Bread

Each year, the family gathers at our house for Thanksgiving. For the past 15 years, part of the weekend activities has been a wine tasting on Friday and with the arrival of Grandchildren -- now seven -- we integrated a Juice tasting into that event as well, with the children giving their reviews and tasting notes on the various juices. This year they will taste and comment on Mango, Pineapple, Banana Nectar, Passion Fruit and V-8 Fusion Tropical Orange while the adults compare the qualities of five Pinot Gris from five countries.

With the Wine and Juice Tasting, we also feature three cheeses and three breads. This year, the cheeses will be Fromage d'Affinois, Morbier and a Chevre with raspberries while the breads will be a Russian Black Bread, an Italian Tomato and Basil, and a San Francisco Sourdough.

I do a little write-up of each of the wines, juices, cheeses and bread each year and this year, in my research, was stopped by a note about Sourdough Bread. Sourdough has been around since around 1500BC -- 3,500 years. It was the first agent for leavening bread and remained the only leavening agent for 3,000 years, until the Europeans began using the fermenting foam from beer -- called Barm -- as an additional leavening.

Today, many of us in the US take bread for granted; there are so many choices in the supermarkets -- soft, organic whole grain, rustic, rolls, buns, bagels, high fibre, seeded, unseeded. And yet, for centuries Bread has been a basic substance of living.

Bread is so woven into our existence that it is the subject of many quotes:

• He who has no bread has no authority -- Turkish Proverb


• Give us this day, our daily bread - The Bible


• Man shall not live by bread alone - The Bible


• Cast thy bread upon the waters - The Bible


• Acorns were good until bread was found -- Francis Bacon


• The greatest thing since sliced bread -- anonymous


• Anytime a person goes into a delicatessen and orders a pastrami on white bread, somewhere a Jew dies -- Milton Berle, comedian


• A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government. -- Thomas Jefferson

While bread has been a basic necessity of life, it has also become the source of slang -- bread to many means "money". "Dough" likewise means money. Or other euphemisms: "Breadwinner," "Putting bread on the table," "Breadbasket," "Bigger than a breadbox."

Bread has probably been a part of human living since Neolithic times. And for most of those 12,000 years, it was a central concern of every day. In our world of iPods and gigabytes, bread is no less important, but amongst all the technology, it has faded far into the background of our lives -- until you have a really good, fresh piece of it. And then your DNA does a little dance of joy.

You know that Pepperidge Farm Bread? It is fancy. That stuff is wrapped twice. You open it and it still ain't open. That's why I don't buy it; I don't need another step between me and toast.

~ Mitch Hedberg, comedian