Pandemic focuses attention on the kitchen Gwen Florio Montana 55
Maybe, as the reality of the pandemic-imposed restrictions began to sink in this year, you found yourself becoming intimately acquainted with a room in your home. No, not your home “office,” as some of us so grandly termed our sofas. Nor the bedroom, despite the impulse to just pull the covers over our heads and stay there until this is over. We’re talking the kitchen. Surely you haven’t escaped all the photos everyone you know seems to be posting on social media of their food-porn-perfect baguettes, their bubbling sourdough starter, their newly arranged spice racks. We, too, plead guilty (except for the perfect baguettes. It’s going to take more than a pandemic to get us to go there). We talked to Missoulian food writers Greg Patent and Mea Andrews about the phenom, and about their personal experiences with it, which were quite different. For the first time in years, Andrews said, she focused on meal prep and planning, although when she went in search of a new freezer to help with those tasks, she found freezers scarce, as people sought to hoard food as well as toilet paper. Patent, author of (among others) “A Baker’s Odyssey: Celebrating Time-Honored Recipes from America’s Rich Immigrant Heritage,” was equally troubled by the scarcity of flour and yeast, nearly panicking when he picked up his food orders at the Good Food Store “and there was never any
14 Summer 2020
Mia Andrews
Greg Patent
flour.” “I tried Rosauers,” he said. “I tried King Arthur” — the Vermont company that ships its flour nationwide; or, at least it did until the pandemic nearly wiped out its stocks — “they were saying it was temporarily unavailable.” Patent started searching the internet and finally scored the flour in the unlikeliest of places: Etsy, the crafts-focused e-commerce site. “Etsy!” he marveled. While Patent was actively hunting down baking supplies, Andrews found herself briefly paralyzed by her dilemma. Andrews and her husband, Dave Guffey, are both retired now, but years in jobs with unpredictable hours — Andrews as a Missoulian reporter and Guffey as sports information director for the University of Montana — meant meals were catch-as-catch-can affairs, with a lot of dinners out. Suddenly, though, restaurants were closed and Andrews had plenty of time — so very much time — to
contemplate meals. “I really had gotten lazy about cooking at home,” she said. But with the shutdown, “for the first time in a long time, I actually had to plan meals, think about meals. … I hadn’t paid attention to my freezer in years. I threw out stuff that was probably six years old.” She also delved deep into her cabinets, unearthing little-used spices and some Mustard Seed sauces she’d bought last Christmas. “I became much more creative,” she said, also searching her cookbook collection and planning meals farther in advance “instead of just at 5:30 Googling what can I do?” Patent, meanwhile, was buying up flour wherever he could find it — a company called New York Bakers came through, as well as another company in Kentucky — and as as result now has 80 pounds of flour in his home. “Then,” he said, “yeast was a problem. I just activated sourdough starter that’s been in my fridge for years.” (For yeast-free
baking, see accompanying recipe for Irish soda bread.) Eventually he found yeast, too, and now, “I’ve just been baking everything.” Define “everything,” please. “A high-gluten flour bagel, French baguettes, boules, wholewheat sandwich loaves. … and a long time ago Dorothy (his wife, author Dorothy Patent) created a Graham carrot bread with whole wheat flour, bread flour and carrot juice that makes an amazing sandwich loaf.” Patent, of course, has always been a baker. Of the pandemic-inspired baking newbies, he said, “I hope they keep it up, now that they have experienced what homemade bread is.” His advice: “Just get in there and do it. … If you want comfort, you want to feel that all’s right with the world, I think baking does that.” As for Andrews, her newfound sense of organization means fewer trips out to buy food, therefore less risk in a time of pandemic. She thinks that she, like a lot of people, will stick with her new habits once our new normal, whatever that may be, becomes apparent. “At the beginning (of the shutdown) I thought, ‘Oh, this is kind of a challenge, something exciting, something different.’ Now, months later, it’s, ‘Oh, this is a new life.” With that in mind, and realizing how much more she was relying on her freezer, she went in search of a new one, a task nearly as daunting as Patent’s search for flour. She succeeded. “It’s a vote for the future,” she said. MT55
