Everything I Needed To Know I Learned From Working at a Bakery

A family-owned business under financial duress

Consumer culture of America has two poles. On the one end is the dream of individual opportunity, a romantic ideal of gridded streets lined with small, family-owned businesses, each stylish and unique. On the other is the reality: golden arches looming over every town, giant Walmarts uprooting neighborhoods, mass consumption of Starbucks’ three-day-old baked goods.

This brand-over-brain phenomenon is paradoxical. Most of us know which of those societies we want to live in, but because of some combination of price efficiency and capitalistic self-interest, we continue to endorse the one we resent.

Through high school I worked at a small bakery enduring a ceaseless struggle to stay afloat. I started there when I was 14, which may or may not have been legal. I can’t be sure, as I was getting paid under the table. I suspect it was, though. My boss James was actively involved with his church.

My older brother was the one who got me the job, and my older sister had gotten him his. I don’t know how she got hers. She’s an overachiever. On my first day, my brother walked me through the kitchen to the three-sectioned sink near the back door. “This is your new home,” he said, smiling. I got cozy. The two of us only worked there together for about a year before he left for college. But during that time, I learned that working with — and under — my siblings was probably best avoided. Training others in a bakery, where the skills aren’t typically innate but instead take time and effort to master, is a test of patience. I only came to realize this myself years later. But my brother learned it working with me. We bickered. It is possible that I sprayed him with the power washer once.

After a couple weeks of solely cleaning, my responsibilities began to broaden. I quickly learned how to make mistakes. On one occasion I put fifty pounds of confectioner’s sugar into a bin half-full of flour. I think someone tried to separate the two and make a cake that ended up being thrown away. Another time, I accidentally used twelve and a half pounds of lard instead of shortening, which, to be fair, looks pretty much the same, in a batch of white icing. Sometimes my muffins were too wet to rise. Sometimes the lattice over my pies was too thick to cook through.

I walked around with cream stuck to my forearms. I let pieces of shell into the egg mix. But with time, specific bits of baking knowledge began to sink in. I mastered a removal technique to get everything off my arm when I had to scrape down giant mixing bowls. I found the balance of push and pressure while rolling out six feet of danish dough without letting it stick to the table. I gained the dexterity to crack eggs with one hand. I began to embrace the simplistic tedium of braiding roll after roll after roll for hours on end.

I figured out how to talk and work simultaneously. My boss was proficient at this as well.

He became somewhat of a mentor to me. He had deep set eyes and coarse hands and a kind of unforgiving wisdom. When we talked about life and specifically issues I was having, if it was appropriate, which it usually was, he’d say things to me like, “Don’t be a fucking idiot.” And I’d realize that I was, indeed, being an idiot. Perhaps his bluntness stemmed from his lifestyle. He got to the bakery at 2:00 a.m. and didn’t leave until the afternoon. Holidays were crazier, obviously. On Christmas and Thanksgiving he worked maybe twenty hours a day for five days straight, drinking beers every so often to keep his head amidst the chaos.

He depended on that season’s business to pay bills through the following summer.

There were other characters, too. When I worked there, James’s mother, who originally owned the store with her late husband, was 86-years-old, and she didn’t take shit from anybody. She knew way more about college basketball than I did; I often had to pretend I knew who she was talking about. She ridiculed the other employees in my ear in an effort to inadvertently flatter me. It’s safe to assume she probably complained about me to the others, too.

Charles, another employee I got to know well, worked the ovens. He muttered to himself unintelligibly, and was something of a genius. We discussed literature, and he contributed these often irrelevant, insightful aphorisms, like, “Life is a record player. You have to move the arm if you want to form a new groove to make new music,” when we had just been discussing Tolkien.

Because of the nature of the job — the manual labor, the heavy lifting, the monotony of cookie-cutting — James would say, whenever someone got their first work experience there, that he or she would go on to become a doctor or a lawyer. There were times where I, exhausted from rolling out dough across the table, found comfort in this sentiment. There were other times, however, when I thought to myself, maybe the life of a baker isn’t such a bad one. The occupation, for one, facilitates creativity, a characteristic of a job I wouldn’t want to forego wherever I worked. Bakers are also craftsmen of sorts. They can develop skills with no limit to their growth. Making pies is meditative if done mindfully; the required concentration, cathartic. Embracing the simplicity of the vocation is a lesson that can, and hopefully does, reverberate throughout my life.

But there is the financial struggle to consider, the low pay-off for the disproportionately hard work. As I mentioned, like most small businesses, the bakery nearly closed a few times. How can they compete with something like the almost-inedible-yet-oddly-alluring taste of Acme challah?

I’m not exactly sure, but for the past half century, they have competed, and pretty successfully. There’s something comforting in that. Something comforting about the regulars who come in every morning for coffee and a danish and a word or two with James, about an old woman’s insistence that she can carry that pan herself thank you very much, about fresh cakes dispersed throughout town from the same someone who knows personally the bride and the birthday boy and the graduate, about three siblings, one after another, rooting out wisdom from the nooks and crannies of a kitchen.

There’s something comforting about the perseverance of a local, family-owned, business. In America.

Yoni Blumberg is a senior at the University of Delaware, and was an intern this summer for the Awl network. This is, however, his last week. He wanted to say thanks to Mike Dang and Ester Bloom for taking him on! And he’ll be continuing to write for the site on occasion throughout the year as their college correspondent.

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