KENTUCKY BREAD
(excerpt)

ROXANA ROBINSON

A culinary heritage without borders

Pine Mountain is in the southeastern corner of Kentucky. It’s a steep, densely forested region, remote and beautiful. Early settlers led hardscrabble lives, clearing wooded slopes, plowing angled hillsides, building cabins deep in the hollows. The land was slant and challenging and it resisted farming, but it was generous in other ways: lush with plant life, vivid with animals, lavish with views. 

The isolated life of the mountaineers meant a paucity of education. The children who lived “back in the hollers” were a long way from any classroom, and many of them never reached one at all. Troubled by this, a farmer named William Creech founded a school in 1913. “I have heart and cravin’ that our people may grow better,” he wrote. “I have deeded my land to the Pine Mountain Settlement School... Hoping it may make bright and intelligent people after I’m dead and gone.” Creech donated several hundred acres to the boarding school—rich green bottomland at the foot of Pine Mountain, down in the narrow valley where Isaac’s Run meets Shell Run to form Greasy Creek.

It was not a purely local venture. Two women educators from outside (one a Smith graduate) helped found and administer it, and an architect designed handsome rustic buildings for the campus. Pine Mountain taught academic subjects, but the intention was to preserve the regional crafts and culture, so the girls learned baking, quilting, and weaving as well as Shakespeare, and the boys learned farming, carving, and woodworking. The students worked at the school farm, which produced most of the community’s food. It had chickens and hogs, oxen and mules, and its own dairy herd. The settlers had come from farming communities in England and Scotland, and they brought with them a close connection to the land, simple country cooking, and rich cultural traditions. Their old songs, ballads, dances, and festivals were honored by the school. May Day was a great celebration in the green bottomland along the winding creek.

Pine Mountain was where I was born, though it’s not where my family was from.

My father was from New York. He went to boarding school in New England, and then on to Harvard, where he trained to be a lawyer, like his father. My mother grew up outside Philadelphia, where her father, too, was a lawyer. She went to a private school and then Vassar. When my parents married, in 1935, they moved to an apartment in Murray Hill. It seemed like the start of a conventional, decorous, and affluent life, but things took a sharp left turn.

My father didn’t find much satisfaction in the practice of corporate law, much to his father’s disappointment. My father felt stifled, and troubled by an absence of altruism. A bit like William Creech, my father had heart and cravin’ to help people. So he changed everything: he left law for education. He left the Episcopalian Church for the Society of Friends. He left New York City for the hinterlands.

Who’s to say what drives the shifts and turns of a family’s narrative? My family’s history is so familiar to me that these moves seem inevitable, entirely normal, and perfectly predictable. Of course my father left the law, it’s so obvious, now, that he wouldn’t have been happy there. Of course we all went to Pine Mountain, which is so central to our history. Of course we left Kentucky later, and moved finally to Pennsylvania, where my parents spent the rest of their lives, and where I grew up. How else could it have been?

At the time, though, it must have seemed like a tremendous adventure for my parents—exciting but perilous, there was no turning back—as they walked forward into the rest of their lives, which still lay hidden before them.

My mother embraced the venture. She shared my father’s ideals, and she left the Presbyterian church to become a Quaker. She left her friends, family, and the life she’d known in moving to a remote mountain community during World War II, when transportation was difficult and communication limited.

I was too young to remember this (we left before I was three), but I know it all by heart. Our family lived in a log house with a tiny rudimentary kitchen and a sleeping loft for the children, reached by a ladder. My brothers and sister went to a one-room schoolhouse down the road. Everyone walked everywhere; the only traffic on the dirt roads was carts and sledges, pulled by mules and oxen. In some ways the life was primitive, but the people were warm and welcoming, the landscape was glorious, and the food delicious. “Aunt” Delie and “Uncle” Henry Creech, who had twelve children, invited our family to Sunday lunch nearly every week: homemade applesauce, homegrown greens, home-raised chicken and pork, fresh-baked cornbread and pies.

In fact, food was the great luxury here: Pine Mountain offered three hot meals a day. Everyone at the school ate in the big communal dining room at Laurel House. This was high-ceilinged and airy, with large windows; grace was sung before the meal. The school food was simple, but the important thing was that it was there, so my mother did not have to cook. This was good, since she had never learned how.

 

KENTUCKY BREAD 2 packets of active dry yeast 2 ½ cups warm water ½ cup molasses 1 tablespoon salt ¼ cup Crisco oil or peanut oil Pour the yeast into a big mixing bowl. Add the warm water. Add the oil. Add the molasses and salt. Stir until mixed. Let sit for 15 minutes. The oil will form large bubbles on top of the mixture. Then add: 5 cups of whole wheat flour 2 cups of white flour Mix until the dough becomes stiff, then start to knead. (Make sure your hands are clean, then dust them with flour.) Put the ball of dough onto a floured surface and begin to knead.  Push down into the ball of dough with the heel of your hand, press down, then pick it up and fold it over into a ball and press down again. Pick it up and press it down. The more you push it through, the smoother and more elastic it will become. The dough is very responsive, and you can feel it turn silky in your hands. Knead it until the consistency is completely smooth. Make it into a ball, push down with your the heels of your palms to make it a plate, then fold it over and make it a ball again. You can’t do this incorrectly, so don’t worry. After about ten minutes of this, when it is smooth, make it into a ball, turn the smooth side up, and set it in the mixing bowl again. (The bowl will be crusty, with bits of flour and dough in it. Don’t worry about this, either.) Pour a tiny bit of oil on top of the ball of dough, just to glaze it so that it doesn’t form a crust as it rises. Set it into a faintly warm oven—you can turn it on to 200 degrees but turn it right off again. The oven must be turned off as the bread rises. Or you can let it sit in a warm place, covered with a tea towel. Let sit for 1 hour, or until it’s about doubled in size. If you poke your finger into the dough and the shape of your finger remains, it’s ready. Then put the dough back on the floured surface. Pat a little flour on top of it and punch it down: knead it again. Push down with the heels of your hands, fold it over until it’s plump again, then punch it down. Get rid of all the air bubbles. This should only take a few minutes. Then squeeze down in the middle and pull the two halves apart, separating them into roughly two halves. Shape each one into a loaf: push down, spread out, then roll over until you have a plump, rounded sort of torpedo shape. Have ready two greased bread pans, 8 ½ by 4 ½ x 2 ½  or 9 x 5 x 3. Set the loaves in them, smooth side up, seam side down. Dust them with a little flour. Put these, not touching, back in the turned-off oven on the middle rack. Let them rise again for another hour, until they reach the top of the pan. Then turn on the oven to 350 and let bake for 1 hour. Do not open the door while they are baking. When they are done they will be a deep golden brown, and when you knock on them with your knuckles they will sound hollow. Remove from the loaf pans. If you greased the pans thoroughly this will be easy, but if there is a place that sticks, just slide a table knife deep along the edge of the pan to disconnect things Put the loaves on rack and let cool for 20 minutes or so. If you cut them too soon they will crumble to bits, although they will still taste sublime. As they cool, they will smell wonderful and they will scent your house with comfort.