It's not just another nice loaf of bread, dear friends. It is indeed a nice loaf of bread, but it is also the first bread I ever learned how to bake, under the close eye and proto-bakerina hand of my mother. When I was five, my mom acquired a copy of the then-brand-spanking-new, now-classic Vegetarian Epicure. Among the lovely things* we found in this book was a recipe for oatmeal bread that called for a large potato, boiled, crushed, combined with butter and milk until it was perfectly smooth and lump-free, and blended into a mix of flour, rolled oats, yeast, a little sugar, a pinch of ginger, salt and some of the water used to boil the potato. I didn't know then that the potato and ginger were what are known in French kitchens as trucs, little tricks that yield big dividends in the finished bread. I just knew, with my five-year-old certainty, that taking all this stuff and turning it into bread was really, really neat. It still is.
*One of the other lovely things in this book is a recipe for pumpernickel bread, which Ms. Thomas calls "Monday Pumpernickel," because if you start the week with a slice of it, then Monday won't look so bad, and you'll be fortified to get through the rest of the week. I have made other pumpernickel recipes that were more suited to my palate, but the Monday pumpernickel gladdens my heart like the others don't, simply because I love the idea of a bread that can lighten your workweek gloom and give you a nice hit of complex carbohydrates and protein at the same time.