February 4-5, 2024
Brioche is a physically and emotionally demanding project, a labor of love. I bequeath it upon my loved ones on special occasions, a long holiday weekend or a beloved teacher’s birthday. It’s what you do when you want to wow someone. I once blew my daughter’s friends’ minds when, on my turn in the gymnastics carpool, I doled out slices of freshly baked brioche to the girls after practice. “You made this?” the oldest, and hardest to impress, exclaimed. I proudly nodded and lapped up the cheap ego boost from a grade school girl’s suddenly elevated opinion of me. Habits die hard.
But this weekend, the loaves are not for my loved ones as such. I’ve been commissioned to make this labor of love on behalf of others, a gift for two different women who had each recently lost someone. An hour of keeping vigil as the dough transform seems a fitting offering.
When life hands us crap cards, and you spend all your effort getting by, it can feel like, well, like after all your hard work enduring, you deserve a treat. One time I was facing a difficult medical diagnosis, and I just wanted saag paneer. There were no Indian restaurants in my town, and my parents drove 30 miles to get it. It didn’t make me better, but the effort weighed as heavily in the pro column as my newly named illness did the con, a memory I carry now as strong as the memory of how scary it felt to be sick. Another time I was in the hospital standing watch over my own sick baby, for weeks on end, and someone brought lavender scented lotion to the hospital room. The splash of beauty that bottle brought to our beige room, the extravagance of massaging that calm, luxurious scent into my dry skin, felt like oxygen.
These little gestures mean something. They’re like a consolation prize for the pain, a confirmation that what you’re dealing with is hard and you need some countervailing sweetness. Beauty has a way of making us feel seen, human, alive, remind us we are more than a person who has a sick child or a dead loved one.
With ceremonial solemnity, we wrapped the cooled loaves in saran wrap and foil. I affixed a colorful Pretty Good Bread sticker on top, a silly gesture of beauty, then tucked in a small jar of recently homemade grapefruit curd, the color of sunshine, to slather on the bread. First thing Monday morning my husband drove it all to the post office, gently packed it all into boxes, and sent it off, in hopes that a grieving, weary woman might soon find a sliver of joy in a cup of tea and slice of bread, and feel a sense of surrounding love.
