Guest/Crystal: At the Break of a New Dawn

We are excited to feature our first guest contributor: Crystal! We hope to see her more often here – she’s quite an accomplished photographer and has a strange obsession for bread and bakeries and all the mysteries that emerge from the hours before the sun breaks for a new day…or year. Happy New Year! – Zomppas

I’ve never been greeted by the sweet smell of breads or pastries being pulled from the oven. It’s an experience that always seemed unreal, something you might see in a Norman Rockwell painting. Nobody in my family baked when I was younger; at most, my sister made Rice Krispie Treats or brownies, which seemed to me unattainably complicated.

The strange thing is that I actually love bread, possibly even obsessed with it. Perhaps the stranger fact is that the first bread with which I remember falling in love was Home Pride: mass-manufactured and preservative-filled but soft and oh-so-tasty. I would go to the supermarket and squeeze those yellow bags of carbohydrate happiness to see which one was the softest and therefore the best (my apologies if you were one of those unwitting folks who bought a pre-squeezed loaf). As I grew older, I expanded my horizons. I’d always loved Chinese dinner rolls; soon I was trying English country breads, challah, and ciabatta. Bread became exciting and bakeries, by extension, havens of bliss.

When I was deciding on a topic for my documentary photo class a few years ago, I knew I had to take this opportunity to uncover the secrets contained in the behind-the-scenes of a bakery. I wanted a place that made baked goods from scratch, somewhere that matched my mental image of splattering flour over your face and hands and strewing eggshells and butter wrappings around you as you whip up something delectable. I also wanted to see some baker’s hats.

So off I went to Petsi Pies, a cozy bakery & pastry shop a short walk from the Porter Square T stop in Somerville, Massachusetts. No baker’s hats, but plenty to look at, smell, and savor – greasy cookie sheets and stacks of muffins and crumbs and special pie-making machines and oh my!

I would have loved to see the place as it opened, but bakers get up when it’s dark outside and when I’m busy REM-cycling. Nevertheless, I loved the thrill of going behind the counter and peering at shelves, watching a sale, even passing by the dishes being washed. Seeing that the process of baking was messy (but still hygienic, of course) – as opposed to the neat and orderly displays that I often see in large supermarkets – comforted me. I responded to the flourishes of flour, the art of it all.

The entire experience made me feel closer to the food. Overly reverential? Perhaps. But cherishing the process helps me cherish the food. Though I still haven’t tried baking myself…

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