Ten Reflections on Pastry
Grace Burwell
- A slice of walnut baklava ordered loudly in a college cafe, which makes me think about how much I miss my hometown sometimes.
- The rich scent of melted butter in the air, powdered sugar under my nails and in the creases of my limbs when I work a shift at the French bakery where I once dropped a tray of croissants fresh from the oven onto the ground. The bakers—Jordan, Fabrice, and Nathan, often swearing like sailors—who arrive at 3 a.m. daily to roll layers upon layers of cream-colored dough that gets paler as air is folded in, eventually filled with chocolate chips or apricots or ground almonds. A hundred more paper-thin layers within a single pastry, hours of work so easily crushed in a five-year-old’s hand or squished at the bottom of a purse. Working early morning shifts (a veteran move) has always been my favorite because I can lay claim to preparing the pastries for the day: carefully rolling the six-foot rack of trays out from the kitchen, lining the wicker baskets with parchment paper, arranging the croissants in ever-so-delicate formations as customers line up in wait. They ask for recommendations--which one is the best? You can never go wrong, I always say, though I grew sick of the cloying crescents long ago.
- The cranberry tart I spent hours laboring over (you know the New York Times recipe) for Christmas, though my hazelnut crust failed miserably. I rolled the hot shells fervently in a tea towel, hoping for the intended polish. I ended up resorting to store-bought Pillsbury. Crimson filling slightly too bitter, I only ate a small slice.
- The doughy bagels I thought my mother hated as a child because she would rarely ever eat them--I love them, but not the carbohydrates.
- The Michigan rocks cookies my grandmother would bake every time her brother visited, a generational remnant of Pennsylvania coal mines and kitchens littered with Polish pottery. Her father’s infamous sweet tooth. He would’ve loved my French bakery, the glistening rows of lemon tarts and mille-feuille and chocolate eclairs. And the croissants, of course. He would have found delight in the thick, buttery fog that casts a golden sheen over my hair and senses. My grandmother always tells me that we’re similar and how he, too, loved to bake, and I wonder if he also enjoyed the methodical calmness of adding elements together. Pristine yellow slabs of butter, a royal blue KitchenAid, a worn wooden rolling pin. Ingredients combining like chemistry.
- The days I biked with my father to Daddy’s Bread in Rhode Island, which always smelled of steaming cinnamon raisin loaves. We’d pedal furiously down roads that felt so steep to me then—roads I haven’t seen since childhood, since before my grandfather passed away. I can’t remember how to get to that small bakery from my grandparents’ old house, but I could tell you what it looked like, the exact taste of the bread.
- The flaky, delicate shortbread Clare and I split from that tiny Skye bakery I will never forget, devoured thousands of miles away from my old self. (Clare was the only lasting friend I met while studying abroad who seemed to understand the meaning of home in the combination of ingredients. We took trips to the farmers market in Stockbridge as often as we could hop on the bus, searching for the right items to recreate distant flavors. Most of the time, we’d end up at her neighborhood co-op, emerging with a £5 bottle of wine or the ingredients for homemade burgers. We savored everything, from fine pastries in the highlands to paper-thin crisps at our favorite jazz bar.) Nestled on the corner of a small town five hours from my new city, surrounded by cobblestoned hills and looming pines, that bakery felt like a magical secret possessed by only a few people in the world.
- The birthday cakes I baked for my parents every year without fail in high school: carrot for my dad, lemon for my mom. I’d spend hours trying to perfect the buttercream frosting, ensuring it wasn’t too sweet. Leveling cake layers with the precision of an architect. Decorating with steady hands. I rarely tried more than a bite, but I took pride in the effort. (Before the years of slinging croissants, I worked at a cupcake shop for a summer and lost my appetite for birthday cake pretty quickly.) In college, I seldom reach for my oven.
- The yearly odyssey of Thanksgiving pies—ten or twelve each holiday, baked in batches the morning of. My cousins and I can never seem to agree on how much allspice for the pumpkin filling or the correct amount of streusel to coat the apples, though we’ve been rehearsing the recipes for decades. Slicing Granny Smiths just right, meticulously carving lattices and leaves out of floured dough. If we drive up to Pennsylvania a day early, I might make it to the market with my grandmother to buy pounds and pounds of apples—Honeycrisp and Golden Delicious. Of course, we’ll talk about last year’s scandal, when Anna forgot the sugar in a hungover stupor. Nobody liked the taste of pumpkin without its usual sweetness.
- So much of my life traced by sugar and flour, molded by my grandmother’s rolling pin.
Grace Burwell is a journalist and writer from Maryland. She received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in May. Her work has been published in Vox Magazine, the Columbia Missourian, the Missouri Independent, and more.