Brother Anselm enters the kitchen at three forty-five in the morning. The flagstone floor is cold against the soles of his rope sandals. He nods at the icon of Saint Benedict above the sink, lights the oven, and pulls down a wooden bowl from a shelf his predecessor built in 1972.
The starter is in a small clay crock with a wooden lid. He feeds it first, before anything else. He says good morning to it. He says he is aware this sounds strange. He does not mind.
Anselm is sixty-eight. He entered the monastery in 1987 at the age of twenty-nine, after eight years working as a high school history teacher. He took his solemn vows in 1992. He has baked the community"s bread since 1991, when the previous baker, a monk named Brother Paul, was no longer able.
The community numbers nineteen monks at present. It has been as high as thirty-four and as low as fifteen. He bakes for whoever is there.
The bread is a simple wheat loaf with a small percentage of rye. The recipe has not changed in his time. He says it has not changed in Brother Paul"s time either, and that Brother Paul learned it from Brother Maurus, who learned it from someone whose name has been lost.
He measures by feel. He says the scale is in the drawer if he needs it. He has not needed it in many years.
The kitchen has a single high window. By four-thirty it shows the first pale gray of dawn. He shapes the loaves on a long wooden table that has the soft sheen of a hundred thousand flour-dustings.
He works in silence. The community does not require silence at this hour, but he keeps it anyway. He says the bread prefers it.
“The community does not require silence at this hour, but he keeps it anyway.”
He bakes twelve loaves a day. Six are eaten by the community. Two go to a soup kitchen in the nearest town. Four are sold from a small stand at the gatehouse to visitors and pilgrims, who help support the monastery.
The oven is a stone-floored gas-fired oven installed in 1968. It has been repaired twice. Brother Anselm has learned its temperament. He says it runs about fifteen degrees hot on the left side. He compensates by rotating.
At five-thirty he goes to Lauds, the morning office. He leaves the dough to do its second rise. He returns at six-twenty with the prayers still in his head and the loaves nearly ready for the oven.
The smell of baking bread reaches the chapter house by seven. The other monks have stopped commenting on it, the way you stop commenting on the sound of a river you live next to. But visitors notice. Visitors always notice.
It is the easiest evangelism, the abbot once told a journalist. The bread does the work.
Anselm pulls the loaves from the oven between seven-twenty and seven-forty. He lays them on cooling racks made of dowel and pine. He turns them at the eleven-minute mark. He does not know why eleven minutes. He says Brother Paul said eleven minutes and he has not yet found reason to disagree.
He eats a small breakfast at eight, at a table by the kitchen door. Coffee, a slice of yesterday"s bread with butter and a spoonful of honey from the monastery"s own hives. He reads two pages of a book of psalms. He does not check his watch.
He has had two surgeries on his right shoulder. He has adapted his kneading. He says the bread does not care which arm. He says it cares whether you are paying attention.
Once a year, on the feast of Saint Benedict, he bakes a slightly larger batch and includes a small enriched loaf with raisins for the older monks. He says it is not in the rule. He says nothing about kindness is.
The starter has been continuously fed since at least 1958, according to the kitchen log. He keeps a small portion of it in a second crock in a cold cellar as a backup. He has only had to use the backup once, in 2003, when the main crock cracked. He cried briefly. Then he started over with the cellar starter, which was the same starter anyway, and the bread tasted the same.
He has trained two younger brothers over the years. One left the community. One is still there and bakes on Anselm"s day off, which is Wednesday.
He plans to bake until his body will not let him. After that, he says, he will help in the kitchen in other ways. He says there is always vegetable prep. He says the bread will continue. He says this is the point of a monastery. The bread continues.
By nine-thirty the loaves are cool. He wraps two in linen for the soup kitchen. He carries them to the gatehouse himself. The drive from the soup kitchen comes at ten. The driver is a woman named Patty who has done this run for eleven years. Anselm hands her the loaves. She thanks him. He says, as he always says, that the bread thanks her.
He returns to the kitchen, washes the wooden bowl, dries it, and sets it back on the shelf. He looks at the clay crock. He covers it with its lid. He bows slightly, almost without thinking, and goes to the next office, which is Terce, and after that, to whatever the day brings.
