THE STORY

I had two grandmothers, and both were named Anna. One came from Budiš, the other from Dubové.

Neither of them ever used a scale — not for leavened dough, anyway. They worked from feel, from memory, from hands that had done this a thousand times before.

When my grandmother from Budiš kneaded dough, her upper arm swayed with every motion. I remember trying to watch her palm — the rhythm of it, the way she slapped the dough against the sides of that yellow enamel bowl at steady intervals — but the muscle in her arm was impossible to look past. It didn’t need an audience. It simply was.

I didn’t know anything then about gluten, or why stretching wet dough is the best way to turn it into something soft and pliable, almost like clay. I just knew I was watching strength — the kind she spent, without fail, for at least twenty minutes, every single week. And it wasn’t always the same cake. Different ones, week after week, always with the same patience.

My grandmother from Dubové had a different love: sheet cakes, dough stretched thin across a baking tray and covered in fruit from her garden, or in home-canned compote. She adored curd cheese — tvaroh. Most often she made a stretched, leavened cake topped with tvaroh and redcurrants.

It’s only now, decades later, that I understand something about that garden — the one she used to chase me out of, so I wouldn’t step on the kohlrabi seedlings. It was protected from us, for us. So there would always be something ready. So the table, every Sunday we came to visit, could be set sweet — for us. It took me a long time to realize…

But I think that by making their cakes today, still guided by their advice — my grandmothers, my starké — I keep them alive.

That was a time when a woman was fully sovereign in her own kitchen — fully present, fully in her strength, giving without asking anything back. A kind of quiet magic. There were thousands of women like her across the villages. And mine passed their secrets on to me while I was still very young.

“Jane, my darling, all the hands that kneaded the dough before you, and all those that will knead it after, are making the exact same motion. The curd cheese, the dough, time itself — everything dissolves. All that remains is the presence of palms against the bowl. Do it from a place where you defend nothing and prove nothing. That dough is already complete in eternity; today, you simply let it pass through your hands.”

With love, A + A