Each summer for at least a week and sometimes two, my neighborhood of Pudding Hollow here in Hawley enjoys the musical and culinary talents of Alison Seaton. Alison rents a cabin in the area.
Alison lives in Washington State. She is a singer, a conductor and a teacher. She originally came to Hawley in 2008 to study with our resident sage and composer, Alice Parker, who she met at a conference. Over the years, Alice has become a mentor and close friend to Alison.
Alison still spends most of her time here with Alice, but she has also cultivated friendships with many of us neighbors. We spend hours sitting by the water together during each of her visits. I love to hear about her menagerie (I think she is up to six dogs, and she has cats as well), her work and her garden.
Alison also cooks for many of us when she is here. For her, cooking is a way to build community. She recently invited a few neighbors for a simple supper of hot dogs and fresh corn on the cob.
The meal would have been special in any case because Alison prepared it and was a gracious hostess, but it became even more special when she baked her own hot dog buns. Those buns, which were hearty and delicious, inspired me to interview her about her cooking in general and her breads in particular.
I asked whether she grew up cooking.
“I really came to cooking as a young adult,” Alison remembered. “I hadn’t had an opportunity when I was a kid; my sisters, mom, and grandmother did all the cooking, and I was an appreciative sampler. When I was young and married neither of us knew how to cook — so we had to learn.”
“I started simple and discovered that I really loved making good food and feeding people,” she told me. “I guess it is part of how I show love. Over the years, I have expanded my repertoire, but I mostly love exploring local food and cooking it the old-fashioned way — slow and with natural and local ingredients.”
Her connection with Alice reinforced her connection with cooking. For many years, Alice taught week-long music workshops in her home at the aptly named Singing Brook Farm here in Hawley. The students, known as the Alice Parker Fellows, were housed down the road.
Alice prepared a meal for their first night, but after that the students were expected to cook.
“One of the things that is integral to the fellows program is good food,” explained Alison. “Everyone is instructed to come prepared to cook one dinner for the group, and so we all bond over the creation and consumption of lovely meals and good dinner-table conversation.”
“I have tried to carry on that ‘farm’ tradition at my own home and have really missed it during the pandemic.”
Alison likes to make bread every week or at least every other week, she noted.
“My grandmother, who was born in 1898 and died in 1996, was absolutely famous for her bread. All of the family still talks about it even though it has probably been at least 55 years since she made any.”
Alison and her sister tried over the years to duplicate that recipe. They never quite managed to do so, although they came close, according to Alison. She ended up devising her own recipe.
“I always thought that making bread was really hard because of the legend of my grandmother’s bread, but one day I just decided to give it a try, and it turned out great,” she enthused. “My bread tends to be a kind of sturdy, country-style bread that is quite versatile and isn’t hard to make.”
Alison recalled being inspired by the attitude of a friend who was a baker.
“Early on in my bread-making I met a person who was homebound,” she said. “He couldn’t easily go out into the world, but he could make these incredible whole-grain loaves of bread and give them to friends, or those in need… He told me that as he made the bread he held the person or people he was baking for in his heart and wished them all manner of blessings and channeled that into the loaf of bread. That is something I borrow from him. I send blessings and good wishes into my bread when I make it.”
The hot-dog buns we had at Alison’s table certainly must have come with lots of blessings. Those of us who ate them felt happy all evening.
Alison has now returned home to her husband and animals but told me she looks forward to her return to Pudding Hollow next year.
“I have always felt so welcome, accepted, and actually seen for who I am there,” she said. “I think that that is a unique and lovely quality of the Charlemont and Hawley community that is especially nourishing during these times when so much of our country is having trouble being together.”
In case readers would like to knead their own good wishes into hot-dog buns, here is Alison’s recipe. It made eight buns when she served us, but they were huge. She observed that next time she would probably make more, smaller buns.
The dough is adapted from her basic buttermilk bread recipe. If you’d like to make a loaf of bread instead, feel free. You will have bake it longer, however.
Ingredients:
2 cups white flour plus more for kneading
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 package dry yeast
1 cup buttermilk (you may substitute milk, but buttermilk makes a moister bread)
1 tablespoon olive oil plus more for greasing the bowl
Instructions:
Gather all your dry ingredients and mix them together in a large bowl.
Combine the buttermilk and the olive oil and heat them to between 110 and 128 degrees. Alison uses a thermometer to make sure she is in the right temperature range.
Once the liquid reaches the correct temperature, pour it into the dry ingredients and stir well. Your dough will be sticky and wet.
Take a medium handful of flour and spread it on the surface you will use for kneading the bread. Dump the wet bread dough on to this flour. Sprinkle another handful of flour on top of the dough, and use a little more flour to coat your hands.
Knead the dough until it is smooth and silky. If your dough gets too sticky, add a little more flour to obtain the smooth and silky texture.
Grease a non-reactive (stainless-steel, plastic, or ceramic) bowl with more olive oil, and place your dough in the bowl for the first rise. Cover the dough with a kitchen towel and let it rise for about an hour.
Alison suggests that a good way to facilitate this first rise is to turn your oven on to warm for about a minute and then turn it off. Then you can place the dough in the warm, draft-free oven.
After the first rise take the dough out of the bowl. Punch it down. Add a little more flour as you knead the dough for a second time, but not enough flour to make the bread dry. “Remember to keep the dough feeling silky but not sticky,” says Alison.
Shape the dough into hot-dog-shaped buns, cover the buns with a kitchen towel, and let them rise again until the rolls have doubled in size, about 40 to 60 minutes. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees toward the end of the second rise.
Place the buns on a sheet pan. If the surface seems old and/or liable to stick, either dust the buns all around lightly with flour or line the pan with parchment paper. Bake until the tops of the buns are golden and a little firm to the touch, about 20 to 25 minutes.
Alison observes that ovens differ and suggests checking after 15 minutes and then again every 5 minutes until the buns are done.
Slice the buns before serving. Any that are leftover make excellent toast. Makes 8 large buns.
Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning author and singer. Her next book will be “Pot Luck: Random Acts of Cooking.” Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.