In the decade or so that I’ve been part of the workforce, I’ve had a couple of truly satisfying jobs, and a handful of those that left something to be desired. I’ve pounded the pavement in rough neighborhoods while writing stories about housing rights; edited travel guides, humor books and workbooks about aligning your chakras; wiped 4-year-olds’ noses; and helped high school students prep for the SATs.
Yet one of the most gratifying positions I’ve ever held was the one in which I wore an apron that stayed clean for maybe the first half-hour of a shift, and I came home dead tired, hands aching, and covered in flour and sugar.
As a baker at Nabolom Bakery — a small, homey spot at the corner of Russell and College avenues, a collectively run business and a bastion of old-school Berkeleyness through and through — I learned to make cookies, muffins, croissants, Danish, cinnamon twists, bear claws and other pastries in relatively obscene amounts. I met local legends, like the great writer/art historian/Mills College professor Moira Roth, who came in almost every day for a café au lait.
I still regret that I never learned to make the bakery’s signature challah. But I’ve yet to duplicate the kind of good-tired that comes from spending the day creating food for other people.
Though I still stop by regularly when I’m in the neighborhood, the bakery especially comes to mind around Jewish holidays. It’s not a kosher eatery, but the place is quite popular with Jewish families who, like mine, don’t really mind. Nabolom does good business with special orders for round challah loaves at Rosh Hashanah and flourless cakes around Passover, and at Purim — oh, at Purim — the hamantaschen sell as fast as they’re made.
The fact that I have ever been given unencumbered access to a two-gallon tub of freshly made poppy seed hamantaschen filling is a hilarious, wonderful and terrible thing. To say that I never once made myself slightly sick off the stuff would be a lie. To say that I learned my lesson and now only enjoy hamantaschen in healthy moderation would also, unfortunately, be inaccurate.
Of course, I have some bakers to live up to in my family lineage. My grandmother on my father’s side made perfect rugelach. Her daughter, my father’s sister, learned the recipes before my Nana died.
My mother, mostly a self-taught baker, kept the house full of sweet smells when I was a kid, and it wasn’t long before I followed suit. The poster I made for show-and-tell one year in elementary school, displaying the instructions for the easiest peanut butter cookies ever (1 cup peanut butter, 1 cup sugar, 1 egg — I swear, they’re good!) is still floating around the basement somewhere.
But it wasn’t until it became my job that I really fell in love with baking: the hum of the stand mixers, the repetition of motions involved in shaping pastries, and the chemistry of it all, the way a slight tweak of a recipe could lead to an instant classic — or to disaster. And the chance to educate through food: I can’t count how many times I explained the concept of a collectively run business to a customer, or trotted out a primer on Passover when someone asked why the cakes advertised for the holiday were flourless.
Being one of the bakery’s resident Jews came in handy at other times. For instance, closing the place on Christmas Eve 2008. I volunteered for the shift, as I didn’t have any family obligations and most other employees did. As I was cleaning up, I saw that we had an abundance of leftover dinner rolls. We’d usually sell them discounted as day-olds, and then the following day they’d be donated to one of a handful of food banks and charities.
But since the next day was Christmas, and we’d be closed, I simply dumped them into a bunch of brown paper shopping bags and loaded them into the backseat of my car as I left for the evening. Then I stopped outside People’s Park en route to my parents’ house and dropped them off as an early present of sorts for the homeless residents. For a holiday that didn’t involve poppy seed hamantaschen filling, it’s one of the sweetest I can remember.
Emma Silvers lives in San Francisco. She can be reached at [email protected].