Her grandmother showed her once, in the kitchen that smelled of rendered fat and old newspaper.
"Not like that," she said, taking the dough. "Like this."
The fold was a specific motion: the far edge brought toward you, then pressed, then turned a quarter. Not complicated. But the angle mattered, and the pressure mattered, and the way you held your shoulders mattered because the tension came from somewhere.
She tried again. Her grandmother watched without expression.
"Again," she said.
Not a criticism. An instruction.
There were fourteen folds to make. By the fifth, something had changed — not the motion but the feel of the dough under her hands. It was warmer now, or more yielding. She couldn't have said which.
"You feel that?" her grandmother asked.
"Yes."
"That's the gluten." Then: "Also your hands."
She didn't understand the second part for years. She had thought her grandmother meant that her hands had warmed the dough. Later she understood she meant: you are learning what your hands can do. The dough is the occasion. The hands are what you'll keep.
Her grandmother died in the spring, the year she turned thirty-two. The recipe wasn't written down. She spent a week reconstructing it from memory, from the feel of the flour under her hands, from something she couldn't have named but recognized when she got it right.
She got it right on the third try.
She has never shown anyone. Not because she's possessive of it — because the fold requires hands on dough, and hands require a kitchen, and a kitchen requires time, and she is always waiting for the right occasion.
She knows she's waiting too long. She knows the fold will outlast the occasion she's waiting for.