#170: The Home-baked Loaf
A collaboration between home and home-owner
Baking, as Katie herself has explored, has strong links to femininity, to the idea of a domestic goddess. But as I made this cheese and spinach loaf, my thoughts were instead on the concept of home.
Weekends are the time of the week we truly exist in our homes. In the evenings, after work, we are tired. The home is predominantly merely useful to us. We cook a quick dinner in the kitchen, we eat at the table, slump on the sofa, brush our teeth in the bathroom, and then curl up in bed. The home provides the tools and space for these everyday activities.
On the weekends, however, we can choose a greater function for that space than mere facilitator of routine. We have time to make the living room our dance-floor, the dining table our artistic refuge, or the bedroom our music studio. The home becomes an extension of the activities we choose to do inside it; it becomes an extension of ourselves.
If we are constantly outside of the home; if we spend our weekends at the shops, the cinema, our friends’ houses, the home remains a transitory place we hop to when we need something from it. It struggles to become a place we can call our home. It struggles to become that spatial extension of ourselves.
And as my home remains relatively new to myself, deciding to take the time to use my kitchen for something other than an essential meal was a move towards making this home my own.
Baking is a very hands on, physical activity. I plunged my hands into the mixture, covering my fingers in globs of dough. There was flour sprayed across surfaces. And the smell of cooking pervaded my flat. I sat at my table listening to the quiet hum of the oven, knowing that my home and I had worked together to create something, something I had never made before.
And when I pulled out the loaf tin, and encouraged the bread to drop into my open oven-gloved palm, I could hold the results of our efforts. This collaboration between my kitchen and I.
I am grateful to have a home that can provide for me. That can help me achieve things rather than hinder me. After three years of student properties, I know what a bothersome home is like. And so to stand in my kitchen and bake this loaf is an appreciation of finally having a real home of my own.
And spending time creating things here is the best type of homeliness I could wish for.
