437. Bread

BROWDERBOOKS

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.

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