A Look at Bread

 

            For those of us who lean on bread as a staple of our diets, we know it’s the staff of life without any hoary cliché telling us so. Try to replace it with tofu or crackers, and you’ll soon find yourself stumbling onto the tableland of tasteless ennui, and you’ll long even for just one bite of white toast to even out your trembling taste buds.

            Okay, so bread is been the staff of life wheat and yeast addicts everywhere, but it also might be the measure of a restaurant.

            For the years of my wasted youth, like most people, I never thought much about what bread was put before me in whatever restaurant I stumbled into. Usually, bread is first thing you see when served in a restaurant. I never paid much attention to the first impressions it made until I observed a waitress friend of mine acting very befuddled and glum one day.

            “What’s the matter with you?”

            “A critic from the Inquirer came in the other day.”

            “And?”

            “She wrote a pretty nice review.”

            “So what are you unhappy about?”

            “Said we should have more interesting bread.”

            It was the first time I had heard the concept. Interesting bread? Wasn’t that like talking about interesting socks? Or interesting cement? Or interesting underarm deodorant?

            “What does that mean, more interesting bread? What the hell is interesting bread?”

            I was young and foolish then and didn’t realize what awaited me in the awesome world of interesting bread.

            It was completely beyond my friend why bread would even be mentioned in a restaurant review of a spectacular new restaurant. She was young and foolish then, without a clue about bread or its fascinations. The odd thing was she took this slap at the integrity of the bread where she worked very, very seriously. She even went to the high-ups, and suggested to management that the bread be made more “interesting,” whatever that was. But she did not stop there.

            She developed a bread fetish.

            Whenever she visited a restaurant, she checked with great care what is generally that wheaty first course you see practically wherever you dine, no matter how formal or indifferent to form that restaurant was. She became a maniac about checking out the bread, dipping an eager fist into the napkin-covered offering almost before it hit the table. It was almost embarrassing how she took to examining bread, as though that Inquirer restaurant critic had hit a nerve with her criticism and was now unraveling it all the way into my friend’s brain.

            “You know, the bread really does tell you an awful lot about a restaurant,” she said so often it became a mantra, as though repeating it would put a magic spell of goodness on the surprise in the bread basket. “If a waiter or waitress puts those stale, white snowflake rolls in front of you, hard and ugly as bricks, you might guess they won’t take much care with the rest of the meal or service, since they gave you such lousy, despicable bread. That’s a very silly thing to do, when there are so many delicious breads to get you interested in the place, and they’re so easy to find, and cheap. It’s just lazy, to give you bad bread.”

            I might suggest she became the first politically correct advocate of good bread I ever knew. I don’t know in which state legislature she now resides, but I would know if I bothered to check out recent legislation about bread.

            And, of course, I followed her down that holy path toward good bread.

            The first thing that catches my critical eye in a new restaurant is that basket of sweet wheaty aroma that is my introduction to the establishment. If I can smell it before I see it, that smell of warm, fresh-baked bread, I know that first delightful sense with prejudice me in favor of the bread before it comes into my sight, and the place automatically gets ten points positive. If there’s a dish of real fresh butter, not margarine or those junky scientific blends of unpronounceable icky oils, accompanying the bread, add another ten positive. If it’s herbed butter, add another positive twelve points. And if the food goes with the bread, if the restaurant goes to the trouble of learning ethnic breads to match its ethnic foods, add a hundred.

            French, Italian, Greek, Russian, German, whatever. Each has its own wonderful bread, and learning what they are is as much a part of the process of learning ethnic food as a good foreign language dictionary is. Bread comes with every culture. A culture’s bread supports just about everything else in that culture. If there are many types of bread for each ethnicity, and there generally are, you can count on the richness of the culture, for each bread fits somewhere in the imaginations that created the cuisine. If you’re tossed a Kaiser roll before your sushi, you know you’re fishing in the wrong place.

            Whole wheat or white, or mixed grain or rye. Sourdough bread, or Damper bread from Australia or a bagel from New York City or Middle Eastern flat bread. Naan bread from India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Chinese steamed bread, or India’s flaky Paratha bread. All have a place within those countries’ cuisines. Germany alone is said to have over three hundred types of bread, from pumpernickel to short bread, to go along with a variety of food and drink that is far more than bratwurst and beer. All have their proper places on the table, and all score points when served at the right time with the right food, just as the proper wine enhances the dishes it’s meant to be served beside.

            So, okay, I’ve defended my snobbishness about bread in a rye way.

              Now if only I could just determine exactly on which side to butter that delicious, aromatic, warm Schwarzbrot ...