When I was growing up, my mother made all the bread for our home. This was because my father claimed that he could not eat store bread, and held to this position until my mother died of ovarian cancer in 1986. I can remember serious discussions about 'what is Tom going to do about bread after Louise dies?' and the decision that a so-called Sheepherder's Bread from King Soopers was an adequate replacement.

All those years 36 years they were married she baked huge batches of bread, 30 loaves at a time, and froze them. She had a big 1950s gas stove with two ovens, side-by-side. She increased her basic white bread recipe by many times, and always wrote out the new amounts so she wouldn't make a mistake. She pre-measured the flour needed into a bowl instead of just dipping it out of the sack so she wouldn't lose count.

There was a huge stack of bread pans and now that I think of it, I guess they were all sold at auction when my folks downsized and moved up here to the mountains.

We didn't have air conditioning, so in the summer she stayed up at night to make the bread. She'd set the timer for rising time and doze on the sofa until it rang for the next step.

As the loaves came out of the oven she ran a stick of butter over the crusts so they would be more tender, and arranged them on racks on their sides. When cooled, she bagged them up and froze them in her giant double deep freeze out on the back porch.

Every Saturday my dad had homemade chili (also made in large quantities and frozen) and the homemade bread with big chunks of butter on it. Many times she would forget to thaw out the bread ahead of time so tried to hurry it up in a hot oven. That worked pretty well, but I can remember sawing off a couple pieces then sticking it back in the oven to thaw some more.

Another thing that was important to my dad was hard butter. He wanted it to go on the bread in chunks, not be soft enough to spread evenly. Once again, there were times when there wasn't a stick of butter thawed out, so she'd have to figure out how to get it soft enough to cut, but not so soft it wouldn't make chunks. Apparently my dad wasn't the only person in the world who thought this was important: one time my brother-in-law was in the hospital and his room-mate, an older guy, woke up from a coma and started griping: 'Here I am, 68 years old, and can't even get hard butter for my bread.'

My mother also gave away some of her bread. One night she had a huge batch going and the oven wouldn't turn on. In a panic, she called John Berglin, the local Public Service (power company) man to come over and see what was wrong with her stove. Somehow, the oven control had gotten set to Auto Timer, so it was a simple solution. The next day she took a couple loaves over to his house as a thanks.

People were always asking for her recipe, and she'd give it to them, but leave out the milk and the egg. I can remember her laughing about that, she was quite the trickster.