Peter Rabbit Dinner, in depth

on recipes, breadmaking, and rethinking my approach to family mealtime

Greetings! The Ancestral Homekeeper is a newsletter dedicated to slow & simple living for all of us. I’m Kristina, and I believe that the way we shape our lives at home will be reflected in our society at large. By blending the wisdom of our ancestors with contemporary thoughts on mental health, self nurturing, and social justice, we can find the path to changing our world. New letter is out every Sunday!

---

My eyes are closed. I can hear my children in the other room, passionately discussing the particulars of today’s elaborate train track configuration. I sigh, pleased finally to have a few moments to myself. I am in the kitchen, focusing intently on the bread that will serve as the cornerstone for tonight’s meal and tomorrow’s lunch.

I can feel the dough beneath my fingers turning, becoming silkier and more elastic as I continue kneading. The stickiness is slowly shifting as the gluten develops, becoming long strands that will enable this sourdough sandwich loaf to rise tall, strong, and soft.

Breadmaking has been one of my favorite grounding practices. In today’s high-speed consumer capitalist society, making bread has become a hobby, instead of an integral part of how we cook for our families. Living in the Bay Area, I am spoiled for amazing bakeries that produce a dizzying amount of artisanal loaves. I am grateful they exist and love indulging in a crusty hearth-baked loaf when I’m short on time or my budget allows. But like most things food related, I prefer to make it at home if I can.

I am a cook. I first taught myself the basics in college, when I realized that my projected image of an independent, intelligent scholar was being undercut by my inability to manage a basic boxed cake mix. In the twenty years since, I have gone from amateur, routinely overcooking a Rachel Ray apricot chicken recipe, to working with professional chefs on their recipe development and publishing my own elaborate ten-page recipe guides.

But the traditional recipe has never really served me as well as I had always hoped. I find them too exacting and inflexible. You must cook a ton to develop your own instincts and learn the skills of figuring out substitutions on the fly. Many times recipes wildly underestimate the time needed for most home cooks to complete the prep work required. Recipes just feel rigid, like the steel frame of a building designed to withstand all sorts of pressures and movement.

At this point in my journey, when I cook something new to me, I read a handful of similar recipes, paying close attention to any important ratios, and then use my knowledge to make up something as I go. This helps me adapt a recipe concept to what we have on hand, and to my family’s personal likes and aversions. One day I would like to figure out a way to explain the particulars of a dish to people without using a traditional recipe, but I have not yet discovered the medium.

One place where the traditional recipe still shines for me is in baking, or more specifically, breadmaking. The varying percentages of flour to water to starter to salt can produce wildly different loaves. The temperature of the ingredients and of the room can dramatically alter the speed of fermentation. The amount of vigor in kneading or number of stretch and folds in the bowl can affect the final appearance and rise of the bread. It is immensely helpful to follow a recipe precisely the first time you bake a particular loaf, and to take detailed notes. With each bake, you can take more notes and make more adjustments based on previous experiences. All of my bread recipes are like living organisms that shift and adapt every time, based on dozens of different factors. In bread making, a recipe isn’t constricting — it’s more like a treasure map on a never-ending quest.

Plus, there’s the discard! Maintaining a starter also requires discarding a large portion of it with every feeding, though, of course I almost never actually discard it. It tickles me to no end to use up every last bit of sourdough starter discard for our morning pancakes or waffles, or blueberry muffins, or crepes, crackers, cookies, or even cakes. The sourdough discard is full of fermented goodness and a lightly tangy flavor, making them particularly well-suited to these types of baked recipes.

Because breadmaking can require a significant amount of overall time (three days is not unusual for many sourdough recipes!) but relatively little hands-on time, it rewards those who are able to spend a good many hours puttering around the kitchen or the home. This is why sourdough baking took off like wildfire in the early pandemic. Now that we’ve mostly reemerged into the world and into our usual hustle and bustle, the long hours of sourdough have been lost to many folks again. And I understand it! It can be a challenge to fit bread into a busy schedule, especially when it comes on top of making dinner, packing lunches, and showering snacks onto ravenous children.

But I have found one way of reframing breadmaking that has altered our entire concept of family mealtime. Instead of viewing it as an additional activity to complete on top of the endless slog of deciding on and then preparing dinner, I use the bread that I bake as the cornerstone of the whole meal, the anchor for all the other ingredients to settle around it.

One of my family’s most requested dinners is Peter Rabbit night. I have written about this concept before, and it is something that folks seem particularly fascinated by. Remember when Peter was put to bed with a cup of chamomile tea, but his sisters got to enjoy bread, milk, and blackberries for supper? Well, nutritionally speaking, this is actually a pretty well-rounded idea. If use a wholesome sourdough, with a percentage of long fermented whole grains, you are getting a wonderful source of protein, fiber, and complex carbohydrates. The milk provides fat and protein. And the berries offer more fiber, vitamins, antioxidants, and a joyful sweetness. We usually round out the meal with crudite, like bell peppers or carrots (a bunny favorite!), a bit of cheese, and a simple salad. If it’s cold out, leftover soup pulled from the fridge or freezer is always welcome. It’s a meal that even the most selective of eaters can enjoy, but provides enough nutrition and variety for the whole family.

And this method doesn’t work just for bread. Our family meal plan usually only has these cornerstones decided in advance, and I fill in the details closer to the actual date. Some days I have made rice the anchor, or noodles. This lends itself beautifully to a dinner rhythm that is predictable yet adaptable. It is structured enough for children to understand. It’s flexible enough for me to lean on leftovers or food preserved from the freezer, or to devote some time to making a more labor-intensive or recipe-dependent meal like schnitzel or lasagna.

When baking bread becomes the central component of dinner, it becomes not just a pleasurable hobby — it becomes vital. Much as the rhythm of our ancestors’ days made have centered on the rise and fall of whatever bread was central to their particular cultures, our days can share in this simple grounding practice. As the world falls apart around us, and we are inundated with news of suffering and destruction and war, there is something almost primal in the soothing art of breadmaking. We cannot feed all the hungry children of this world, but we can feed our own. We can bake two loaves as easily as one, giving the extra to a neighbor in need of solace. We can live a bit more sustainably by putting our leftovers to work, and thus as add slight effort to arresting climate change. Even baking just a few loaves a month would reduce our consumption of single use plastics. We can spend our time at dinner talking about our days, highlighting the kindness and gratitude we find within in order to raise children who value peace over violence.

When we feel helpless, whether due to world crisis or just the endless mental pressure of coming up with dinner for the hundred thousandth time, we can find our center in the simplest of ancestral foods — flour and water.

---

(many thanks to R & K for inspiring the subject matter of today’s newsletter. I treasure you!)