Grandma’s Home Baked Bread | Documentary Style Portraits

From the time of her marriage to my grandpa in the autumn of 1959, my grandma Bradford has baked her own bread from scratch to feed her family. Her homemade bread is legendary in our family, and even though my mom, aunts, sisters, and cousins have attempted to follow her recipe on our own, none of us can bake bread that tastes like a thousand memories quite the way my grandma’s bread does. As I documented Grandma’s bread baking process, she told me stories from her childhood, growing up in the 1930’s–how her mother always baked bread every week, and as a little girl she preferred store bought bread until she grew older and learned to appreciate how special her mother’s home baked bread was. Grandma recollected the Jersey cow that had been given to her parents as a wedding gift which they kept in a small barn behind their little home in Brigham City, Utah. She told me how her mother would churn the milk into butter and sell the butter to their neighbors, and Grandma groaned and laughed when she told me about the time when she was five years old and was running around the house while pulling her little red wagon behind her and knocked over the butter churn when she came around the corner. Her mother was kind, quiet, and worked hard to care for her young daughters as well as her step-children, the son and daughter of her husband’s first wife who passed away in childbirth. Grandma’s father was the peacemaker in his family, could play any musical instrument you handed him, and always had a twinkle in his eye for his little girl.

It makes me cry whenever I think about the way my seven-year-old grandma was at a friend’s birthday party when the telephone rang and the friend’s mother said, “Ellen, you need to run home right away,” and how she skipped home only to walk up the porch steps and find out that her daddy had just been killed in a tragic construction accident. I think a part of her childhood died that day with her daddy, as it became necessary for their survival for Grandma to help her mother with farm chores, since the uncles on her father’s side had swindled their brother’s widow and orphaned children out of the financial support that should have been left to care for them after his death. My grandma comes from the “Waste not, want not” and “Eat it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” generation, and the resourcefulness and frugality she gained during her youth helped her create a life filled with abundance for her husband and six children, even on Grandpa’s teacher’s salary. While waiting for the dough to rise, Grandma pointed out just a few of the many visible traces of Grandpa that can be seen around her kitchen, like the heart shaped plexiglass cutting board he cut with his beloved jigsaw that hangs by the sink, and the toy cabinet he built between the kitchen and laundry area so that Grandma could easily keep an eye on their little ones while she went about her housework.

Grandma’s Home Baked Bread | Documentary Style Portraits

Grandma’s strength in the face of losing her father, then later her newborn second child, her mother, and more recently my grandpa never fails to amaze me. She has experienced great tragedy, and the challenges of advancing age make her daily tasks more difficult, yet at 86 years old, she can still function so independently in so many ways. Her faith in God and her firm belief that she will one day be reunited with her dear loved ones lost is palpable in her home. There is a warmth in Grandma’s kitchen that doesn’t just come from the oven where her loaves of bread are baking, it comes from her heart, and the way her tender, inimitable spirit transcends her four-and-a-half foot tall frame and fills up her home. Come to think of it, that’s probably why no one else can replicate her melt-in-your-mouth home baked bread.

Grandma’s Home Baked Bread | Documentary Style Portraits