By Zainab Motiwala
In the early hours of the morning, amidst the warmth of ovens and the scent of freshly baked goods, a solitary baker discovers the intricate ways in which love, like baking, can transform the essence of life.
At 7 in the morning, I begin my daily routine, swiftly weighing and mixing flour, water, salt, and wild yeast to prepare my first batch of sourdough. I lay out the fridge-rested miso brown butter chocolate chip cookies neatly on the baking tray and check the oven temperature, set at exactly 185°C. I carefully place each tray in the oven, set the timer, and let the heat work its magic. The cookies gradually rise and then fall, creating a shallow crevice perfect for filling with luscious miso salted caramel. Next, I move on to scoring yesterday's long-proofed sourdoughs with a specialised tool called a lamé; the slice is swift, clean, and precise. The sourdoughs are quickly slid into the deck oven with a generous spray of water, creating a beautiful rise and an open, soft crumb. As the bread and cookies bake, the aroma of the individual Maillard reactions slowly merges, creating a scent so intoxicating that a woman hurrying past the bakery stops to take a deep, slow breath. I occasionally observe the reactions of passersby, as it fills me with a great sense of joy and purpose. But today, for the first time, I feel lonely.
While in school, my girlfriends spoke about their boy crushes and hung out post-school with them. I, on the other hand, couldn't wait to rush home and whip up profiteroles, a recipe I'd spent hours researching the night before. I enjoyed the seclusion of the kitchen, watching butter, sugar, and flour magically transform into something divine. Baking was my premier creative outlet, my raison d'être. Whether on a bad day or a good day, through good grades and bad, for every birthday, anniversary, graduation, disappointment, or celebration, I baked to show people my love and to avoid falling in love. Falling in love with anything else felt like a betrayal to my craft. So, I avoided it, rejecting every person who showed interest in me. "I'm too busy," I'd say, "too tired, too worked up." I convinced myself that a solitary relationship with food was better than boring old romantic love.
But the reason I felt lonely now was due to a rather unusual request I received a couple of weeks ago from one of my regular customers. She wanted to gift her partner one dessert along with a single rose every day until Valentine's Day, each day marking a month since they met—14 months, 14 days in total. Her partner had been a fan of the bakery since its inception. She told me how, whenever they had an altercation, her partner would gift her my bakery's miso caramel chocolate chip cookies, and if she was depressed, a warm parcel of my sourdough would quickly brighten up her mood. She thought it was a perfect way to honour their love. The old Zainab would have found this kind of thing cheesy and over-the-top. But as I wrapped each package that my customer wanted to send to her partner, I felt something stirring. I don’t know what it was but I was touched by the gesture because in the act of baking I felt like I had become party to this act of love.
Having been blissfully sheltered for so long by the elemental passivity of my creative pursuits, I finally had to come to terms with my avoidance. The anxiety of missing out swiftly swept through my body. I had to acknowledge that what I had held onto for so long had served its purpose. It was time to move on; to embrace the next new chapter of my life. It felt as though every rose I attached to the desserts was slowly untangling the knots I had tied around my own heart. I began to realise that love, much like baking, requires patience, care, and a willingness to risk the occasional heartache for something wonderful. Dating right away didn’t seem like the right step. Deep down, I was still fearful. I have become more observant of people who use food as a love language. A boyfriend trying to gift his partner a cake without her deeply conservative family noticing, while he is in LA and she in Mumbai; a designer who couldn’t decide which flavour of cake to gift her best friend on her birthday, so she decided to gift them all. In these stories, I realised how love was intertwined with the baking process. It allowed me to slowly open my heart to it without actually having to undergo the things I did not like about it. And I thought to myself, if this was the end result, it would not be all that bad.
It began to seem like baking had become a bulwark against the unpredictability of human connection. That by choosing not to fall in love, I was protecting myself from the vagaries of life. In the patisserie I was in control. Of temperatures, and knives, and proofing methods. In the Wild West of dating and human interaction, I would have to lose myself. Not be in charge. I was not ready for that yet. But I was ready to move on from baking. Suddenly, it seemed like a chapter of my life was at an end. And I was ready to accept another, whatever that might be.
About the author: Trained at Ferrandi Paris, Zainab Motiwala has been baking longer than she can remember. She ran the Mumbai-based Mizah bakery for an alternately rewarding, alternately stress-filled two years.