daily bread

[‘The Basket of Bread’ (1914), Raoul Dufy]

I may just have a thing about bread. I consume it, and it consumes me. Barely a day goes by without eating some sort of bread. I make my own, I buy it, and it’s one of the best entrées into exploring different places and food cultures. ‘Best bakery in xxx’ is probably one of my top five Google searches.

I started young, apparently. I had a very kind, indulgent Nana who would buy a fresh white loaf from the baker’s and put at the end of my pram, then turn a blind eye when I reached over, picked up the whole thing, and started eating while it was still warm. The rest of my life has really just been the story of me recreating these moments. I still absolutely adore eating just-baked bread, and the best way to ensure a supply of it is to make it myself.

This is something I’ve been doing for decades. The process is timeless yet fascinating, a mix of the magic of yeast multiplication with simple requirements - just water, salt, flour, active yeast, heat. And it’s never not possible to be thrilled by a successful loaf. It’s a little miracle, every time. I used to use fresh yeast, but I’ve had my sourdough starter for nine years now, and it’s almost a part of the family (its offspring are in other Brocket fridges). I’m a very proud mother of my mother, and the way it always springs back into action with water, flour, warmth and time.

[Thomas Clissold (photo c1910-13), cook and bread-maker on the Terra Nova expedition to Antarctica]

There’s all the lovely tactility of making by hand, too. Testing for tepid water, scooping out the stretchy, bubbly starter, feeling the cool floor, using hands to mix the soft, sticky dough, stretching it, noticing the way it warms with the yeasty activity, shaping, rolling, sprinkling with rice flour, then turning it out the next day and going full slasher movie with a lethal lame.

So there’s this excitement of bread-making which never palls, balanced by the fact that it is such a very commonplace, quotidian foodstuff. I like the poem by Amy Lowell which compares ‘smooth and pleasant’ morning bread to a comfortable, long-standing relationship, unlike the early, heady days of ‘red wine and honey’.

It’s this ordinariness which makes the photo of a world-famous artist playing with his bread with a totally straight face so brilliant. ‘Les pains de Picasso’ (1952) by Robert Doisneau, brings together pretty much all the good things in life: a checked tablecloth, a cheap bottle of red wine, a striped top, a sufficiency of bread, a lovely visual joke, and a nice play on words (the title works so well in French because of the pun on pains and mains).

[‘The Tea Table’ (1920), Harold Harvey]

Picasso would have just torn his bread when he’d finished posing with it, but cutting a big loaf bread isn’t always easy. I’ve never held a loaf steady against my body and cut towards myself the way so many people do in books, and in paintings like this one. Harold Harvey is the master of the domestic interior narrative, and my goodness that’s a huge loaf which no doubt has its own story. (FYI: major Harold Harvey exhibition coming up this year.)

The bread cutter here looks well disposed towards the seated eaters, but compare this to the bread violence in Great Expectations. Magwitch threatens to cut Pip’s throat before he is appeased with bread, and the abusive Mrs Joe Gargery cuts bread ‘in a trenchant way’, as though she, too, is cutting someone’s throat, or beheading them (like Judith and her maidservant cutting off the head of Holofernes in the painting I saw in Oslo in which it appears to be in a bread basket). “First, with her left hand she jammed the loaf hard and fast against her bib,—where it sometimes got a pin into it, and sometimes a needle, which we afterwards got into our mouths. Then she took some butter (not too much) on a knife and spread it on the loaf, in an apothecary kind of way, as if she were making a plaster,—using both sides of the knife with a slapping dexterity, and trimming and moulding the butter off round the crust. Then, she gave the knife a final smart wipe on the edge of the plaster, and then sawed a very thick round off the loaf”.

[‘Annette à la miche de pain (1915), Vuillard]

And tbh I’ve never seen anyone cut or sculpt bread into what looks like an abstract marble piece by Barbara Hepworth. Then I discovered that Antony Gormley actually made a huge bread bed sculpture out of white sliced bread (the after-story is a bit gross, though). He said, “I used Mother's Pride because it was a food furthest from the field, part of a distribution network more akin to gas or electricity. It had nothing to do with mothers and very little to do with pride.”

[‘Bread’ (1969) by Jasper Johns ]

This may indeed be true, but industrial white sliced bread made by the Chorleywood process should not be written off. It’s great for chip butties, and nothing goes better with peanut butter than a slice or two of Warburton’s Super Toastie (which has its own rarity value), especially when it is so fresh and soft, it’s like a poultice.

[‘Evening’ (1925) Isobel Codrington]

Plus, it’s an important part of the vital but modest, plain, ordinary still life on millions of kitchen and dining room tables, like the bread in this painting, just in a different form.

[‘The Tea Table’ (early 1940s) by Ruskin Spear, **with milk bottle **]

Bread rarely takes centre stage, but it is one of the most important elements, the glue of a spread, which make up a daily domestic arrangement.

[‘Soviet Breads’ (1936), Ilya Mashkov]

Unless, of course, you are a painter of bread propaganda. In which case you can make bread look like weapons, or like the flag of a country where bread rules (both true of the USSR at times).

[‘Bread-salt’ (1970), Victor Klimenko]

Bread can undoubtedly be a huge political issue, but it is also a symbol of welcome and sharing in Russia. Guests and visitors are often greeted with an enormous loaf of bread with a little bowl of salt on top. And speeches, of course. Years ago, I spent ten weeks in Ukraine with a group of students, visiting top attractions such as tractor factories and renal units (this was the at the height of communism). At every stop, the bread and salt appeared, although the loaf was a usually a well-used prop, not for eating, ironically. Despite this, I always thought xлеб-соль/bread-salt was a lovely way to welcome visitors, something I still do when I can (minus the speeches, costume, embroidered towel etc).

And to finish, here is Simon Armitage savouring the lines “be it bloomer or farl, be it sourdough or scone, be it tea-cake or bap”.

A reminder of all the lovely Northern (white) breads - barm cakes, Blackpool rolls, and cottage loaves - that I would have happily devoured in my pram.

[photo by Elliott Erwitt (1955)]

Even today, I suspect there wouldn’t be much left of one these baguettes if it were me on the back.

Happy Sunday!