Hot bread and Cleopatra
published: Monday | April 14, 2003
Tony Deyal
IF I were to be reincarnated as a fruit or vegetable, I would return as a bread-nut. I can be described as "well bread". As I travel through the Caribbean, when people call me "Breads" or "Breaddah", I marvel at their perceptiveness and insight. How do they know that bread is my favourite food? My preferred hymn is "Oh Breadder Man" and my prayer of choice is the Lord's which includes, "Give us this day our daily bread." From the day I left school I religiously obeyed the dictum about eating bread by the sweat of my brow, but now the low-salt diet deemed necessary by increasing age and blood-pressure, makes it difficult. Either I develop my own biological desalination plant or settle for unsalted water which in Trinidad, whether from the tap or bottled, is more expensive than gasoline. The word "Evian" spelled backwards says why.
The price of flour rose recently but that does not deter or otherwise inhibit my consumption of the commodity that is the basic building block of bread. Bread is the staple that holds the pages of my life together. Not for me the cake so beloved of Marie Antoinette who, when told that the people of Paris were demanding bread and could get none, responded, "Let them eat cake instead." Even though historically peasants have always been revolting, the one ennobling and elevating element of their existence is their love for bread. There is a local Trade Union that uses as its motto, "Peace, Bread and Justice putting bread in its rightful place at the centre of man's search for salvation and salivation." All bread is indeed mouth watering.
The musical scale of evolution and existence begins and ends with dough. The first bread was made in Neolithic times, nearly 12,000 years ago, from coarsely crushed grain mixed with water, with the resulting dough probably laid on heated stones and baked by covering with hot ashes. It went like hot bread and soon its fame spread throughout the ancient caves. Probably bread helped to make the dinosaurs extinct since it transformed the Tyrannosaurus Rex from a carnivore to a bread-nut like me or even a dough-nut. The Egyptians discovered that allowing wheat doughs to ferment, thus forming gases, produced a light, expanded loaf, and they also developed baking ovens. Mark Anthony's frequent travels to Egypt were not, as Shakespeare and History would have it, because of his attraction to Cleopatra. As far as he was
and shove it up her asp. Although she was well endoughed, he was more interested in her buns. That, after all, is the way the cookie crumbles.
By that time, bread had developed its reputation, and was referred to in the Bible, as "The Staff of Life." Moses, for instance, took up his staff, struck a rock a mighty smite, and water gushed out, probably from too much sweat in the baking process. The shape of the pretzel was developed by a monk about A.D. 610. Using the dough left over after bread making, the monk formed a figure meant to represent children's arms folded in prayer. At that time also, "nunchion" was the word for liquid lunches. It was a combination of the words "noon scheken," or noon drinking. In those days, a large chunk of bread was called lunch. So, if you ate bread with your nunchion, you had what we still call today a "luncheon."
Then the greatest invention since sliced bread was born. On a cold winter night in the late seventeen hundreds in the sleepy little town of Sandwich, England, a discovery was made that would change the course of human history for all time. Our heroine was standing in her kitchen, having just finished washing off the playing cards from last evening's card session when the idea seized her like a bolt of pure imagination. It was in that moment that the sandwich as we know it today was conceived. The lady of the house walked over to the table in the middle of the kitchen and cut off two hefty slices of bread and asked herself the question that had plagued homemakers in Sandwich since the beginning of recorded time. What if she put the meat and cheese between the slices of bread? She did just that. She held the first sandwich in her hand, noticed that her fingers were clean and a tear of pure joy came to her eye. She had done it. The sandwich was born. Her husband, the Earl of Sandwich, to this day is given credit for his spouse's innovative achievement. If you thought Cleopatra had it hard, consider the poor Lady Sandwich. In spite of her upper-crust upbringing, such an experience was enough to make her as hard as a three-day old bagel.
BAGELS
The bagel, a roll with a hole, something it has in common with Mark Anthony and other great lovers and playboys in history, is golden brown and crusty on the outside, soft and tender on the inside. Bagels are low in calories, 270 calories per three-ounce bagel. The first bagel rolled into the world in 1683 when a local baker wanted to pay tribute to Jan Sobieski, the King of Poland. King Jan had just saved the people of Austria from an onslaught of Turkish invaders and a lifetime of nougat. The King was a great horseman, and the baker decided to shape the yeast dough into an uneven circle resembling a stirrup. The Austrian word for "stirrup" is "beugel." In Poland, bagels are officially approved as an appropriate gift for any woman in childbirth except perhaps in Mexico.
In Mexico, you have to be careful in terms of what you give to women, in or out of childbirth. The reason is that they give their breads names like gendarmes (policemen), llaves (keys), cuernitos (horns), alamares (frogs), palomas (doves), besos (kisses), monos (bows), corbatas (ties), banderillas, campechanas, magdalenas, orejas (ears), garibaldis, conchas (shells), calzones (underwear), cocoles and pelonas (bald ladies). I can see myself giving a cocole or pelona some calzones and besos, her husband would think that he was getting cuernitos and the next thing you know he would get the gendarmes for me. That is why I prefer to stay here in the Caribbean where we eat what we like, where we like, when we like. There are men I know who eat saltfish and roll straight off their beds.
Tony Deyal, a crusty older man, was last seen talking about the two insects who left the flour bin to go out into the world to seek fame, fortune and dough. One became a roll-model and the other, whose life was filled with many turnovers because of his half-baked schemes, died before knowing how much he was kneaded. He was always known as the lesser of the two weevils.
