How to Make a Simple Bread

I eat white bread. My family eats bread with cheese. I cannot make bread, but I want to learn. The bread in my country is round and flat.

In my country, we eat a flatbread called chapati. It is made with wheat flour, water, and a little salt. First, you mix the flour and water in a bowl. Then you knead the dough for a few minutes. After that, you make small balls and press them flat. We cook them on a hot pan, with no oil. My mother makes them every day, and we eat them with vegetables and dal. They are best when they are still warm.

My grandmother taught me how to make dumplings when I was twelve. I had thought, before she showed me, that the folding was the hardest part. I was wrong. The hardest part is the dough. It has to be just right — soft enough to fold, but not so soft that it tears.

First, you mix flour and warm water in a bowl. Then you knead it for about ten minutes, until it is smooth. After that, you let it rest for half an hour. Only then do you start the folding.

My grandmother folded each dumpling in about two seconds. I needed about a minute, and they all looked terrible. She did not laugh. She just said, 'Keep going. Your hands will learn.'

That was nine years ago. My dumplings are now reasonable, but they will never be hers. I have come to think this is a normal feature of hand skills. You learn enough to be able to do the thing — but the person who taught you was always slightly better, because they had been doing it for longer.

Last year, my mother taught me how to fix a torn shirt. I had thought, before that day, that mending was a difficult skill — something my grandmother could do but my generation had lost. I now know this is mostly wrong.

You need a needle, some thread the colour of the shirt, and about ten minutes. Thread the needle. Tie a knot at the end. Go through the fabric on one side of the tear, then the other, pulling the two sides together with small steady stitches. Tie off the thread at the end. That is, more or less, all of it.

I am not going to tell you that everyone should mend their own clothes. New shirts are cheap; time is short; the clothing industry has built itself around throwing things away. I understand the choice — I make it many times a year myself. What I will say is that knowing how to do this small thing has changed how I look at clothes. I now notice when something could be saved, even if I don't always save it. I used to be only a buyer of shirts. I am now, in some small way, also a person who could fix one. That feels, on most days, like a small but real piece of independence.

I have, for as long as I can remember, made tea by pouring just-boiled water onto a small quantity of leaves. The procedure is short. Heat water until it is at full boil. Place the leaves in a vessel — a teapot is traditional, but a cup, a thermos, a small clay jar will all work. Pour the water on. Wait for between three and five minutes, depending on the leaf and your taste. Strain or remove the leaves. Drink.

I mention this not because I have anything original to add to the millennia of writing about tea, but because I have been thinking, with what I hope is appropriate caution, about what it means that this procedure exists, in subtly different forms, in essentially every culture that has ever encountered the leaf. The tea ceremony in Japan, the gong fu pouring of southern China, the sweet mint tea of the Maghreb, the strong black tea of Russia and Turkey, the chai of South Asia, the masala tea of East Africa, the British cup with milk — these are not the same drink. They are, however, structurally a single practice. Hot water meets leaves. The leaves give up something. The result is drunk in company or in solitude, often with a particular small ceremony, and almost always with attention.

I am alert to the ways in which any 'universal' claim about tea risks erasing the specificity of these traditions. The Japanese ceremony is not interchangeable with the British morning cup. They are not, in any meaningful sense, the same activity. What they share is something narrower: a structural form, repeated independently, whose persistence across cultures probably tells us something about what humans recognise as worth doing.

What I notice, after many thousands of cups, is that the practice resists optimisation. Tea is not faster when made hastily; it is, in fact, worse. Tea cannot be improved much by spending money. The structure of the practice — slow, attentive, drunk while warm — is approximately the same as it was a thousand years ago.

Make the tea. Or don't. There is, of course, coffee, which is equally interesting and which I would write about if I drank it. The leaves, in any case, will keep.

I have, every morning of my adult life, washed my face. The procedure, for the curious, is approximately as follows. Run cold water from a tap. Cup it in two hands. Apply to face. Repeat several times. Reach for a towel. Dry. The whole thing takes about ninety seconds, requires no skill, and is, by any measure that anyone has ever bothered to apply to a daily action, completely uninteresting.

I want, all the same, to take it seriously for a few minutes, because I have been thinking about how strange it is that the small action I have just described — cold water, the cup of two hands, the application — is something almost every person now alive performs in roughly the same way, and that they are doing this against the backdrop of one of the more remarkable infrastructural achievements in human history.

The water came out of a tap. The tap is connected, by an invisible underground network, to a treatment facility, which is connected, by a longer network, to a reservoir or river, which is the result of substantial public engineering and substantial public expense. For most of human history, the action I have just described would have required someone — usually a woman, usually a child, usually before sunrise — to walk a considerable distance to a well or a stream, and to carry the water back. The world's poorer countries still contain enormous numbers of people for whom this is an accurate description of how the water arrives at their face. The cold tap, in this respect, is not a small thing. It is the visible end of a system that has, at extraordinary collective cost, spared roughly half of humanity from one of the most labour-intensive daily tasks in the pre-modern world.

I am, I should say, conscious of the way this kind of observation can drift into a particularly insufferable register — a writer noticing the marvels of plumbing and inviting the reader to feel grateful — and I would like, with what I hope is appropriate caution, to try not to land there. Gratitude is not really my point. The water from the tap is the result of decisions, taxes, engineering, and labour, much of which has been performed by people my morning routine has never required me to think about. I do not, in any straightforward sense, feel grateful to them. I am noting, more narrowly, that I am the beneficiary of their work, that this is a fact I usually fail to notice, and that the sheer ordinariness of the daily face-washing is itself a kind of monument to a system I have spent very little time understanding.

The political content of the cold tap is, I think, easy to miss precisely because the tap works. When piped water arrives where it is needed, in approximately the right quantity, at approximately the right cleanliness, the system disappears. We notice it only when it fails — in a power cut, a contamination scare, a strike, a war. The visibility of the tap is, in this respect, inversely proportional to its political success. The infrastructure that runs best is the infrastructure that goes most fully unseen.

What I notice, washing my face this morning, is the slightly uncomfortable fact that almost everything I will do today depends on systems of approximately this shape. The food in the kitchen, the electricity in the wall, the road outside, the language I am writing in: all of these are similarly large, similarly invisible, and similarly maintained by labour I have very little contact with. I do not, on any given morning, have a clean way to absorb this. The essay form, with its preference for resolution, is not particularly good at it either. I have settled, in the meantime, for noticing — which is, I am increasingly inclined to think, what most honest writing about ordinary daily life eventually has to settle for.

Wash your face, then. Don't, if you don't want to, although I would gently suggest that you should. The water, while it is still arriving from the taps, will not, alas, last forever — but that is a subject for a different essay, and a more difficult one, that I am not, today, prepared to write.