“Share the bread, not the recipe.” My mind repeated the words as I shielded my friend Kristin from the ingredient line-up and dilapidated note card. The phrase has thrown me into a series of playful arguments with friends throughout the years, but I’ve never been able to abandon the vow I made to myself at an early age of protecting our one and only treasured family recipe for cinnamon bread. With this vow comes the dutiful practice of making it for anyone at anytime, and the most appropriate time always has been and always will be Christmas—a tradition that may have played into Kristin’s decision to visit me in Aachen, Germany that December.
“You know the drill, Kris,” I said, pointing to the kitchen door. Only after her reluctant exit (not short of an eye roll), I turned back to the tattered index card, which had been stained with splashes of years of uneven mixing patterns and dotted with techniques refined. I overdrew sugar from a double-lined paper bag into a Pyrex measuring cup, distracted by the note card. My gaze landed back on the recipe’s scripture; not for accuracy’s sake, but for the familiar comfort I found when my eyes followed my mom’s romantically curved “s”s and lingering “y”s. Where was she when she recorded the family secret in which we took most pride?
I wondered if she had already been told she was sick when she penned “2 tablespoons cinnamon,” or if her first round of chemo had taken place before or after the date on the top right hand corner.
I blinked back to the marble countertop and glanced over my shoulder. Ensuring complete privacy before flipping on the electric mixer, I shook the superfluous sugar onto a paper towel and let the remaining granules spill into the bowl. Slowly, I poured the batter into two loaf pans, and using a butter knife, created a marble effect in each. With each turn of the utensil I felt another year younger, until I was back on the production line with the baker herself. I’d kneel on a chair, her hands guiding my inexperienced ones through the custard-like batter, and we’d smile at the occasionally uniform pattern we created together.
I struggled in operating the knobs of a foreign oven, but resisted a call for help and deciphered its code. Twenty-five minutes into bake time, the smell of hot cinnamon and barely cooked butter slapped me in the face and back into our suburban Chicago home, where that intoxicating aroma once filled our kitchen and wandered upstairs into each of our bedrooms, serving as the year’s most anticipated alarm clock.
My brothers and I would roll out of bed and tumble down the stairs, eyes half open and hands clutching the railing for sleep-deprived support. We’d enter the kitchen and be greeted by the perfect pre-icing, ready-to-sample moment, now fully alert and eager for what would follow.
And only at that moment, I called Kristin back into the kitchen.
