Good and Mad and Rage Baking: Rebecca Traister’s Zucchini Almond Bread Recipe

This piece is excerpted from RAGE BAKING: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women’s Voices by Katherine Alford and Kathy Gunst. Copyright © 2020 by Kathy Gunst and Katherine Alford. Reprinted by permission of Tiller Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. 


At all the marches, all the rallies, you’ll see one sign over and over again. It is a Mexican proverb, apparently taken from the Greek: “They thought they could bury us; they didn’t know we were seeds.”

Women’s anger has been buried, over and over again. But it has seeded the ground; we are the green shoots of furies covered up long ago.

If you happen to be reading this in the future, having stumbled across it in an attempt to find out if you’re allowed to be angry about whatever you’re angry about, let me say: yes. Yes you are allowed. You are in fact compelled.

And if you’re reading this now, in its moment, with me; if you’ve gotten to this page because you’ve been feeling rage at the unfairness and injustice and at the flaws of this country and be- cause your anger is making you want to change your life in order to change the world, then I have something incredibly important to say: Don’t forget how this feels.

Tell a friend, write it down, explain it to your children now, so they will remember. And don’t let anyone persuade you it wasn’t right, or it was weird, or it was some quirky stage in your life when you went all political—remember that, honey, that year you went crazy? No. No. Don’t let it ever become that. Because people will try.

The future will come, we hope. If we survive this, if we make it better—even just a little bit better, but I hope a lot better—the urgency will fade, perhaps the ire will subside, the relief will take you, briefly. And that’s good, that’s okay.

But then the world will come and tell you that you shouldn’t get mad again, because you were kind of nuts and you never cooked dinner and you yelled at the TV and weren’t so pretty and life will be easier when you get fun again. And it will be awfully tempting to put away the pictures of yourself in your pussy hat, to stuff your protest signs in the attic, and to slink back, away from the raw bite of fury, to ease back into whatever new reality is made after whatever advances we achieve now.

But I say to all the women reading this now, and to my future self: What you’re angry about now—injustice—will still exist, even if you yourself are not experiencing it, or are tempted to stop thinking about how you experience it and how you contribute to it. Others are still experiencing it, still mad; some of them are mad at you. Don’t forget them; don’t write off their anger.

Stay mad for them. Stay mad with them. They’re right to be mad and you’re right to be mad alongside them. Being mad is correct; being mad is American; being mad can be joyful and productive and connective.

Don’t ever let them talk you out of being mad again.


ZUCCHINI ALMOND BREAD 

Ingredients

  • Cooking spray
  • 1 cup almonds
  • 3 cups (360 grams) all-purpose flour
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1¼ teaspoons fine salt
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 3 large eggs
  • 2 cups sugar
  • 1 cup vegetable oil, plus more if needed
  • 2 cups grated zucchini (about 1 large)
  • 1 teaspoon pure almond extract or vanilla extract

Directions

Position a rack in the center of the oven and preheat the oven to 350°F. Mist a 9 x 5-inch loaf pan with cooking spray or brush with oil.

Grind the almonds in a blender or food processor until almost finely ground.

Whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt,  baking  soda, and cinnamon, in a medium bowl.

In a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, com- bine the eggs, sugar, and oil and beat on medium speed until slightly thickened, about 3 minutes. With the mixer on low speed, slowly add the flour mixture and beat until fully incorporated. Add the zucchini, ground almonds and almond extract and mix until the batter is smooth.

Transfer the batter to the prepared pan. Bake until golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center of the bread comes out clean, about 1 hour 15 minutes. Let cool in the pan for 5 to 10 minutes, then turn the bread out of the pan and serve warm or at room temperature. Wrap tightly in foil and store at room temperature for up to 4 days.

About

Rebecca Traister is writer at large for New York magazine. A National Magazine Award winner, she has written about women in politics, media, and entertainment from a feminist perspective for The New Republic and Salon and has also contributed to The Nation, The New York Observer, The New York Times and The Washington Post. She is the author of "Good and Mad" and "All the Single Ladies," both New York Times best-sellers, and the award-winning "Big Girls Don’t Cry."