It Hath Risen For One Traditional Breadmaker, Baking Is A Spiritual Experience

In the footsteps of her family and her faith, Mary Lee Abba-Gaston bakes bread.

The inspiration came from her mother, who used to share homemade loaves with hobos passing by their house north of Hillyard, a house Abba-Gaston now uses to teach cooking classes.

The brick oven sitting in the yard between that childhood home and her new home next door came from Mount St. Michael’s — the former Catholic seminary, visible on the hillside above, where Abba-Gaston’s parents met.

The significance comes from the Bible. Abba-Gaston, who’s finishing a master’s degree in religious studies at Gonzaga University, is writing her research paper on the spirituality of bread, based on the Old Testament and the gospel of Luke.

When she’s finished, she plans to keep teaching classes under the name of Old Mission Brick Oven Breads, and also offer longer retreats where stressed-out workers can come to unwind, connect with each other — and bake bread.

“It’s more than just baking bread,” she says. “What people have said, ever since I started (teaching), is, `This has been like a spiritual experience.’ I don’t say anything about Jesus, God, but they leave feeling that.”

For Abba-Gaston’s mother, Mary, baking her own bread was a matter of finances, not faith. Among the hobos who hopped off trains on the nearby railroad tracks, headed for the soup kitchen at Mount St. Michael’s, word soon spread that Monday was Mary’s baking day.

“We were really poor, but we shared,” Abba-Gaston says. “Mom would say, `There he is, you might as well take it out to him so he doesn’t have to knock on the door.’ “

Abba-Gaston began baking bread more than 30 years ago, as a way to affordably feed her own family. When all her children were home, that added up to 10 loaves a week.

“When I first baked, they were like doorstops,” she remembers with a smile. “But I never gave up.”

Along the way, baking became a release from the challenges of raising eight children. “Bread became my therapy,” Abba-Gaston says. “I’d grab my bread bowl, and my whole life would get put back into some sort of perspective by pounding on that dough.”

Baking also became a way for Abba-Gaston to teach fractions in her adult education classes through the Community Colleges of Spokane to the likes of welfare mothers and work-release inmates.

“These were really, really emotionally and psychologically poor people,” she says. “They had never imagined creating anything.”

When she saw the joy in their faces, Abba-Gaston started thinking that the general public would benefit from baking bread, too. Spreading the word through her garden club, she began teaching cooking classes on the side to anyone who would come, from bread to pizza, Italian biscotti to German meat rolls.

It all revolved around the big brick oven that arrived three years ago, during her final year of working for the community colleges.

“For 10 years, I had wanted one,” Abba-Gaston says. “When we were kids, we used to go up to Mount St. Michael’s and bum bread. One night, I woke up and wondered if the ovens were still there.”

One was. She got it cheap, for the salvage price of $200, although having it taken apart and moved cost another $5,500.

So far as Abba-Gaston is concerned, the investment was well worth it.

“People come out at the end of a stressful day and they laugh, giggle, tell jokes and pound that dough,” she says. “They say, ‘Life gets so crazy, and here I am, playing with dough, like a kindergartner.’ They go home and feel better.”

They take with them the bread they bake, as well as a few morsels of philosophy, such as Abba-Gaston’s insistence that bread be broken with the hands, not cut.

“The new ones always ask, ‘Do you know where she keeps the knives?’” she says. The ones who have been here before say, ‘You’re not supposed to cut it; you’re supposed to break it.’”

After all, Abba-Gaston points out, there’s no place in the Bible that talks about cutting bread with knives.

“I just think a knife makes it as sterile as Wonder Bread,” she says. “There seems to be such a symbolic, earthy tone to breaking a loaf of bread. We’re all a part of that whole which we are breaking.

“Maybe the whole idea of families not breaking bread around a table any more is why families aren’t connected.”

In her biblical research, Abba-Gaston found more than 50 references in the books of Luke and Acts to Jesus breaking bread with his followers.

During the first Easter, she says, “When Jesus rose, he didn’t look the same; he was transformed. A lot of people didn’t recognize him until he broke bread and said, ‘Take this, remember me.’”

In fact, Abba-Gaston says, Jesus was put to death because he broke bread with the wrong people.

“What made people so angry with him is that he was eating with people he wasn’t supposed to be eating with, the despised and the outcasts and the prostitutes,” she says. “His eating bread got him killed.”

Today, more than ever, she says, we need to follow Jesus’ example and break bread with the poor, the mentally ill, “the people we in our affluent society don’t want to look at any more. We need to be that same spiritual and physical nourishment that Jesus provided.”

One of Abba-Gaston’s favorite biblical passages about bread is the very first, from Genesis 3:19: “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it your were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

While some may see it as depressing, she sees it as reaffirming.

“The whole implication is about the beginning and end of life - we plant in the dirt, feel the soil, we bake bread, eat the fruits of our harvest, then we die and go back to the soil,” she says.

“I had thought about being a chaplain in a hospital, but I decided this is really where I ought to stay, do this here, in my mother’s house. To me, it keeps the cycle of life going, like the new things that come back in the earth every year.”

And year in, year out, Abba-Gaston never tires of taking flour, water and yeast and turning them into something with a life of its own.

“Every time I drop that oven door and those loaves of bread are there,” she says, “it’s like a miraculous thing.”

Easter breads are a tradition in many cultures, from the cross-topped Christopomo in Greece to Italy’s dove-shaped Columba di Pasqua. Abba-Gaston’s thoroughly American creation, Easter Bunny Dough Boys, is adapted from a Sunset magazine recipe for braided Greek Easter bread. It’s easier to shape these bunnies than it might seem, but if you don’t want to bother, the lemon-accented dough is delicious for regular sweet breads or rolls.

Easter Bunny Dough Boys

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 cup butter

1/2 cup milk

2-1/2 - 3 cups flour

1 tablespoon yeast

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

1-1/2 teaspoons grated lemon peel

Juice of 1/2 lemon

8 hard-cooked eggs (optional)

1 egg yolk, beaten with 1 tablespoon water and a pinch of sugar

In a small pan, combine salt, sugar, butter and milk; warm over low heat to about 125 degrees.

In large bowl, combine 1 cup of the flour with the yeast. Add warm milk mixture, eggs, vanilla, lemon peel and lemon juice. Beat for a few minutes. Add remaining flour to make a stiff but soft dough. Knead dough until smooth and elastic, addding flour as necessary. Turn dough over in a greased bowl; cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled, about 45 minutes.

Punch down dough and knead lightly on a floured surface. Divide into 8 pieces. Roll each piece into a rectangle about 5 inches long. Pretending that the rectangle is a clock, make slits in dough at 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12 o’clock. Shape top two sections into bunny’s head and ears, bottom two sections into legs and feet, and middle sections into arms. If desired, place a boiled egg in bunny’s tummy and wrap arms around egg. Insert raisins for eyes, nose and mouth. Brush bunnies with egg yolk mixture and let rise on greased baking sheets 30 to 40 minutes.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake bunnies just until light golden brown, about 20 to 25 minutes. Cool on rack. If desired, frost tips of bunnies’ ears and feet with white icing.

Yield: 8 bunnies.

Nutrition information per bunny (not including hard-cooked eggs): 277 calories, 8.4 grams fat (27 percent fat calories), 7 grams protein, 43 grams carbohydrate, 97 milligrams cholesterol, 1 gram dietary fiber, 173 milligrams sodium.

This sidebar appeared with the story:

CLASSES

For more information about cooking classes and retreats at Old Mission Brick Oven Breads and School of Lost Arts, call Mary Lee Abba-Gaston at 467-7309.