The bread of friendship

A few weeks ago one of our friends stopped by our house with a gallon-sized Ziploc bag filled with a thin white fluid that looked like—well, like baby sick in a plastic baggie. Charming, right? “Here you go,” he said to us. “Friendship bread. Take care of it.” Then he was off and away, no doubt cackling at the top of his little lungs once he was out of earshot.

I’d never heard of Friendship Bread before, but apparently it’s widespread enough that it has its own Wikipedia entry. Basically it’s the pastry form of a chain letter. You receive a yeast starter (like a sourdough) that allegedly originated from the Amish, from a friend. For nine days you follow the instructions on the sheet that comes with it—instructions that largely consist of squeeze the bag, so that it gives the illusion of simplicity. Halfway through the process, you have to give the starter a little snack of flour, milk, and sugar. Over time, the starter changes from a gruel-like white to toenail-fungus yellow, and begins to bubble, foam, and produce massive amounts of gas. I was burping the Ziploc bag several times a day and recoiling from the yeasty, fermented aroma.

Finally comes the big tenth day. After dumping the ever-growing Audrey II mix into a bowl and adding more milk, sugar, and flour, it’s your turn to scoop out cupfuls of the reeking stuff and put it into three one-gallon plastic bags (just like the Amish have done with Ziploc bags handed down through the generations) to hand out to your friends, along with a clean copy of the instructions for care. I stress the word clean, because by the time I reached day ten, my copy was covered with grunge and starter. Then you bake the bread.

I hadn’t really studied the recipe before I started preparing it. All I knew is that it was supposed to create two loaves of a lightly sweet bread. Lightly sweet, my flat ass. My eyes began to bulge out as I mixed the thing, and continued to bulge as I added ingredient after ingredient, because it seemed to read like this:

Add four cups of flour to the bowl.
Add one cup of sugar.
Add 1/2 tsp. of baking powder.
Add two cups of sugar.
Add 1 tsp. of baking soda.
Add one cup of sugar.

It was when the recipe exhorted me to add “One large box of vanilla pudding (low-fat or sugar-free is fine)” that I decided that whoever wrote the recipe had a fairly mean sense of irony. Especially as the next step was to “Coat baking pans with non-stick baking spray and dust with one-half cup of sugar.”

How was the bread? It was fine. It was a fairly dense, far-from-lightly sweet concoction that tasted like coffee cake more than anything. It was so much like a quick bread I’m not really convinced it needed a starter, to be honest. But spread with butter and roasted under the broiler, it was delicious.

Oh, what happened to my starters, you ask? I foisted one on Ford Girl, who left hers out overnight to freeze and die. The other went to our friend Jeffrey, who let it sit on his kitchen counter for two weeks before he admitted that he’d forgotten about it. He then apologized and said that he really could only have taken care of the friendship bread if the recipe had asked for cocktail pickles and cajun spices to be added to the starter, because that’s all he had in his pantry. Which he might have mentioned when we gave it to him.

The last packet went to our friend Clark. Ten days after I gave Clark the packet, I got a flurry of text messages from him. Why does it use so much sugar?! he asked. I’m running out of sugar! said the next.

Ah, friendship and diabetes. They walk together hand in hand.