Carrying on the family tradition

She’s since largely given up retail operations and has converted her commercial kitchen into a teaching space where she shows others how to feed people with love and delicious baked goods.

But she still sees bread as not only a way to make a living, but as a part of life itself. While bread as life is a metaphor as old as baking itself, it’s also a key part of Gonzalez’s maternal great-grandmother Viola’s story.

“My great grandmother lived in heartache and poverty in Missouri,” Gonzalez said. “They were dirt poor and she was a mostly single mother with four kids and a husband who showed up long enough to get her pregnant and leave.”

At the time, Viola was a servant who baked bread on the side, keeping a sourdough starter on the counter that she fed daily. But when the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression descended, she lost her source of income. Viola, clutching her sourdough starter in her lap, fled with her children to California.

“That precious jar filled with flour and wild yeast was her family’s lifeline,” Gonzalez wrote. “She protected it as if it was gold. It was like a scene out of The Grapes of Wrath.”

In California, Viola continued to bake bread, both for money and to feed her family. Viola would also feed anyone else who was hungry, sustaining people with flour, wild yeast and water.

Viola’s baking, and how it sustained the family, was not lost among the branches of the family tree. Her daughter, Gonzalez’s great aunt Hazel, made sourdough that became the stuff of family legend. Gonzalez remembers standing on a chair with her mother and her mother’s sisters, smashing fruit and baking pies.

Gonzalez herself carries on her family tradition through her teaching kitchen. Her own 16-year-old daughter also seems to have a knack for bread baked into her DNA.