A Letter From Hollis Brenner

I have absolutely no business getting emotional about a bread bag.

I am 70 years old. I have buried my parents and stood in a hospital hallway the night Cathy had her scare in 2011. A cotton sack with wax on the inside is not supposed to make a man's throat close up.

And yet here I am, writing this at four in the morning, because in a few weeks we are turning the key on the bakery for the last time.

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My father opened this place in 1982. He handed me a wooden spoon and a set of keys and told me two things. Bake honest bread. And do not, under any circumstances, let plastic into this building.

I thought he was being dramatic. He was not. He had tested plastic on two Sundays that spring and thrown both loaves in the compost by Tuesday, crust like rubber, crumb with that faint sour sweat plastic gives everything it touches. He never spoke about it again but he never forgot either.

In 1987 a man in a brown suit came by with a case of clear polyethylene bags and a clipboard. Said every bakery in the Hudson Valley was switching. Said I would be a fool not to sign.

I walked him to the door.

Not because I was principled. Because I had seen what my father saw. Plastic seals the moisture in, and moisture with nowhere to go turns a loaf into something you throw away by Thursday. Cotton with beeswax on the inside does the opposite. It lets the crust breathe out the last of its steam without letting the crumb dry to dust. A bakery friend in France called it a lung, not a room. That was the phrase that stuck.

Tom Reilly has been bringing me the wax since 1984. He keeps bees twenty minutes south in Red Hook. The first time he handed me a batch I asked him the question everybody asks me now. Does it flavor the bread. Does it smell like honey. He laughed and handed me a slice that had been sitting in a waxed cloth for three days. It tasted like bread. Just bread. The way bread is supposed to taste on day three, which is to say, still alive.

That is the part I have never known how to explain to people who have not held one of these bags. A good sourdough leaves the oven at around 40 percent water. That water wants to leave. The whole trick, the only trick, is slowing it down without stopping it. When you do that, day four bread still gives you a crust that presses back and a crumb that pulls apart instead of crumbles. Cathy will pull a slice on Wednesday morning, toast it, butter it, eat it standing at the counter looking out at the yard. I watch her do this and I think, that is the whole point. That is what a loaf is supposed to be. Something you finish, not something you throw away because it went hard on Tuesday.

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Our lease is up. My back is done. Our daughter has been asking us to come to Oregon for three years and we are finally going.

Before we do, we are selling through the last of the bags. Tom's wax, our cotton, the same label my father designed in 1982. I am not reopening this under a new name and I am not selling the recipe to a company that will make it in a factory. When they are gone, they are gone.

Two bags for $34.95. Buy one, get one free. Ninety-day guarantee, which Cathy will personally honor because she reads every email that comes to the bakery and she is not going to stop just because we are in Oregon.