Friendship Bread (34 page)

“I don’t mind the scrambling,” Madeline assures her, but Madeline does look peaked. She lets out a long breath as she looks through the orders again. “But maybe you’re right. We can talk about it some more this weekend. In the meantime, let me get going on these.”

“I’ll help.” Hannah, the musician, stands up and comes over to join Madeline. “I need to get my mind off things.”

Madeline puts a motherly arm around Hannah’s shoulders. “I’d
love to have you in the kitchen with me.” They’re about to walk away when Connie sees Edie step forward.

“Hi, excuse me? My name is Edie Gallagher and I’m trying to learn a little more about Amish Friendship Bread.” She extends a hand to Madeline who shakes it. “I was looking through the recipes and it looks like you were the first person to start making Amish Friendship Bread in Avalon. Back in March?”

“Has it only been since March?” Madeline seems thoughtful. “I suppose the date is right, but I’m not the first person. I got my starter from this young lady here, Julia Evarts.” She nods to the woman still seated, the woman with strawberry-blond hair. Connie tries to mind her own business and not pry, but she knows that Julia Evarts is the mother of the little boy who died a few years back.

Edie quickly turns to Julia, fake exuberance oozing everywhere. Connie wants to gag. “Oh, really? Well, um, that’s great! Do you mind if I talk with you for a bit?”

The woman hesitates for a moment before shaking her head. “I’m sorry, but I actually have to go.” She starts to gather her things.

Edie persists. “Can I just ask where you got your starter from?”

“I actually don’t know,” Julia says. “It was on our porch when we came home one day. It was the starter plus several slices of the bread. Gracie found it first.” She smiles at the other women who are beaming at the mention of Julia’s daughter. “We were supposed to save the last slice for Mark, but I ate it. So we didn’t have a choice but to wait ten days and bake the bread ourselves.”

“Mark is your husband?” Edie is edging a bit closer now and Connie intentionally bumps her, as if to say,
Don’t come any closer
.

Julia is nodding.

“So you never found out who gave you the starter?” Edie asks.

She gives a noncommittal shrug. “I suspect one of my neighbors but no one has said anything to me about it.”

“Interesting. Do you think I could interview your neighbors?” The look on Edie’s face is hungry. Connie wants to shove her out the door.

Julia stands up, slinging her large tote bag over her shoulder. “I’m sorry, but I’m late picking up my daughter.” She gives Hannah and
Madeline a quick kiss on the cheek before pushing past Edie and leaving.

“And we should get started on those to-go orders,” Madeline says briskly. She nods for Hannah to follow her into the kitchen and Connie waits a beat before heading back to the sitting room, throwing one more look of warning Edie’s way.

Edie is suddenly alone, the women having evaporated before she could ask another question. She knows she came on too strong, but that’s no reason to give her the cold shoulder. And Connie is one level up from a thug. Amish Friendship Bread thugs. Right here in Avalon.

It doesn’t matter. Now that she knows where it’s all originated from (and from Julia Evarts no less!), Edie knows exactly how to frame the story. She’s starting to feel tired and wants to go home and crawl into bed, annoyed that this pregnancy has completely sapped her energy by mid-afternoon. She snaps a quick picture of the empty tearoom then hurries out the door.

AVALON, ILLINOIS
—In a small Illinois town boasting a modest population, word of mouth is oftentimes the quickest and most effective way to spread the news. Now, only one thing threatens to travel even faster: Amish Friendship Bread and its ubiquitous goopy starter, complete with detailed instructions.

By now you or someone you know has been a victim of the Amish Friendship Bread craze that has swept through America since the mid-1980s and made a recent resurgence in northern Illinois. It goes like this: Someone gives you a plastic Ziploc filled with fermenting batter called “Amish Friendship Bread” (incidentally, there seems to be no corroboration on the part of the Amish for actually coming up with this recipe). You give it a little love by squishing the bag daily, adding a few ingredients (flour, sugar, milk) on day six. By day ten, you add those ingredients again, split the starter into three new baggies, and bake with what’s left over. Then you get to find three friends who naïely agree to take a bag of starter, not knowing that in ten days they’ll be hard-pressed to find three friends of their own to pass it on to.

What’s the harm, you may say? Well, picture this: One person keeps a bag and passes three more to friends. All four people do the same, and so on and so on. After three “generations” (approximately one month), there are sixty-four bags of starter floating around out there. After four generations: 256. Six generations: 4,096. And by ten generations (approximately three and a half months): 1,048,576. You don’t even want to know what happens after fifteen generations.

Amish Friendship Bread is an excellent example of how epidemics get started. In a digital age, it’s incredible to see viruses spread the old-fashioned way. And all in the name of friendship.

“Oh, I’ll head in the opposite direction if I see anyone coming my way with one of those Ziplocs,” says Sue Pendergast, the organist at Avalon United Methodist Church. “I don’t mean to sound unchristian, but I find it very presumptuous of people to assume that I have time to do all this work to make what amounts to a simple sweet bread. It’s just not worth the trouble.”

Eleanor Winters agrees. “I heard that Martha Stewart had trouble figuring it out. If she had trouble, what hope is there for me?”

As simple as the instructions may be, there are a few things you should be aware of. You cannot use metal utensils when mixing the batter as it will interfere with the fermenting process. According to Dr. Roland Fetters at the University of Chicago, the starter contains acids that will cause the metal to dissolve into it.

“It’s a chemical reaction,” Dr. Fetters explains. “It will not only contaminate the starter, but it will kill it.” This small detail is responsible for the recent hazardous materials scare at the Avalon Police Department, when Cora “Miss Sunshine” Ferguson was found carrying a bag of starter on her person. If you’ve ever seen the starter, you’ll
understand how it’s not difficult to be suspicious of it. Ferguson’s failure to elaborate on the substance resulted in a tri-county hazardous materials alert, costing taxpayers valuable time and money.

The other thing to be aware of is that you must care for the starter every day, which includes squeezing the batter and letting out any air in the bag, otherwise it could result in mold or a clean-up job that will leave you cursing the person who gave you the starter in the first place (see picture to the right).

Which brings us to the big question: How
did
Amish Friendship Bread make its way into this small town? No one is quite sure, but the earliest sighting harkens back to March of this year, on the porch of Mark and Julia Evarts. It was their daughter, Gracie, 5, who first spotted it, and while her mother claims to not know who gave her the starter, no one else recalls seeing (or eating) Amish Friendship Bread before that time.

The residents of the town of Avalon are certainly split on whether the phenomenon that began with Mrs. Evarts has been a boon or a burden.

“Friends don’t give friends Amish Friendship Bread,” says Earlene Bauer, the dispensing optician at the Avalon All Eyes Vision Center. “I throw it in the trash the minute I get a bag.”

“I love the bread, but have the worst time sharing the starter with friends,” sighs Pearl Kirby, an avid birder who spends her days looking for white-breasted nuthatches in Avalon Park. “One person actually stopped talking to me. I finally gave up altogether.”

But Claribel Apple is quick to disagree. “I think the bread is a blessing,” she proclaims. Apple spends her afternoons in Madeline’s Tea Salon where she and a handful of other ladies gather to swap recipes and compare notes in a room designated specifically for all things having to do
with Amish Friendship Bread. “There’s so much negativity in the world, so many terrible things happening that can’t be explained. Why not make the world a better place with a little love and friendship bread?”

Why not indeed? Provided you’re not diabetic, a little friendship bread can go a long way. You can beat it, freeze it, thaw it, and it’ll live on in perpetuity. You don’t even have to bake it on the tenth day—you can bake it on the eleventh day or even the twentieth, provided that you’re always feeding it. But for this reporter, I’m hoping the good people of Avalon will learn to be their own best friend and keep their starter to themselves. Or, better yet, Mrs. Evarts, come up with a starter for a pot roast dinner, and then we’ll talk.

“Edie, how could you?”

Edie looks up from her computer, surprised. Livvy’s face is red and she’s angry, the day’s paper clutched in her hand.

“How could I what?” Edie’s inbox has been jammed with emails and her voice mailbox is full. The article wasn’t picked up by any of the newswires, but the flood of local attention has pleased her nonetheless. She’s obviously hit a nerve, which is one of the greatest compliments to a reporter in Edie’s opinion. She’s thinking about writing more articles on the subject, maybe a series on Amish Friendship Bread. “You didn’t like it? It was supposed to a humorous lifestyle piece. Did you read the part about the pot roast? I’ve been craving pot roast, don’t ask me why.” She smacks her lips and can practically smell it. Maybe she’ll have Richard do takeout again from the Avalon Grill.

Livvy throws the paper on her desk. “Edie, Julia Evarts is my
sister. You blamed her for bringing Amish Friendship Bread to Avalon! None of the research I gave you said that!”

“I did some of my own reporting and that’s what I found. It’s not a big deal, Livvy.”

“Not a big deal?” Livvy explodes. “Julia’s going to think I had something to do with this, that this is somehow my fault.”

Edie suppresses a smile as she glances at the headline again. She’d written the story in less than an hour. She had planned to make a larger statement about life and world peace and the like, but the words just flowed onto the page so she went with it, and she’s glad she did. Edie can’t remember the last time she had fun writing an article. She credits the pregnancy to vamping up her creativity about a hundred notches. “How is any of this your fault? You didn’t do anything wrong, Livvy. It’s just an article—these are just the facts.”

“
I
know that, but Julia won’t. She knows I work at the
Gazette
. She’ll think I put you up to this!”

“So call her and tell her that you had nothing to do with it.” Edie is about to head to the break room for another cup of coffee when she remembers that she’s already met her caffeine quota for the day. Rats.

Livvy is pacing frantically. “I can’t do that.”

“Why not?” Edie knows the answer but she wants to hear Livvy say it. It’s the only thing Livvy hasn’t shared about her life. Edie pieced it together quickly between what Richard told her and what she found in the newspaper archives, but it’s curious how it’s never come up, as tragic as it is. In some way having this secret makes Livvy more human, makes Edie think that their friendship has a shot of going beyond these superficial lunches and bubble gum discussions.

But Livvy just shakes her head, the look on her face so pained that Edie feels a morsel of regret. No question this would have been easier if Julia Evarts hadn’t been Livvy’s sister, but what can you do? “Look, Livvy, I know we thought it had to do with that Madeline person, but Julia had given the starter to her. She says someone gave it to her, but I haven’t been able to verify it. I don’t expect to, either.”

“Edie, my sister has been through so much already! She doesn’t
need to be back in the fishbowl again! I heard people in line at the bank talking about making her bake all the excess starter …”

Edie has heard that, too, but actually thought it was kind of funny. “Come on, Livvy. You know they’re joking.”

“I don’t care!” Livvy’s face is red. “I don’t see why you couldn’t have found the person who gave it to her and started from there instead …”

“I can’t do that, Livvy, because I don’t think there was anybody else.” Edie says this gently.

Livvy stares at her. “What are you talking about?”

Edie blows out her breath. She didn’t really want to tell Livvy this, but it’s too late now. “No one other than Julia received a starter that week. Don’t you think that’s a bit odd? You yourself found a recipe for the starter on the Internet. It wouldn’t be completely out of left field to assume that she started the craze herself.”

“Julia wouldn’t do that. Why would she do that?”

“I don’t know. Attention? Think about it. You make the starter, dish it out to some friends, maybe some people you’re hoping to get to know, newbies to town who don’t know what happened five years ago. It starts up the whole sympathy thing again …”