Bread
Bread drying beside a communal oven near Gap, France, 1998
Bread sits at the center of the European table. This is true, even now, when bread is more a condiment than a dietary staple. Bread is very much more a food than most foods. It is a carrier of complex cultural messages in ways that few other foodstuffs are. I am interested in what bread tastes like as a food to be eaten on its own or to compliment other foods, but I am probably more engaged with how it looks, with the various qualities of shape, crust, and crumb and what these mean as carriers of cultural messages. My forthcoming book, Bread, with Reaktion Books in London offers an outline of my current thinking about bread as cultural messenger.
The thought I’d like to leave you with today is that bread is a cultural invention. Bread isn’t harvested by farmers. Farmers harvest grain. Bread is a manufactured product. While many of us grow passionate about what makes a good loaf of bread I think it is important to keep in mind that the qualities that make a good loaf are not written in the stars. Fast rise or slow rise; thick crisp crust or soft think one; fine soft even grained crumb or a crumb that is chewy with large irregular holes, these are all cultural choices. Over time what any given culture or culinary elite has praised has changed. And, of course, different cultures praise different breads.