friends to it. There was just one problem: the recipe card was not descriptive at all!
Although the recipe card does fortunately list the measurements of each ingredient, the instructions leave something to be desired. They simply read, “add flour to right consistency...makes 3 double loaves.”
Aside from the fact that I (a university student living in a tiny apartment) had no need for three loaves of bread, I also had never made bread by myself before. But I did know there certainly had to be more to it than simply combining all of the ingredients together and adding flour “until the right consistency.” So, I called my grandmother on my mom’s side, hoping she’d be able to help me out. Fortunately, she was! I took detailed notes, and soon realized that this was not going to be nearly as quick of an assignment as I’d initially thought. The dough needed to proof twice, she said! For an hour and a half each time! There went my plans to leave the house that day. However, with the promise of freshly-baked bread on the other side of all this waiting, I decided it was worth it.
Preparing the Bread
I began by activating yeast, which I’d never done by myself before. As it rose, I prepared all of the other wet ingredients in a bowl, and then combined the yeast with that. Next, I moved to a larger workstation so I had more room for dough-kneading purposes.
After about twenty-five minutes of hard work, the dough was looking pretty good! So I added it back to a shortening-greased mixing bowl for its first proof, being sure to also cover the top with extra shortening so it didn’t dry out (as per my grandma’s advice).
One and a half hours later, the dough had doubled in size, and I was very excited about the living being in my kitchen! I punched out the air and then divided the dough between a loaf pan and a muffin tin. Then, I set my timer for another hour and a half for the second proof.
After over three hours of waiting impatiently, the bread was finally ready for the oven! Unfortunately, I’d actually forgotten to preheat the oven, so that added another ten minutes to the process. After, however, I slid the pans in at 375 degrees celsius for 35 minutes.
Just over half an hour later, I sped to my oven and excitedly removed my bread! I burned my fingers on a roll because I was too excited to wait for them to cool to try them out. And… It was delicious! I was so pleased with the fruits of my labour that it made all the waiting well worth it.
Reflection
Although I felt satisfied, I also ended this process utterly exhausted. Aside from the bread-making, I’d also spent my Sunday preparing two meals for the week, as well as doing laundry and schoolwork. One thing became abundantly clear to me from this exercise: domestic labour is very, very difficult and we systemically undervalue it. Scholar Bridget Anderson also speaks extensively about this in her book Doing the Dirty Work?: The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (2000).
I mentioned at the beginning of this post that, early on in my exposure to feminism, what I understood very much resembled the second-wave narrative. To me, “women’s empowerment” looked like a sophisticated, independent woman living in a city, working an “important” job. But I obviously know now that this understanding was problematic, and feminism comes in many forms.
In any case, I realized that all of those days I’d spent with my grandmother — and all the ones I hadn’t — she’d probably ended absolutely exhausted. During her time running the special care home, she woke up nearly every day at 5:30am to prepare breakfast and didn’t stop working until everyone went to bed that night. She made three meals from scratch, plus desserts and snacks, every day for years — and here I’m only counting the time at the special care home. Prior to this, she did all of the same things for free for her husband and three kids.
Like I mentioned, she always told me that she loved what she did. But regardless, it is difficult for me to do justice how hard she worked during her life, and how much it upsets me that domestic labour is nearly invisible. As Peter van de Ven, Jorrit Zwijnenburg and Matthew De Queljoe of the OECD demonstrate, it simply goes unaccounted for in GDP calculations (OECD 2018). Moreover, socially, we simply take it for granted as something that will “just get done” (mainly, of course, by women). And there are many feminists who, like me when I was younger, still look at women’s desire to be a homemaker or a stay-at-home mom as a form of oppression.
I certainly do think there is a tension between intrinsic goals and systemic, oppressive pressures, and I think there are elements of what my Nan did during her life that fit into each. However, it is invaluable labour that society simply expects to be provided from somewhere, and always with a smile. My grandmother told me many times toward the end of her life that she felt fulfilled by the work that she did, and that it was always her goal to accomplish what she had. I am so grateful to have had this experience and to have tried living in her shoes, even in a small way, for a day.
Works Cited
Anderson, Bridget. Doing the Dirty Work?: The Global Politics of Domestic Labour. New York: Zed Books, 2000.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013.
Oland, Bridget. “Sarah's Molasses Brown Bread.” Crosby's Molasses, February 19, 2019. https://www.crosbys.com/sarahs-molasses-brown-bread/.
van de Ven, Peter, Jorrit Zwijnenburg, and Matthew De Queljoe. “Including Unpaid Household Activities: An Estimate of Its Impact on Macro-Economic Indicators in the G7 Economies and the Way Forward.” OECD Statistics Working Paper Series, no. 91 (July 25, 2018).
