After our marriage and before we settled down to the business of trying to act like grownups, my husband, Roger, and I traveled in Europe for a year. Halfway through our trip, we landed on Naxos, a Greek island in the middle of the Mediterranean, and stayed for four months. It's a toss up whether our rent of $12 a month was the reason we lingered so long--or was it the bread? I vote for the bread. 

Our 14x14-foot room boasted a dreadful bed with ropes instead of a box spring, a lumpy couch that completely enveloped unwary guests if they sat right in the middle, a big table with one short leg, two rickety wooden chairs painted bright blue, and a hot plate. One entire wall was taken up with a huge wall cupboard where we kept food, clothing, cooking supplies, Rog's paints and canvases, my typewriter, and our footlocker and backpacks. 

It was 1970, and indoor plumbing was still a novelty on most of the islands. We appreciated our good fortune in having a sink with a cold water faucet and access to a flush toilet. If we were willing to pay to heat the water, which meant waiting an hour, we could even use a common shower at the
end of our alley. Like our neighbors, however, we usually opted to swim in the thalassa, the sea, and call it "a bath." 

Our daily half-kilo of milk, a bit more than a pint, was delivered straight from the cow by a milkman we never saw, as it arrived long before we awakened. When I opened our door to the sunshine each morning, the milk sat in our saucepan on the garden table, covered by a plate weighted with a large stone to keep out the cats. While I boiled the raw milk on our hotplate and cut up oranges as large
as grapefruits for our breakfast, Rog went jogging. He turned right at the end of the alley and ran up the town's one road. Within half a mile it began to climb into low hills and soon dwindled to a meandering goat path. 

Jogging seemed to be a concept that our new neighbors hadn't yet grasped, so they stopped to watch the crazy American running up the rutted track, only to see him run back toward town again 20 minutes later, having accomplished nothing. Along the waterfront, men sat on metal chairs sipping the first of many miniscule cups of Turkish coffee, smoking dark brown cigarettes, waiting for their morning entertainment. Soon my husband came panting around the corner.

The men pointed, shook their heads, and smacked their thighs in amusement as
Rog galloped past and disappeared into the bakery. Minutes later and 12 cents poorer, he emerged with an oblong loaf of bread hot enough to burn his fingers. The Naxos men waved their black fisherman's caps in the air and cheered "Hoppah!" as they watched Rog juggle the loaf from hand to hand, tossing
it overhead and flapping his hands to cool his fingertips, while he trotted up the alley and turned into the overgrown courtyard we shared with five other families and 20 feral cats. 

Rog plopped the bread onto the table and sluiced himself with cold water. I poured the frothy milk into tall glasses and added a spoonful of sugar to each, creating gala zesto meh zahari. Hot milk with sugar. It's the way
all the Greeks drank milk, if they drank it at all, and we'd become addicted. Then Rog sat down and we purred as we ate a breakfast that never varied in a single element for the whole time we lived on Naxos. We never grew bored or yearned for variety. It was that good.

The juice of the oranges ran down our chins and made our fingers sticky. The milk left white moustaches on our upper lips. And they were wonderful. But the bread. Oh, the bread. As the crust broke with the first hunk we tore off, the intoxicating aroma filled the room. Then we slathered on vutero-meli, a creamy mixture of butter and honey, which increased our pleasure and our stickiness. By the end of each meal, we were licking each others fingers and grinning like two sticky fools.

The bread was a one-kilo loaf. At the end of breakfast, only crumbs remained for our neighbor's chickens. Every morning, we were amazed anew that we had just eaten a pound of bread apiece. As time to leave Naxos approached, we knew we'd miss our neighbors, the sun on the whitewashed houses, the sound, smell, and changing colors of the
sea, and our endless walks in the hills. 

No other fried potatoes have ever topped those we had at our favorite taverna, and no tequila shooters will ever compete successfully with fiery raki--the island version of moonshine.
We knew we might never again see octopus drying on clotheslines or gypsies swarming through town hollering, "Kareklas," their offer to repair chairs. We would miss the Greek Orthodox priest who nuzzled his wife's neck in
the shadows of a classic column, the austerity of Holy Week and the joyous abundance of Easter morning, the click of the men's worry beads, and the keening bouzouki music. And we would miss the bread. 

"Let's see if we can copy the recipe," I suggested. With our meager Greek, we asked Yankos, the baker, for his secret. He raised his eyebrows and stared at us. Then he frowned, gave a Mediterranean shrug that brought his shoulders nearly to his ears, said, "Po, po, po," which translates as something like "Oh, for heaven's sake," and should have warned us. But his Greek hospitality prevailed, and he invited us to watch him and his three sons make bread the very next morning. And yes, we would be allowed to copy his recipe.

"What time?" I asked, dreading his reply. "Five o'clock," he said. That's what I'd been afraid he'd say. But at five o'clock the next morning, there we were, all in our places with bright, shining faces. To procure the recipe for the world's best bread, no sacrifice was too great. The baker's young sons, all in their teens, could hardly contain their hilarity as they looked at Rog and me standing in the dark, warm, yeasty-smelling back room. I held a tiny notebook and pen, and Rog had his camera. He thought photographs, rather than words, might better explain some steps in the process.

Yankos and his boys, dressed in sleeveless T-shirts like my grandfather used to wear, donned clean, white, bib aprons. They tied bandanas around their heads until every one of their abundant dark curls was tamed. Then they washed their hands and arms, lathering and rinsing two-thirds of the way to their shoulders. At that point, I began suspecting we might be just a bit out of our depth. The baker dragged a cloth sack the size of a sleeping bag to the edge of an enormous tub, although "tub" is too mundane a word to indicate the size of that cauldron. A VW beetle would easily have disappeared into it, with
room left over for spare parts. 

One of the boys took a wicked looking knife from the window ledge, stabbed it into the side of the sack and ripped it up the middle as if gutting a goat. He and his father lifted the sack, turned it over, and dumped about an astounding amount of flour into the tub. As clouds of flour filled the room, Yankos's luxuriant black moustache quickly turned white. Rog stowed his camera and snapped the case in some haste. In response to my look, he said, "All this dust wouldn't be good
for the camera." 

We watched in amazement as another boy dragged a second flour sack to the tub and repeated the performance. The baker nodded at me and pointed to the empty sacks, saying, "Two hundred kilos flour. More later." Four hundred-plus pounds of flour? More later? I began to see the bigger picture, and it was about then that my eyes began to glaze. But I flipped open my notebook and wrote "400# of fl." Yankos held up a package the size of a New York City phone book, tore off the paper wrapping, and crumbled a block of fragrant yeast into the tub, right on top of the flour. Then he ripped the stitching from a toaster-sized bag of salt and added it. "How much, how much?" I asked, feeling ridiculous. And desperate. The baker lifted a floury hand to hide his grin and said, "Four kilos each. Yeast, salt," pointing to make it clear. I wrote it down.

Then one of the sons, the one with the biggest biceps, walked to a faucet on the wall, and for the first time I noticed a hose coiled on the floor. The youngest boy held the end of the hose over the tub while his brother turned on the water. Yankos tested the temperature, nodded, and warm water flowed into the tub. He lit a foul little black cigarette and chatted with his boys, glancing into the tub now and then. When he judged the amount of water to be just right, he held up his hand and said something that sounded like, "Pah!" The faucet squeaked and the water stopped. I put my notebook away. The baker made writing motions on his palm and looked at me with a question in his eyes. I shrugged. They all looked down into the tub, but I saw their shoulders shaking with silent laughter. Then Rog and I watched as the four of them leaned over, plunged their hands into the mixture, and began stirring, mixing, folding, turning, and finally kneading. 

They ripped open a third sack and left it lying on the floor. Before long, the eldest son used a wide coal shovel to add perhaps another 30 or 40 pounds of flour to the dough. And they kept kneading. "How long?" I asked, watching beads of sweat appear on their shoulders. "Miso hora," the baker answered. Half an hour. For at least 30 minutes every morning, these guys wrestled with maybe 500 pounds of flour and only God knew how much water. And water is a pint a pound, the world around. Now I understood those impressive muscles. 

I returned to California without a recipe for Yankos's bread but with a much better understanding of the art of bread making. I began to realize that much depends on the kind of flour, the source of the water, the type of oven, the Mediterranean air, and perhaps most of all on the soul of the village baker. And clearly, bread-making is not an exact science. That morning in the Naxos bakery freed me forever from yeast phobia. If Yankos and his sons could make bread fit for the gods with a hose and a shovel, then bread dough must have a very forgiving nature. 

I've made bread hundreds of times since then. Sometimes I add a little sugar, sometimes butter or Crisco, maybe milk or an egg, even leftover cooked cereal or mashed vegetables now and then. But when I'm feeling a yen for a trip down memory lane, a need to return to basics, a desire to strip the essence of life to its simplest form, I attempt to recreate the bread of Naxos. Two cups of warm water, six cups of flour (plus maybe a little more),
one tablespoon each of yeast and salt. Plenty of time and a really, really hot oven. 

It doesn't take much to create a little piece of heaven--when my family gathers, the house smells like the old Naxos bakery, and Rog's eyes go soft with remembering. The children, grown now, nod knowingly. "Greek bread? Yum. What's that you always say, Mom?" "Horea psomi. Beautiful bread, the staff of life..." "...from the cradle of civilization," Rog finishes. As I look at him across the table, the years melt away and I'm 25 again, living with my new husband on a Greek island. It doesn't get much better than this, I think.

Author's Biography

Peggy Vincent is a retired midwife living in Oakland, California with her husband and teenaged son. 

Her first book, a memoir titled BABY CATCHER: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife, was published by Scribner in March 2002. 

Contact Peggy through her Web site: http://www.babycatcher.net

Read or write reviews on this essay!

We are still working on the "read reviews" section. We need your input!

Read or write reviews on this site!

We'd like to know from our readers if they enjoyed this issue of Seven Seas! Do you have praises or complaints? Suggestions or ideas? Would you like to read other people's reviews? Please check out our Site Reviews Page

Get notified!

Would you like to get notified as soon as new Seven Seas issues are published on the Web?
Get notified!

Tell A Friend!

Do you enjoy the Seven Seas site? 
Please tell a friend to stop by!
Tell a friend!

Go back to the table of contents
 of the current issue.

You just read essay # 2.  Read essay #

1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   14