Bread

Eastside Road, December 8, 2010—

WE CAN GET BY A DAY or two, maybe a week even, without meat; anyone can do that. I can easily go a day or two without wine; last summer I went over a month without any alcohol at all. Almost anyone can do that.

But yesterday we went the whole day without bread, and I found myself thinking about it a lot. We eat a lot of bread in this family, probably a pound a day in normal times. We both come from bread-eating families. I have two slices at breakfast, another slice or two at lunch, and at least one at dinner, without even thinking about it. And that's just the problem, not thinking about what one's eating; and that problem was just why we decided to to that half fast yesterday.

So today we ate, and we ate bread. I had two slices of Downtown Bakery levain toasted for breakfast, with some delicious quince jelly Lindsey's somehow cousin-in-law in Italy gave us last month. For lunch, the customary slice of toast spread with almond butter.

Cocktail time, this delicious flatbread, pizza dough I would guess, rolled out very thin indeed, baked on a grill, and spread with olive oil and salt, and accompanied by a little dish of fine hummus; a delicious accompaniment to a Manhattan*. And then came dinner, at home:Grilled cheese sandwiches. This was on another Downtown Bakery bread, don't know the name, Lindsey bought it, and remembers its name featured the word "Italian." (The cheese was Abondance, brought home from Netherlands last month. It tastes of Savoie.)

Then, with my green salad, because salad doesn't count if you don't have a piece of bread to sop up the last of the oil-and-vinegar, a piece of Ciabatta, really my favorite bread, brought home Monday from dinner out at Monti's, where it had been drizzled with white-truffle-infused olive oil. Bread, bread, bread, and bread.

Tempranillo, La Granja 360(Cariñena), 2009

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Three memories of bread from my childhood:

Cellophane-wrapped Wonder-type sliced sandwich bread, of course, like everybody ate in those days, suitable only to be squeezed into doughy balls in your hands and used to clean typewriters, not that anyone has a typewriter these days

Franco-American "French bread," favored by my father, who occasionally brought a loaf home to be sliced not quite all the way through, spread with margarine, and sprinkled with garlic salt (the horror! the horror!)

The bread Mom baked, using a jar of yeast she kept on the windowsill: too airy and filled with holes at first, over the months changing until it was dense as cheese and about the size of a slice of two-by-four

Early in our marriage, when I worked as a laborer for the City of Berkeley, Lindsey wrapped a couple of liverwurst-and-onion sandwiches made with dark dense but still pre-sliced and cellophane-wrapped bread from the Co-op. Later I used to walk three quarters of a mile down to Spenger's to get a loaf or two of Colombo's sourdough bread, baked in Oakland in those days; it was best bought at this otherwise unsatisfactory restaurant because it was trucked to them innocent of any wrapping, no cellophane, no paper, and the crust was therefor perfect.

Later, finally, thankfully, Steve Sullivan opened his Acme Bread Company in Berkeley, and I've never baked bread since. And then Lindsey, Thérèse, and Kathleen opened the Downtown Bakery and Creamery in Healdsburg, so we're within seven miles of really good bread.

There are fine bakeries in Portland: I like the raisin bread and the boules at the Pearl Bakery, and especially the big country levains at Ken's Artisan Bakery. There's decent bread to be had, in fact, in most towns we visit these days, just one of the many things that have improved the quality of daily life over the past sixty years. I'm grateful. And I chew, taste, think about my daily bread, and am glad to have it, and sorrow for those who don't.

*The Manhattan was drunk at Spoonbar