Bread in literature?
Like a lot of you, I suspect, I have been compiling a kind of "commonplace book" about bread. It's a notebook of recipes--some handwritten, some cut'n'pasted--and pages of things like easy substitutions, conversions, etc.
I've started adding short passages from literature that involve bread in some way. Here's one from Raymond Carver's short story, "A Small, Good Thing":
He had a necessary trade. He was a baker. He was glad he wasn't a florist. It was better to be feeding people. This was a better smell anytime than flowers.
"Smell this," the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. "It's a heavy bread, but rich." They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light. They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.
If there's a passage you think would be a nice addition to this project, please share it.
I was listening to a Selected Shorts podcast from PRI this week, and there is the story of Gimpel the Fool--I think by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Gimpel was a baker, who--despite being a fool--rose from being a worker in a bakery to owning his own bakery--it's an amusing story and nicely read on the podcast.
In Eastern European Jewish villages of the time (late 1800's), women would prepare bread dough (like Sabbath Challah) and other baked dishes (such as "cholent", a kind of stew that could heat all night in a heavy pot to provide a warm dish on the Sabbath when fires could not be lit--an early version of the crock pot!) at home and take them to the bakery to be baked for a fee--fuel must have been too precious to bake in your own home. The bakery would also make and sell baked goods for those who could afford to buy them. There is a good descripton of this in the story.
The bakery would become a gathering place of sorts, because the women of the village would meet there at the appointed times to leave their doughs and pots or to pick up their baked goods.
Was the movie "Moonstruck" based on a book? There's lots of bread as metaphor in that story.
Exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for. Strong work, friends!
Cheers,
Jason
A wonderful book about waking after 100yrs to find yourself in an England transformed by the 20th century into a Socialist Utopia. The bread of the new age tastes of paradise: