ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 31, 1996 TAG: 9604010088
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: New River Journal
SOURCE: Madelyn Rosenberg
Madelyn Rosenberg, a former New River Bureau assistant editor, is the acting Features editor for The Roanoke Times.
Thousands of years ago, when the Jews fled Egypt and the iron hand of the Pharaoh, they did not have time to wait for bread to rise to feed them on their journey. They packed it up, still flat, in a desperate rush to leave behind the chains of slavery.
Today, Jews eat matzo, an unleavened bread that is more of a cracker, really, to remember those times and that flight.
In my family, all of the bread we have made from scratch over the years has been unleavened.
It was not out of tribute to our forefathers or even in preparation for Passover, which begins Wednesday at sundown. In the Rosenberg/Strier DNA, the bread-baking gene is simply missing.
Growing up, I remember my mother's attempts to knead dough into a substance that, with the encouragement of a warm, wet towel, would rise into a giant, oval mound.
An hour would pass and I would peek under the towel to see if the dough resembled a dinosaur egg, as promised by the recipe. Alas, there it remained, a white, stagnant lump.
It was a lump I would recognize in my later years, when I tried to make bread myself. A small, sticky blob on the counter, I would stare it down, willing it to grow. But it was not to be.
My mother tried to console me.
She spoke of her own frustrations - tears even! - as failed loaf after failed loaf was buried in the trash can beneath the coffee grinds.
I took no solace in this.
Maybe I wanted to replicate the crusty European-style bread I couldn't find in my rural hometown. Perhaps I pictured myself a young pioneer, turning flour into sustenance for my friends. I was driven, it seems, to bake at least one, decent loaf.
But it soon became apparent that had I been one of the settlers in Canaan or, many years later, in Jamestown, the colony would have been wiped out quickly by starvation.
I continued to fail.
Until ... I got married.
That's when the curse lifted, the bread gene, "missing in action" all these years, reappeared in my genetic makeup.
For my wedding, somebody gave me a bread machine.
Trendy, sure, but here's the thing: it WORKS.
This year, for the first time, I have been able to slice a piece of bread that was not brick-like in density.
There's a little window at the top of my new toy that I can peer through to watch the automatic kneader work its wonders, giving me the feeling that I'm somehow involved in this magical process.
And when I peer in an hour or so later, the dough has actually GROWN.
And in another hour and a half, I pull from the metal bucket a nearly perfect loaf of bread.
I started with a simple garlic and herb, but as time - and my confidence - grew, I moved on to other, more complicated things that contained sun-dried tomatoes and sunflower seeds.
The only thing buried under coffee grinds in my trash can these days is garbage.
And I feel secure in the knowledge that if I were, in fact, among the first settlers in some new land, as long as there was a pretty good infrastructure and reliable electricity, my friends and family would be well fed.
LENGTH: Medium: 69 linesby CNB