Dad Food : When Dad Was in the Kitchen : A Baker of Breads

When my mother joined the work force, my father began to cook. From that time forward he did all the cooking in the house--with the exception of holiday meals.

As far as I knew, my father was unique. None of my friends’ fathers ever entered the kitchen, except to extract the occasional beer from the refrigerator. Dad, a policeman, was actually a little embarrassed about the whole thing. “Don’t go blabbing it all over town that I do the cooking,” he warned. But it was a small town, eventually word did get around, and before long my mother’s friends were trying to get my father to give them his recipes.

But Dad never used a recipe; he simply threw in a little pinch of this and a dash of that. He was at his best with Italian dishes. And because he was raised during the Depression, he never wasted a thing. Yesterday’s spaghetti and meatballs became today’s spaghetti and meatballs and then tomorrow’s pasta e fagoli. His food was terrific; I have never had better rigatoni and meatballs than his.

But Dad wasn’t perfect; he could ruin something as simple as Jell-O. I remember sitting at the table, my skinny legs dangling from the kitchen chair. As I stuck a spoon into a dish of red Jell-O with bananas, the spoon just sort of stayed there. I actually peeled off the top layer as if it were a piece of cellophane. I kicked my sister under the table to get her attention, but she was already spitting it out. She held it up for everybody to see. We all looked at my father. “Shut up and eat it,” he said. “It’s supposed to be that way.”

The one thing Dad never made mistakes with was bread. He loved baking it; his French bread was crusty, his wheat bread dense and chewy and his sourdough divine. Before long he had so many different bags of grains and flours, and so much breadmaking equipment (he even had a commercial-sized Hobart Kitchenaid mixer), that he had to have a special cupboard made just to hold everything. Unfortunately, he baked bread the way he cooked--without a recipe. The only recipe I ever pried out of him was this one for cream of rye bread. It’s still one of my favorites.

LEO KOCHEVAR’S CREAM OF RYE BREAD

1 3/4 cups cream of rye cereal

6 tablespoons molasses

1/4 cup sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1 1/2 teaspoons butter

1/3 cup milk

1 package dry yeast

5 to 6 cups all-purpose flour

3/4 cup raisins, optional

Combine cereal, molasses, sugar, salt, butter and milk in mixing bowl. Boil 1 pint water and pour over cereal mixture. Stir and let stand until lukewarm.

Dissolve yeast in 1/4 cup warm water. Add to cereal mixture. Mix in flour (dough will be very sticky). Knead dough about 10 minutes, until smooth and satiny. Gradually add raisins, kneading until incorporated into dough.

Place in lightly greased bowl and turn once to grease surface. Cover and let rise until doubled in bulk, about 1 hour. Divide dough into 2 loaves. Place, seam side down, in greased 9x4-inch loaf pans. Cover and let rise to top of pans. Bake at 375 degrees 45 minutes to 60 minutes.

Note: Bread browns very quickly. Cover with foil so loaves don’t get too dark. It can be made in Kitchenaid Mixer with dough hook. Cream of rye cereal can be found in health food stores and some supermarkets.