Not much to report on my new book. I have a copy, for one final glance before okaying it for publication. Next comes formatting the e-book. After that, print copies will be available, but the release date will not be immediately.
BREAD
Somewhere in this blog, not
too long ago, I listed five essentials that I could not do without:
1.
Bread
2.
Trees
3.
Books
4.
Sleep
5.
Hope
To these I could add a sixth:
Music. Lately I have been listening to
WQXR from breakfast on, whenever I’m in the kitchen, which means during
meals. I would rather hear Bach and
Vivaldi, whom I cannot turn off, or Beethoven or Mozart or Haydn, than the
news, which proclaims our president’s latest folly, or a report of who’s
killing whom.
Upon refection, however, I notice certain omissions that
might puzzle or shock some people:
· God
· Joy
· Love
· Friends
· Wonder
Joy is on my list, in that
bread, trees, and books bring me joy.
Love and Friends are there, in that I love those three things and
consider them my friends. But God is not
there, nor is, explicitly, Wonder. God,
in one form or another, is the subject of some awful poetry that is making me
write it, but which, with luck, will never see the day, meaning, find its way
into print. So let’s say that He – or
She or It – is pending as an essential, with the outcome uncertain.
And that leaves Wonder.
A serious omission, I grant.
Without Wonder, life is drab, dull, dead. As children we have it, looking at the world
wide-eyed. But as adults we lose it, get
bogged down in our cluttered, busy lives, and see the world around us as mere
routine, overly familiar, or even as an obstacle, a threat, something to be
ignored or overcome. So I’m pondering
where to place Wonder in my list of essentials.
Meanwhile, I’ll do an occasional post on the five that I’ve listed
to date. Starting with Bread. I love it, used to bake it, have it for
breakfast (organic olive bread preferred) and sometimes, in lesser amounts, at
dinner. During my Midwestern childhood in
the 1930s I ate Silvercup Bread daily and heard it advertised on the radio by
the Lone Ranger program. The moment that
program came on, at 5 p.m. weekdays, my brother and I mounted the side arms of
our living-room davenport, and to the rousing strains of Rossini’s William Tell
Overture, rode our horses furiously, firing our imagined revolvers six times (they
were six-shooters) in imitation of the heroic Masked Man of the Plains, who rode
his horse Silver (get the connection?) in the company of his pal of few words, Tonto. When the Masked Man completed his
task at some troubled Western town, with the villains disarmed and peace and
order restored, and the grateful townsfolk wondered who and where their rescuer
was, they would hear his distant voice shouting “Hi yo, Silver, away!” as he and Tonto
galloped off into the hazy distance, his identity still a mystery. So there I was with bread enhanced by the
Masked Man of the Plains and the frenzied strains of Rossini.
 |
| Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger, with Silver, in a film version, 1965. |
(A brief Internet-inspired note: Tonto always called his companion “Kemosabe,” which the radio audience took as a Native American honorific, but in fact means “soggy shrub” in Navajo. Which is only fair, since tonto means “stupid” in Spanish.)
Years later, to be sure, I realized that Silvercup was a bread
made of refined white flour, with most of its nutrients removed, and therefore
nutritionally deficient. Today I wouldn’t
have it in my kitchen. Hardly an issue,
since Silvercup’s maker, the Gordon Baking Company of Long island City (so far
from the Old West of legend) shut down in 1974, the victim of a Teamsters
strike. But legends die hard. The Lone Ranger made it to TV and the movies,
and recently a high-school choir sang the entire William Tell Overture while
galloping on real horses, a performance that must have been memorable,
even if Rossini was turning ten times over in his grave.
Bread was less important to me during my high school and
college years, so we’ll fast forward to my two years in France in the early
1950s. I was a student there learning
French and French culture, but spent my vacations traveling by rail or bus or
foot (hitch-hiking), and in the course of my travels saw a good deal of
provincial France. In big cities and
small towns alike, a common sight was a little kid carrying a flûte, a long, thin loaf of bread, often longer than they were tall. Fresh-baked, the bread was a
rich golden brown, and was destined for the family dinner table, since no
dinner was complete without it. I
learned about real dining, not in the government-financed student restaurants,
to be sure, where one never dared ask what the meat served was (horse meat was a
distinct possibility), but in small restaurants suited to my limited
budget. There each meal was a ritual,
served in courses. One began with soup,
and only after that did one break bread and sip a glass of wine, while waiting
for the next course to be served. And
the bread was good, always freshly baked that day.
 |
| French baguettes, shorter and thicker than flûtes. Both are a rare sight in villages today. jeffreyw |
So good was French bread that when I hiked in the Pyrenees,
where hitch-hiking sometimes failed me, I would walk jauntily along some quiet
rural road, with the sound of water from unseen streams in the woods rising all
around me, and a flûte or baguette protruding
from my backpack. Then, finding a
stream beside the road, I would look for a
smooth streamside rock, sit, and have my lunch, serenaded by the sound of water. And what was that lunch? French bread with jam, and whatever fruit was
in season, often grapes.
During those provincial wanderings, on some early mornings I found myself
the first diner in a café, and had to wait while the owner sent someone to
fetch bread from a nearby bakery. To
serve any bread not fresh was unthinkable.
Imagine my surprise then, years later, when my partner Bob came back from
his first trip to Paris, and told of seeing the woman running his hotel setting
up the tables for the next day’s breakfast with some bread at each place on the
table. Today’s bread for tomorrow’s
breakfast! To my mind, in France,
unthinkable. But who were the guests in
her hotel? Americans and
Scandinavians. The French would never
have put up with it.
When they traveled abroad, the French took their need for
bread with them. In a restaurant in
Mexico I’ll never forget seeing a demanding band of French tourists dining with
their young Mexican guise. “Du
pain! Du pain!” said a woman with great power of tongue. The Mexican guide’s eye
momentarily caught mine, and we both smiled furtively. Annoyed by having seen so many Ugly Americans abroad on my travels, it was
vastly reassuring to see the Gallic equivalent in Mexico. Travel seems to bring out the worst in all
of us, especially when exchange rates are favorable.
Italian bread too can be marvelous. On my trip with Bob and our friend Barbara to
Italy in 1999, on three occasions we tasted bread so delicious that we could
have made a meal of it alone. The bread
was always good, but on these three occasions exceptional. But always, in every restaurant, when we sat
at a table for dinner, they brought us bread and olive oil, and we dipped the
bread in the oil and reveled in the taste. Never, in this country, have I
tasted such bread in an Italian restaurant.
Local traditions and local ingredients probably explain it.
 |
| A French baker baking baguettes. RudolfSimon |
Recently I have learned that in many French villages today there is not one local bakery. No local bakery? No fresh bread every morning, its aroma transporting you heavenward? Unthinkable! But so it is in the provinces, though not in the big cities. Young people are no longer tempted by the trade of baker, with its long hours of work, and shopping malls with supermarkets and chain stores are popping up nearby, often the only outlets for bread in the area. And the young are eating less bread. And to dramatize the death of the traditional boulangerie, with the village baker living above his shop, vending machines that look like phone booths are appearing on village streets. Village life in France will never be the same.
 |
| A bakery in Paris. Becoming a rare sight in the provinces. Poulpy |
Here in the huge metropolis of New York, I have never been
so glad to be able to go year round to a nearby greenmarket and buy, from
Tibetan vendors who know me and my needs, a loaf of fresh-baked organic olive
bread, plus cookies and blueberry muffins and a package of granola. Yes, bread is life. We need it, and want it fresh.
A final thought, inspired by the photo above: Are robots the way of the future? If so, a chilling thought.
Coming soon: No idea.
 |
| Robots moving bread in Germany, 2005. |
A final thought, inspired by the photo above: Are robots the way of the future? If so, a chilling thought.
Coming soon: No idea.
© 2019 Clifford Browder
