I can imagineit well enough: a dense, coarse-crumbed crust, sawed or ripped from a hefty country loaf, itself baked a deep mahogany, the top incised with circular ridges left from its final rising in a wickerbanneton. But what is it doing here? This isn’t a kitchen or a café but a workplace, full of men in dirty overalls carrying things in and out, making adjustments to clanking bits of machinery, standing and talking and flicking cigarette butts out the open door. Someone stopped at aboulangerie to buy it—today, yesterday, perhaps even the day before—and brought it to work, tucked under his arm, thinking nothing at all about it. A place was cleared for it on a table otherwise covered with tools, empty bottles, stacks of labels. And so here it is, sitting on a greasy, crumb-scattered copy ofNice-Matin, completely at home.
The richness of this situation can’t be reduced to a single idea, nor do I wish it to be. But there is something important to be noticed here, and it reminds me of the famous portrait Van Gogh painted of his bedroom in the yellow house at Arles. You remember it: two humble chairs, a washstand, and a bed. This picture radiates presence. Every object in it has the same fullness, an uncomplicated, unquestioned solidity of being. Even the homely pitcher and basin that sit on Van Gogh’s washstand speak of a physicality not yet distanced to a bathroom down the hall. But it is the bed that dominates the room, filling the painting with luminous self-assurance. The other pieces of furniture turn toward it, regarding it in awe. Such a bed is a room within a room, a place of ultimate refuge.
We do not need to ask if this bed is comfortable in order to be comforted by it. In fact, part of the power of the painting comes from the fact that we intuit, even if we don’t consciously articulate this intuition as a thought, that the bed isnot comfortable. The high head and footboards cramp the sleeping space between them; the undulating lines of the bedclothes suggest an old-fashioned dense and lumpy horsehair mattress, the kind that holds the shape of the sleeper long after he or she has gotten out of bed … or tries to assume a different position while lying on top of it. No mattress company or bed-frame maker would useBedroom at Arles as advertising material for their product. The painting is not about beds but about physical and spiritual exhaustion; about the great healing oblivion of sleep.
Here was the cupped board floor, the long table of the same color, two old straight-backed chairs, a few plates in a rack by the sink, a loaf of bread hanging from the ceiling.
— W. S. Merwin,The Lost Upland
This, then, is where I began: with an image of a loaf of bread sitting on a factory worktable and radiating the same density of being, the same “thereness,” as Van Gogh’s bed, and with my awareness that that loaf possessed something that my own bread did not. This was because, although I made all our bread myself, and in the simplest of ways, the constraints of my own cultural conditioning had taught me thatbread is good only if it is fresh. Consequently, the one time I could allow a loaf of bread to sit on my counter was when it had just come out of the oven. The peasant loaf—which a visitor can still find hanging from the ceiling—made me anxious.
There was, of course, a good reason for this. In my world, freshness of bread has always been the most important gauge of its realness. A loaf of bread straight from the oven is, like a roast chicken, best devoured while it is still crisp on the outside and warm within. (Leftovers … yes, there were things to be done with them, good things, but they still were what they were.) I was now faced with a difficult, even paradoxical, task: letting go what had made my bread real for me, what I had fought so hard to obtain—the privilege of always having it fresh—so that I could enter into a larger, more complicated, but also liberating relationship with it. I would have to understand that for bread there is also anaesthetics of staling.
In almost all peasant cultures, the original sustaining food was some kind of gruel—which is to say, grain boiled in water. This porridge is filling and nutritious; it is also dreadfully monotonous. Peasant cooks have expended endless culinary ingenuity over the centuries in improving upon it. Bread, in Europe at least, was the end result. Even so, many of the intermediary dishes retain their particular niches: cooled polenta sliced and fried in fat, pastas made of unleavened pastes, thick pancakes made of flours—like that ground from chestnuts—that are not amenable to bread-loaf baking.
In France, before the Revolution, the nobility not only controlled the major source of cooking fuel—wood—they also forbade peasants the possession of millstones or a bread oven. It was one of the privileges of both lay and ecclesiastical overlords to own the gristmills and the bakehouses and to collect a fee for their use. Consequently, communal bake ovens were fired only at intervals, and the bread baked in them was meant to last. This didn’t mean that the bread wasn’t tempting to eat hot, but that the frugal peasant knew better than to yield to that temptation. As Jeanne Strang wrote about such bread in her book on the foodways of southwest France,Goose Fat and Garlic:
After less than an hour golden crusty loaves emerged, and the one we brought home, almost too hot to hold, looked so good we cut into it straightaway, although we knew it would keep well for up to a week. (In peasant families, they would resist the temptation to eat the fresh loaf, knowing that too much would disappear quickly, leaving none for the end of the week.)
Perhaps the word that better helps us understand this process from the peasant’s perspective isaged. A newly baked country loaf is not so much “fresh” as “green.” It was (and, to the extent that it still has pretensions to authenticity, remains) densely textured and minimally leavened. In contrast, its city cousin, inflated out of as little dough as artifice can manage, is a loaf where crust is everything and crumb the airy architecture that holds it all in place. A city loaf, like a roast chicken, is meant to be torn apart and devoured at once; a country loaf is—like a country ham—meant to be eaten slowly, bit by bit, its thick crumb retarding spoilage. In the classic manner, it is sliced by the head of the family, who clutches it under his arm and cuts it by drawing the knife in a sawing motion upward toward his chest. It is treated with the respect that we usually bestow on a piece of roast meat.
Again and again, we read in cookbooks written about Spanish, Italian, and French cooking, in reference to the wealth of dishes in those cuisines that utilize the sustaining crust, that “these were devised to utilize stale bread that might otherwise have been discarded.” This phrase expresses a city way of understanding, completely at odds with peasant reality. On the contrary,the peasant loaf was made for these dishes. It was no more “stale” than Cheddar cheese is stale milk or a country ham stale pork. These are entities with their own identity, integrity,raison d’être. To find my way to it, I had to make my loaf in the usual manner … and then resist it. I had to let it cool, wrap it up in a clean, dry dish towel, and put it away in the bread tin. The struggle then becomes not only resisting the urgency of ignorance but also mastering its sheer bafflement. What about this loaf do I expect to be different? What, really, do I want from it?
The first thing to be said is that my experience with the staling of what, for lack of a better term, I’ll go on calling “city bread” had always been very much a one-note affair. One day it is fresh; the next day (if left out) it is a rock-hard lump that, when cut, crumbles into shards of rusk. I expected this. My image of stale bread was one gleaned from our shared cultural commons, where the distinction between hard bread and soft, between eaters of crust and eaters of crumb, is, first of all, a class distinction. Gentility trims away the crust from even the softest bread. In a brief fling with teatime, I myself once cut perfectly edible crusts from butter sandwiches.
“Some doe plenteously glut themselves, and others some live with gnawing of poore crusts.” That wordgnaw tells it all. Even so, the crust of the fairy tale wasn’t yesterday’s bread but last month’s. It was a symbol of adversity, of hard times. According to theO.E.D., the wordcrust means not only the dry hard skin of a loaf of bread but, by extension, “a scrap of bread which is mainly crust or is hard and dry
:often applied slightingly to what is much more than crust. ” (My italics.) Example: “‘To have a “crust” as she calls it, or in reality a good deal of cheese and bread and beer.’”
“Slightingly,” I think, is not quite right. I would say, instead, “deprecatingly.” Crumb is luxury; crust is poverty … and worse. Still, it is better to find a crust at the bottom of the cupboard than a raw turnip. Stale bread has three virtues: it is already cooked; it has substance; and it can absorb liquid. These are what make it a restorative. A crust dipped in broth softens, opens itself up, becomes almost a delicacy. By implication, it suggests that the hardness of one’s fate might similarly change. Affectingly, a sopped crust comforts directly and by example. It reminds us what will happen when we are dipped into the warm broth of good fortune: we will soften … expand … become warm again.
Remember the bed in Van Gogh’s bedroom. We are talking of the comfort hunger seeks from sustenance, a consolation that comes as much from what the food says as from what it tastes like. The difference between the fresh and the stale loaf is the same as that between thepetit pois and the dried pea. You eat the former fresh and sweet and young. That is living for the moment. The latter you soak to soften and then eat with the comfort of knowing it is something that is always there. The dried pea is reanimated, yes; rejuvenated, no. You do no good service to a dried pea by pretending that by cooking it you have brought back its youth. That is the realm of the frozen pea, which possesses neither the bloom of true freshness nor the comforting solidity of that which endures. What we are giving back to bread when we recall—reinvent, really—the is the dignity of maturity.
Mediterranean peasant cuisine places bread at the center of the meal. Because of this, the weight and density of the crumb, besides retarding the staling process, also serves to fill the eater. Like country ham, country bread exists in a category separate from the raw and the cooked: thepreserved. The field hand who takes a slice of it from his meal pouch expects, as he does with ham, to revivify it by water or by fire.
To think differently about bread is to make bread differently. Peasant bread is not especially delicious fresh. As Edward Behr once noted about his own slow-leavened loaf:
I would rather eat my bread after it is a day old, when for a couple of days it makes good eating plain. On the day of baking, the bread smells magnificent, but to my mind it takes a day for the taste and texture to compose themselves.
Such a loaf does not necessarily meet expectations we bring to bread that is best when freshly baked: the crackling crust, the sour-sweet fragrance of hot yeast. But there are other expectations: complexity of taste and, especially, variability of texture. This is chewy bread; not only slow to stale but slow to eat, and it is this slow eating that makes the meal.
My mother can remember her childhood in Tuscany when the sea was so unpolluted that the bread was dipped in the sea, wrapped in a clean cloth, to soak it through.
— Valentina Harris,Recipes from an Italian Farmhouse
As I write these words, summer has arrived with full force in Maine and we are already anticipating the first tomatoes of the season. Fresh tomatoes and bread: for the past several years, whenever I think of this combination, I remember a passage in Tom Stobart’sHerbs, Spices and Flavorings:
Where I lived on the Italian Riviera the common snack consisted of a crusty roll split and filled with sliced tomato, salt, olive oil, and a few leaves of fresh basil—no butter of course—just squashed to make the oil and juice impregnate the bread.
I first read this in the early 1980s, and it immediately defined for me the course of a pamphlet I was then writing:Aglio, Oglio, Basilico. I had begun it because I wanted to write about pesto; I ended up writing about summer. The clinging, assertive fragrance of basil; the pulpy sweetness of the tomato; the rich, thick olive oil with the hint of burning bitterness in its aftertaste … in a sense, I was the soft crusty roll, wanting to sop all this up, unable to get enough.
When I subsequently came across a recipe forpanzanella —a salad made by refreshing bits of stale country bread by soaking them in water, then wringing them out and tossing them with chunks of tomato, cucumber, and so on in a simple oil-and-vinegar dressing—I felt I had finally found the dish that might make this possible.
I was right then making a salad, very trendy at the time, of fresh ripe tomatoes. These were cut into wedges and tossed in olive oil and a little red wine vinegar along with torn bits of basil, minced onion, and cubes of fresh mozzarella. Allowed to sit in a cool summer kitchen for a few hours before serving, the cheese softened to the point that it simply melted in the mouth. This same resting process filled the salad bowl with a delicious liquid composed of the dressing and the tomato juice. Whatpanzanella did was give me permission to tear a loaf of fresh Italian-style bread into bite-sized chunks and toss these in. The result was delicious, but it wasn’tpanzanella. Let’s call it …
PANZANETTA
[serves 4]
1 red salad onion, thinly sliced
4 large ripe tomatoes
4 to 6 ounces fresh mozzarella
a few sprigs of fresh basil
1 clove garlic
4 tablespoons fruity olive oil
½ tablespoon red wine vinegar
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
loaf offresh peasant-style bread
Soak the onion slices in cold water for an hour, changing the water every 15 minutes. (This tempers the onion’s rawness without affecting its crispness.) Then cut the tomatoes into chunks, cube the mozzarella, and toss these together in a large salad bowl. Tear the basil into little bits and scatter over. Mince the garlic clove to near-molecular consistency (easiest done with a good pinch of salt) and mix this with the olive oil and vinegar. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Cover with plastic wrap and let sit for a few hours in a cool place until the tomatoes release their juice. Now, bit by bit, tear the loaf into bite-sized chunks and stir these into the salad until the juices have been absorbed and there is a pleasing balance of ingredients. Adjust the seasoning before serving.
Cook’s Note.This salad is also good with torn bits of brine-cured black olives added at the same time as the fresh basil. If the tomatoes are not fully sweet, use a balsamic-style vinegar instead of the wine vinegar.
I offer this recipe not only because I still like it but because it’s a good illustration of how unexamined culinary inspiration tends to work. Encountering a recipe embodying an unfamiliar idea—the durable loaf—I simply tried to detach the recipe. Without in any way realizing what I was doing, I reimaginedpanzanella into a dish that not only incorporated fresh bread but focused on what, for me, was the important ingredient: fresh tomatoes.
The first time I madepanzanella, I did try soaking the bread. It turned into mush, and rather than wonder why, I simply decided to ignore such instructions in the future. This lesson on the difference between country and city bread not only failed to sink in, it didn’t even register. Nor did I wonder, as the years went on, why I never encountered a recipe forpanzanella that included fresh cheese. This is because, even if my “panzanetta”can be delicious, compared to the real thing it is also as evanescent as a summer breeze.Panzanella, true to its peasant origins, is a dense and chewy dish, and mozzarella would be as appropriate in it as in a batch of bread stuffing—which is a very good description of whatpanzanella is like … if you can imagine bread stuffing as a hot-weather salad.
PANZANELLA
[serves 4]
1 red salad onion, thinly sliced
8 ounces or so stale country bread
3 large ripe tomatoes
1 cucumber, peeled and cubed
a few sprigs of fresh basil
4 tablespoons fruity olive oil
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Soak the onion slices in cold water for an hour, changing the water every 15 minutes. Cut the bread into bite-sized cubes and soak them in cold water
just long enough to be sopped through. Drain the bread cubes in a colander and squeeze gently but firmly to wring out as much water as possible. Cut the tomatoes into chunks and mix these together with the bread, the drained onion slices, and the cubes of cucumber in a large salad bowl. Tear the basil into little bits and scatter these over the salad. Drizzle over the olive oil and vinegar and season with salt and pepper. Toss and then let sit for an hour or two on a cool counter before serving. Adjust the seasoning before serving.
Cook’s Note.Other possible additions include celery, anchovy fillets, capers, et cetera. Proportions are relative, with some versions ofpanzanella favoring the bread and others the tomato. Likewise, a decision to shred the bread and cut everything else into smallish dice produces a very different dish from one in which everything is cut large.46
There it is. Compare these two dishes and you have in perfect contrast the hunger of the clerk and the hunger of the peasant. For the latter, fresh tomatoes are no special novelty. Their meals, whether made in summer or in winter, require substance, whether that substance be pasta or bread.Panzanella is an uncooked version ofpappa al pomodoro, a dish that is usually described as “bread and tomato soup.” However, the actual Italian—roughly, “bread sopped in tomato sauce”—brings to mind its culinary equivalent: pasta dressed with tomato sauce. In peasant cooking, sopped bread and pasta are close kin, and, as we know, in rustic Italy it is the pasta, not the sauce, that dominates the dish. So, too, with bread.
PAPPA AL POMODORO
[serves 4]
8 ounces slightly stale country bread
4 cloves garlic, cut in half
basil stems
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
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