The title of this memoir is meant to convey the two meanings of the word: a mixture of flour and other ingredients to be baked and, more colloquially, money. The first meaning refers to the store established by the author's grandparents on New York's Lower East Side. But money also plays a major role in his story.

Zachter's grandparents bought bread and cakes from wholesale bakeries and sold them to restaurants in Manhattan and to customers who came to the store for the day-old wares. In short, it was a bakery in which nothing was baked. The author's two bachelor uncles, Harry and Joe, worked in the store and took it over when their parents died. Their sister, Helen, Zachter's mother, was a graduate of Hunter College. After their father died, she gave up her job teaching in an elementary school to help out her brothers by working in the store full time. When she married, she reduced her hours but, full time or part-time, her only compensation was the leftover bread and cakes she could carry home.

After he married Helen, Zachter's father, a claims examiner in the Brooklyn office of the New York State unemployment insurance department, was also pressed into service at the store. Every Monday after work, he would drive to Brooklyn to pick up "stuff" to bring to the Lower East Side store. He, too, was paid nothing by his two brothers-in law.

When the author was old enough, his uncles set their sights on their nephew, but his mother finally put her foot down; instead, Zachter son attended Brooklyn College, commuting from home every day. He had wanted to major in English but his parents insisted he study accounting so he could get a job after graduation. Later, he went to law school at night. Both as a student and a young married man, he struggled financially, living frugally and going into debt to make ends meet.

After Uncle Joe died, the store was closed; Uncle Harry became ill and moved in with his sister and brother-in-law.

When Zachter was 36, he discovered that the 83-year-old Harry, after a long life lived as a pauper, was, in fact, a millionaire several times over. He and his brother had secretly and successfully invested in the stock market over the years. They had hoarded their "dough," continuing to live their impecunious lives, wearing threadbare clothing, driving a battered, 20-year-old car, and receiving their dental care at a student clinic. They had worked seven days a week, closing the store only during Passover and spending the holiday in the tiny apartment where Zachter's parents lived their own modest lives. The only respite from their life of financial struggle came in the summers, when Zachter and his parents managed brief vacations in Miami Beach, where they stayed in low-rate, rundown hotels.

Zachter tells about cleaning out his uncles' apartment and the "treasures" he found there. He calls this effort "the excavation" since there are many, many boxes filled with all manner and years worth of detritus: papers, pens, rubber bands, buttons, shoehorns, books, coins, pictures, deteriorated dollar bills, audiocassette tapes, bank premiums and still-in-their-packages clocks, radios, electric blankets, and sets of flatware.

This idiosyncratic story is told cheerfully by Zachter who, having inherited those accumulated millions, now lives in Princeton with his wife and two children. He broke away completely from the cramped lifestyle of his workaholic family to devote himself to writing. This book is the first result of his literary pursuits. If he succeeds in future endeavors as well as he has in this memoir, his career promises to deliver the "dough."