"To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death" Pearl S. Buck
All due respect to Pulitzer and Nobel Award winning author Ms. Buck, but if you are eating bread without hope, you still get to eat the bread! I am fine without the hope; just some butter, olive oil or cheese and I am good to go. Bread is special, so before I enchant you with the tale of my first experience baking bread, I thought we would talk a little about bread itself.
My first memory of bread was probably the bread we used to get when I was a kid. I think it was called Golden Circle, and it was a little different than your other mass produced, commercial, grocery store bread available in the 1960's and 1970's. Different, but maybe not better. It was kind of round, and the crust was a light golden brown. Maybe that is why it was called Golden Circle? It was not bad bread, certainly adequate for a PB&J or bologna sandwich. If memory serves, Winn Dixie and Kroger (the 2 major supermarket chains in the Louisville area, at that time) stopped carrying Golden Circle around 1975. I don't really remember what we started getting after that; I suppose it was Wonder or whatever commercially available bread was available. It really didn't matter, because most commercial bread tasted the same, and was generally just a delivery system for meat, cheese, peanut butter, or to make toast. It wasn't until I was a little older that I began to really appreciate how good bread could be, and how important it was to mankind.
If you have never eaten home baked bread, then don't start now. I am talking about made from scratch bread, made by someone who knows what they are doing. You might have popped some Pillsbury Crescent rolls in the oven at Thanksgiving, or baked the "take and bake" dinner rolls from the grocery. Not bad bread, not bad at all. But home made bread, and artisan bakery bread, will ruin bread for you. Once you have had really good bread, it is hard to go back to plain old commercial sandwich bread. Once you have experienced the hearty crust and rustic complex flavors of a home baked tin loaf, or have torn into the thick chewy crust of a great sourdough or a baguette, Wonder bread is just not going to do it for you ever again.
My first experience with home baked bread was at my Grandmother's house at Christmas. Grandma, my Dad's mother, could bake. She was a really good baker, and really excelled at cakes and cookies. Grandma made a yellow cake with a caramel frosting that might be the best cake I have ever eaten. I think she made bread too, but it is not her bread that is burnt into my memory; it was her daughter's bread, my Dad's oldest sister, my Aunt Audrey. Aunt Audrey, or Sister Audrey as she is know to most people, having served her fellow man as a Roman Catholic Nun for the past 65 years, bakes bread. She creates simple, fantastic bread. I wish you could taste it. I have spoken in a previous entry about the love of baking, and how that is necessary to really bake good stuff. Well, my Aunt Audrey must love baking. I think she really gets the essence of baking, and that a big part of the love of baking comes from sharing what you bake with others. Even though she is well over 80 years old, every Christmas season she sends my family here in Arizona a big box of baked goods. German cookies and banana bread and spice bread and her stunning whole wheat tin loaf bread. Aunt Audrey's whole wheat bread is my favorite bread, ever. It is hearty and rustic, but not dense or heavy. Lightly sweetened, great sandwich bread, awesome toasted. I wish I was as loving and generous as she is, but when her gift arrives, it is well known to my boys to eat the cookies and banana bread with reckless abandon, but one loaf of the wheat bread belongs to Dad, and Dad only. I am not proud of my bread hoarding, but I know the boys understand. This is special bread to me. It is a special bread because Aunt Audrey loves to make it, and she loves to share it with those she loves.
This is why bread is special. We abandoned the roving, isolated lifestyle of the hunter gatherer tribe and replaced it with the sedentary community life of agriculture. We sowed crops of wheat and barley and millet and corn, and bread became the staple of human existence. The creation of bread is a community effort. Some sow and tend the fields, some harvest, some grind the grain into flour, then some bake the bread. Bread brought people together. The sharing of bread became a ritual; for Hebrews and Christians, it was Passover and Communion that brought them closer together and closer to their God. When we want to get to know someone, we say "let's break bread together". References to bread permeate human culture, and are found in songs, poems, myths and prayers. To have bread is to be a part of a group, a community. In the Lord of the Rings film, Return of the King, Gollum was trying to explain how much of a pariah he became after he found the One Ring. He said "they cursed us, and we wept to be so alone. We forgot the taste of bread.". To be without bread is to be alone.
So when you are tending to the hustle and bustle of your daily life, and you pause for a moment to grab lunch, whether it be a tuna sandwich from the deli, a hotdog from the street vendor, or a slice of pizza, remember. You are not eating a lowly snack, you are communing with history and with the rest of humanity. Everywhere in the world, we all enjoy our daily bread.
Next time: I do a little shopping and bake some bread, sort of.
My first memory of bread was probably the bread we used to get when I was a kid. I think it was called Golden Circle, and it was a little different than your other mass produced, commercial, grocery store bread available in the 1960's and 1970's. Different, but maybe not better. It was kind of round, and the crust was a light golden brown. Maybe that is why it was called Golden Circle? It was not bad bread, certainly adequate for a PB&J or bologna sandwich. If memory serves, Winn Dixie and Kroger (the 2 major supermarket chains in the Louisville area, at that time) stopped carrying Golden Circle around 1975. I don't really remember what we started getting after that; I suppose it was Wonder or whatever commercially available bread was available. It really didn't matter, because most commercial bread tasted the same, and was generally just a delivery system for meat, cheese, peanut butter, or to make toast. It wasn't until I was a little older that I began to really appreciate how good bread could be, and how important it was to mankind.
If you have never eaten home baked bread, then don't start now. I am talking about made from scratch bread, made by someone who knows what they are doing. You might have popped some Pillsbury Crescent rolls in the oven at Thanksgiving, or baked the "take and bake" dinner rolls from the grocery. Not bad bread, not bad at all. But home made bread, and artisan bakery bread, will ruin bread for you. Once you have had really good bread, it is hard to go back to plain old commercial sandwich bread. Once you have experienced the hearty crust and rustic complex flavors of a home baked tin loaf, or have torn into the thick chewy crust of a great sourdough or a baguette, Wonder bread is just not going to do it for you ever again.
My first experience with home baked bread was at my Grandmother's house at Christmas. Grandma, my Dad's mother, could bake. She was a really good baker, and really excelled at cakes and cookies. Grandma made a yellow cake with a caramel frosting that might be the best cake I have ever eaten. I think she made bread too, but it is not her bread that is burnt into my memory; it was her daughter's bread, my Dad's oldest sister, my Aunt Audrey. Aunt Audrey, or Sister Audrey as she is know to most people, having served her fellow man as a Roman Catholic Nun for the past 65 years, bakes bread. She creates simple, fantastic bread. I wish you could taste it. I have spoken in a previous entry about the love of baking, and how that is necessary to really bake good stuff. Well, my Aunt Audrey must love baking. I think she really gets the essence of baking, and that a big part of the love of baking comes from sharing what you bake with others. Even though she is well over 80 years old, every Christmas season she sends my family here in Arizona a big box of baked goods. German cookies and banana bread and spice bread and her stunning whole wheat tin loaf bread. Aunt Audrey's whole wheat bread is my favorite bread, ever. It is hearty and rustic, but not dense or heavy. Lightly sweetened, great sandwich bread, awesome toasted. I wish I was as loving and generous as she is, but when her gift arrives, it is well known to my boys to eat the cookies and banana bread with reckless abandon, but one loaf of the wheat bread belongs to Dad, and Dad only. I am not proud of my bread hoarding, but I know the boys understand. This is special bread to me. It is a special bread because Aunt Audrey loves to make it, and she loves to share it with those she loves.
This is why bread is special. We abandoned the roving, isolated lifestyle of the hunter gatherer tribe and replaced it with the sedentary community life of agriculture. We sowed crops of wheat and barley and millet and corn, and bread became the staple of human existence. The creation of bread is a community effort. Some sow and tend the fields, some harvest, some grind the grain into flour, then some bake the bread. Bread brought people together. The sharing of bread became a ritual; for Hebrews and Christians, it was Passover and Communion that brought them closer together and closer to their God. When we want to get to know someone, we say "let's break bread together". References to bread permeate human culture, and are found in songs, poems, myths and prayers. To have bread is to be a part of a group, a community. In the Lord of the Rings film, Return of the King, Gollum was trying to explain how much of a pariah he became after he found the One Ring. He said "they cursed us, and we wept to be so alone. We forgot the taste of bread.". To be without bread is to be alone.
So when you are tending to the hustle and bustle of your daily life, and you pause for a moment to grab lunch, whether it be a tuna sandwich from the deli, a hotdog from the street vendor, or a slice of pizza, remember. You are not eating a lowly snack, you are communing with history and with the rest of humanity. Everywhere in the world, we all enjoy our daily bread.
Next time: I do a little shopping and bake some bread, sort of.
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