While ministers were fully aware of their embodiment as physical beings, they were not the ones responsible for procuring the bread and wine.32 Instead, that task fell to deacons, lay leaders recognized by the congregation, whose charge was to “assist and relieve the Pastors, in all the Temporal Affairs of the Church.” In practical terms, that meant that a woman in a deacon’s household was responsible for baking the bread on each occasion when there was to be a ritual meal among the gathered faithful. Whoever baked the bread may or may not have been allowed to eat that bread during the Lord’s Supper—since church practice did not require deacons’ wives to be full church members, it is doubtful the person baking the bread would have been required to hold that status.33 A similar practice seems to have been followed in Bermuda. Early eighteenth-century Bermudian church accounts indicate that women were paid to wash the linens and scour the silver vessels used in church services. They also list expenditures for bread and wine, which suggests that the bread was not made in the minister’s household.34
Baking bread involved a series of labor-intensive steps. In the first thirteen years of Plymouth colony before the first gristmill was built in 1633, the task began with grinding corn in a wood mortar to separate the “Meale” from the “huskes.” In communities with gristmills, the woman would not have had to use a mortar and pestle to get cornmeal, but she might have had to churn butter, make cheese, or spin thread in order to have a way to trade with the miller for grinding her sacks of corn and other grains.35 Whether hand- or stone-ground, the meal still contained larger pieces that, if baked without further processing, would remain hard and result in an unevenly textured bread. The woman would have sifted out the finer meal and set it aside while she boiled the “Course parte . . . till it be thick like batter,” let it cool, then mixed in the finer meal. For everyday bread, the woman might have poured the cornmeal batter as it was into an iron pot and then placed it over a fire to bake.36
For something as special as the ritual meal of the Lord’s Supper, the woman probably mixed in some wheat flour when available, along with some yeast “to make it Rise” and form an airier loaf. Throughout the initial mixing, rounds of kneading, shaping, and as she waited for the bread to proof in its loaf form, she would have maintained a fire in the oven built into the back of her kitchen fireplace, distributing the coals to attain as even a temperature as possible (figure 3.5). Once she determined by the feel of the heat on her hand that the oven had reached the desired temperature, she would have removed the coals and slid in the unbaked loaves. Although not all houses had ovens, the woman selected to bake communion bread likely lived in a house with one.37 If she were making the bread from wheat flour, as she sank the heel of her hand into the dough and pushed against its elasticity, she may have seen her own tendency to return to sin in the way the dough slowly shrank back in on itself. The less springy consistency of dough made primarily from other grains could have inspired thoughts of her own obdurate will in the face of divine intention.
Preparing bread from cassava flour as was common in Bermuda involved somewhat different steps. As more fully discussed in chapter 1, the poisonous juice had to be removed to make the tuber edible. The woman baking the bread may have done that work herself before mixing the flour with a little water to make a paste-like dough, then cooking it on a flat griddle or in a pan. Unlike wheat, rye, or barley, cassava contains no gluten and so produces a dense, moist bread with little crumb or crust. The woman would have had to take care to press the paste to keep it together during initial phases of cooking as its lack of elasticity made it prone to breaking.38 Rather than inspiring thoughts of rebounding to sinful behavior, the bread’s tendency to crack during cooking may have directed the woman’s thoughts to the brokenness of the world.
The woman may have felt that her work creating the bread that bound the members of the community together in the ritual meal commemorating the last meal between Christ and his disciples was a conduit to the divine. If she ascribed to the idea that one’s outward actions were a reflection of one’s inward state, the hard labor and discipline required to produce an edible loaf could have provided her a means to access the world of the unseen and have given mundane actions spiritual resonance. As she recalled the strain in her muscles from wielding mortar and pestle or churning milk into butter to barter for access to the gristmill, she may have thought of the pain of sin or the effort of breaking down her self-will to prepare the soul for receiving God’s grace. Even if she herself were not the one performing those tasks, as the mistress she may have seen servants’ or slaves’ work as contributing to the godly industriousness of her household.39
Perhaps she was a full church member who had given an oral testimony of her faith in front of the congregation and so she would be partaking of the bread, receiving it from a neighbor’s hands and passing the dish on to the next person. Or the woman who sweated as she tended the cooking fire—watching until the embers were of the correct and relatively uniform heat to bake the bread before the dough rose too much and collapsed on itself—might not have made a public declaration and detailing of her conversion process and so would not get to eat bread and drink wine at the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, although she faithfully attended services when her household duties permitted. And if she were Massachusett, or Wampanoag, or Narragansett, or Nipmuc, and did not ascribe to the Christian pantheon, the action of baking bread for the puritan ritual may have had no more significance for her than any other task she was required to do. Every rebound of a dough with a significant percentage of wheat flour may have reminded the woman of the incursions into her people’s lands, even if the English never exacted tribute payments of wheat from southern Algonquians the way the Spanish exacted them from the Aztecs.40 Conversely, working with maize—even in this English-directed product—could have been a reminder of the long-ago gift from Cautantowwit or Kiehtan.
Of course, whoever she was and whatever categories she fell into, she may have contemplated nothing more than the labor extracted from her. The Lord’s Supper was generally celebrated in puritan churches once a month, and she may just have been glad that the ritual did not occur more frequently. Her perspective on the question of admission to the Lord’s Supper could well have been that she was glad it was restricted to a smaller group than those who attended services every week, since fewer participants meant fewer loaves of bread to bake.
Puritan ministers referred to this arduous process in a shorthand meant to illustrate the scriptural concept of many joining together as one. John Cotton emphasized the creation of one body from many that occurred during the communal celebration of the Lord’s Supper with the imagery of “many Grains mak[ing] but one Loaf of Bread.” Lewis Hughes used the same concept in the short catechism that he published along with his celebratory account of Bermuda: “As the Bread is made of many graines, so joyned together, as they all make but one Loafe, . . . so the true beleevers being many, are so united in Christ, as they all make but one Christ.”41
Other examples make clear that on the few occasions ministers did mention the specific tasks involved in baking bread, the actions were metaphors for the ways that the divine shaped the soul and the essential sufficiency of Christ, rather than an occasion to think about the physical performance of grinding grain, hauling water, chopping wood, building and maintaining a fire, kneading dough and letting it rise, or baking the loaves. Samuel Willard meditated on Christ as the “Living Bread,” which “is not made without Grinding of the grain to dust, and being parched with Water and Fire; and Christ became Food for Souls to live on, by being bruised for our Sins, and scorched in the fire of Gods wrath, and so he is made fit for us to feed upon.” Samuel Parris echoed this construction when he preached, “As Bread is Baked or dried in an Oven by the heat of the fire: So the body of Christ is as it were baked by the fire of the cross, & so prepared for to become food, or bread for our Souls.” For these ministers, the significance lay in the parallels between the processes of baking bread and of creating spiritual food, sustenance for the spiritual bodies of the faithful.42 While the woman who completed the tasks necessary to bake bread may also have perceived such links, she would have had a lifetime