Basic Dough for Everything

The card was in the oven when I took over the bakery, wedged at the back between the tray rail and the wall, where it must have lain for decades, handwritten, no name, no date, just the heading "Basic Dough for Everything" and nine steps below it in handwriting I don't recognise and couldn't identify, though I asked five previous owners of the shop. I'm passing it on here exactly as it's written, because I think someone should know it exists, even though I wouldn't advise anyone to use it.

You take five hundred grams of flour, type 550, and zero the scale before you start, not after.

You pour in water until the scale lies — until, no matter how much more you add, it shows the same reading it showed after the first spoonful. This takes a different amount of time for everyone. For me it took thirty-one minutes. I timed it because I assumed it was a fault in the old scale, a loose contact, something mechanical. The scale is from 2019. I bought it myself.

You knead until the dough pulls clean from the sides of the bowl, the same as any dough — this is the only step that's like any other recipe, and I suspect that's deliberate, so you don't notice what you've started until you're already inside it.

You speak a name into the dough, quietly, the name of someone you have recently forgotten — not forgotten in the sense of not remembering them, but forgotten in the sense of not having thought of them in a while, though you should have. At first I thought this was the instruction I could most easily skip, since it requires no ingredient. Then I stood at the counter for five minutes and no name came, until one did, a teacher from trade school I hadn't thought of in twelve years, and I said his name into the dough because I wanted to find out whether anything at all would happen. Nothing happened. That unsettled me more than if something had.

You cover the bowl with a cloth that has been used before, never a new one, and set it in the coldest corner of the room overnight, not the refrigerator.

You do not check on it, even if it moves. That's exactly how it's written, with the "even if," as though it were self-evident that something under a cloth on a bowl of dough might move in a way you shouldn't look at, and I stopped breathing twice that first night because I thought I heard a sound from the corner, a stretching, a faint tearing, the way very elastic fabric sounds when it slowly expands, and I did not get up. In the morning the dough had doubled, the way any good dough does, nothing more.

You shape it only once it appears to breathe on its own — a very faint, very regular rise and fall of the surface, visible only if you let the light fall across it sideways. I let the light fall across it sideways. I don't recommend that anyone do this.

You bake it only once the oven starts knocking, not before — and the oven knocked, one dry knock from inside, before I had even preheated it, while it was still off, cold, and I opened the door and saw nothing but the empty tray, and closed it again and turned the oven on and waited until it knocked once more, this time from the heat, the way ovens sometimes do, and only then slid the dough in.

Nine steps. The ninth is missing from the card — it stops after eight, with a torn-off beginning of a sentence, "When it is ready, say—", and then nothing, a tear in the paper at exactly that point, clean enough that I don't believe it was an accident.

I baked the bread once, that first winter after I took over the shop, out of curiosity, out of recklessness, I no longer remember exactly why. It was the best bread I have ever baked, the best bread I will probably ever bake, dark, dense, with a taste I can't describe, because every comparison I've tried since I've had to abandon. I sold it at the market that day, by the slice, to people I partly knew and partly didn't, and three of them came back to me later, on different days, to tell me the bread had reminded them of someone they'd lost — not the same person, each a different one, a mother, a brother, One of the three, a woman in her sixties, didn't come back that same day but a week later, bought nothing, just stood at the stall and asked, quite calmly, "What was in it." I said flour, water, yeast, the usual. She looked at me for a long time, the way you look at someone you don't believe but also don't want to contradict, and said, "My sister has been dead four years. That bread tasted like her kitchen. Not similar. Exact." Then she bought a Linzer torte and left, and I have thought often, since, about that sentence, "not similar, exact," because it implies that an exact copy of something that shouldn't still exist is sitting out there somewhere, and that my oven, for one single morning, had access to it.

a woman one of them said she'd never married but should have, and I never mentioned that while kneading I'd spoken a name into the dough, my own forgotten teacher's name, because I didn't know how to explain that without it sounding like what it probably is.

I haven't baked it again since. The card is in a drawer under the till now, not in the oven any more — I didn't want to leave it there — and business is fine without it, I want to be clear about that, I don't need the recipe to make cakes people photograph. But some evenings, when the oven starts ticking as it cools, the way ovens do, I still go back to the drawer and check that it's shut.

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