The Knead for Bread

This story comes from Grace Tomallo, how baking bread with her grandmother taught her the importance of food and connection between people.

Nostolgia of trailer floors

As a three-year-old, Grace couldn’t have known that the smell of cigarette smoke, the yellow cabinets, and the hardwood floors would one day become symbols of nostalgia and comfort. In that small trailer, where she first learned to make soda bread, she experienced true love and discovered her purpose—to bring people together through food.

Analysis:

In this story, memory is constructed from sensory and embodied experience, rather than from clear images and dialogue. The narrator can’t remember her grandmothers’ voices or faces. Instead, she recalls experiences of touch, smell, taste, and physical sensation—lying on the cold floor, kneading dough, smelling smoke and animal odor, biting into soft bread. Such memories ground the narrator’s sense of identity, and, perhaps, illustrate the way that early childhood memory is often embodied. At the heart of the story is bread-making, a process that transforms from everyday routine to gesture of love and care. The grandmother’s cooking is illustrated by her not needing to refer to a recipe book, as she can cook without measurements. This embodiment of knowledge, often referred to as expertise, is passed down through shared experiences of food-making and labour. It is particularly highlighted when the grandmother takes the child’s hand and teaches her how to knead dough. In this moment, the child comes to understand that physical contact and the act of shared labour are key aspects of embodied knowledge. Only later does the narrator see that “biting into the soft bread” was “true love.” The story is also acutely attuned to class and material reality. The “real wood floor” is always important to the narrator. In poverty, such durable, long-lasting materials offer a sense of security and continuity that other parts of life may lack. The story also explores how memory is re-membered, reconstructed and revised across time. At first, the narrator finds it strange that his or her mother and he or she make bread on the floor instead of on a table. But with the grandmother’s illness uppermost in the narrator’s mind, the memory re-members this memory in a new way. The story also examines how identity is inherited. Physical experience—kneading dough with hands—is what connects the narrator most directly with his or her grandmother. “Manly hands” are contrasted with the smooth, womanly hands of her grandmother. Later, the narrator notices that his or her hands are just like his or her grandmother’s. These hands are tools of labour, creativity and care that connect the child to her roots.