Free The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald Page A

could get them away from me. I got to be just like a dog with a bone over anything I had washed and ironed. It wasn't that I wanted him to act like the advertisements and come dancing into the kitchen in his underwear clutching a clean shirt and yelling "No tattle-tale gray this week, little Soft-hands!" It was just that I wanted him to be conscious of the fact that it took a terrific amount of back-breaking labor to keep us in clean clothes and occasionally to comment on it. "Heaven knows," I would say in exasperation, "you expect and get praise for your work—acting like you delivered every egg with high forceps." I was that way on winter Mondays and Tuesdays—it all seemed so futile.
    Wednesday—Baking Day! Each Wednesday plunged me headlong into another, great, losing battle with bread-baking. When I first saw that fanatically happy look light up Bob's face when he spoke of chickens and realized that this was his great love, I made up my mind that I would become in record time a model farm wife, a veritable one-man-production line, somewhere between a Grant Wood painting, an Old Dutch Cleanser advertisement and Mrs. Lincoln's cookbook. Bread was my first defeat and I lowered my standard a notch. By the end of the first winter, in view of my long record of notable failures, I would probably have had to retrieve this standard with a post-hole digger.
    To begin with, the good sport, so the mountain legend has it, made her own yeast by grinding up potatoes, using ONE DRY yeast cake PER MARRIAGE; kept the yeast alive by adding potato water and never allowing the yeast bowl to get cool. I had been on the farm a matter of seconds before I saw that the only way I could keep anything consistently warm would be to stuff it down the front of my dress, so I gave up the homemade yeast idea and resorted to deceit and fresh "store-boughten" yeast.
    My first batch of bread was pale yellow and tasted like something we had cleaned out of the cooler. I tried again. This batch had the damp elasticity of the English muffin that tasted like something we had intended to clean out of the cooler but was too heavy.
    At Bob's gentle but firm insistence I took a loaf, still quivering from the womb, to a neighbor for diagnosis. Unfortunately, the neighbor, Mrs. Kettle, was just whipping out of the oven fourteen of the biggest, crustiest, lightest loaves of bread I had ever seen. I put my little undernourished lump down on the table and it looked so pitiful among all those great bouncing well-tanned beauties that I had to control a strong desire to jerk it up, nestle it against me protectively and run the four miles home.
    Mrs. Kettle had fifteen children and baked fourteen loaves of bread, twelve pans of rolls, and two coffee cakes every other day. She was a very kind neighbor, a long-suffering wife and mother and a hard worker, but she was earthy and to the point. She picked my stillborn loaf from the table, ripped it open, smelled it, made a terrible face and tossed it out the back door to her pack of mangy, ever hungry mongrels. "God-damn stuff stinks," she said companionably, wiping her hands on her large dirty front.
    She moved the gallon-sized gray granite coffee pot to the front of the stove, went into the pantry for the cups and called out to me, "Ma Hinckley had trouble with her bread too when she lived on your place." I brightened, thinking it might be the climate up there on the mountains, but Mrs. Kettle continued. "Ma Hinckley set her bread at night and the sponge was fine and I couldn't put my finger on her trouble till one day I went up there and then I seed what it was. She'd knead up her bread, build a roaring fire and then go out and lay up with the hired man. When she got back to the kitchen the bread was too hot and the yeast was dead. Your yeast was dead too," she added.
    Having quite obviously been given the glove, I hurriedly explained that we had no hired man and the barn was now a chicken house. Mrs. Kettle heaved a sigh