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Saturday, January 5, 2019

Live, Love, Bake

The C. A. Pillsbury Company was founded in 1872, one year after Clara, the name I gave the character based on my great-grandmother, was born. In Part VI of Never Done Clara spends the better part of every Saturday baking bread, pies, or other desserts, and probably, although I didn't mention it by name, out of Pillsbury flour.

After cleaning house on Friday, Clara and most nineteenth/early twentieth century housewives devoted Saturday to the week's baking. Sugared baked goods kept better than homemade bread, but by baking bread on Saturday she could serve it fresh with Sunday dinner.

Air is bread's enemy. A breadbox kept the staple fresh a little longer


Part VI begins on a Saturday. "With the aroma of baking bread filling every corner of the hotel, Clara celebrated her first year as manager in the kitchen. It was a cool September afternoon, but the sunshine spilling through the windows, combined with the heat from the oven, made the kitchen almost unbearable. Using the hem of her apron, she blotted perspiration from her upper lip. Then she folded a pat of dough in half, kneaded it with the heels of her hands, and folded it again, pushing and punching, dusting it with flour until the dough reached the texture of an earlobe." 


Clara had many bread-making failures before learning how to compensate for the higher altitudes of Western Colorado's mountains: "dough that wouldn’t rise, yeast that died, bread with so many holes in it there wasn’t any place to spread the butter."

She had no trouble baking pies, though, even in the mining town of Ophir Loop. Below is her pie dough recipe.

2 c. flour
3/4 c. lard
a salt spoon of salt
6 tbsp. of cold water

I modeled Clara after my great-grandmother Ella Tripler Leaming Fell, an excellent bread and pie baker who died in 1959. Grandma Fell lived long enough to witness the first Pillsbury Bake-off in 1949 and the packaged biscuit dough that began appearing in grocery stores in the early 50's. She never met the Pillsbury Doughboy born in 1965. I think she would have liked him.

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