Night of the Living Bread

There is nothing quite like the process of making bread to get that deep dirt out from your fingernails.

I say that from my own endeavours at home baking rather than discovering something sinister in my sandwich bought from Greggs or similar establishments.

I am really mad about bread. Not the making of it but the eating of it.

This is in spite of all of the speculation in the media about unhealthy diets with, invariably, bread now featured on the "to avoid" list for persons of my age and physical characteristics.

It is a staple of life and has been for millenia and yet the persecution of bread is now well founded, following on from a similar witch-hunt for potatoes, chocolate, coffee and all of the pleasureable foodstuffs in our lives.

I have fond feelings for bread at key stages in my life.

As a small child it was the comfort and bulk of Marmite sandwiches in a nursery tea.

Later it would be the veritable sophistication of toasties in the new fangled Breville before a return to, after a boozy night out as an early twenties something, plain toast and more Marmite.

In my student years I could easily survive a whole day on a French baguette. I did once just sit in the doorway of a vacant shop in the city centre where I was studying and settled in to tackle a full sized baguette. It seemed a perfectly normal thing to do but a few passers-by made a point of making sympathetic faces before leaving small piles of low denomination coins on the raised step at my feet.

In my first paid job I could really appreciate having enough cash to pay for a filling for a baguette transforming it into a metre-long sandwich. I usually ate two of them to keep me going in a busy working day.

As a father of three children the value of bread and bread based products really came to the fore. Bread was to the under fives both filling and entertaining. The breakfast toast could be printed using plastic moulds into all manner of cartoon characters. A thinly cut and lightly toasted finger of bread is the ideal format for a soldier for a dippy egg.

There is something magic about a slice of french toast saturated with the best tomato sauce after all of the Heinz beans have been eaten. Packed lunches for school breaktime are nothing without a hastily prepared sandwich with popular fillings of tuna, meat paste, peanut butter and of course, Marmite.

Teatime and more toppings for bread, a particular favourite being grilled cheese or sardines.

There is a natural progression in a family to make their own bread. In the days prior to the availability of budget range automatic bread machines it was a very involved process to assemble the ingredients and manually work them into a dough. Children find it fascinating to see the dough prove in a bowl under the best tea towel and that warm yeasty odour has become to our youngsters a firm recollection of their junior years at home. The final product was always disappointing either failing to rise or cook all of the way through but nevertheless devoured with pride and a great sense of achievement.

Our first electric bread maker produced faultless loaves and rolls but at the cost of an educational and fun exercise for those involved.

I now have to accept, in my sixth decade, that I will have to review my bread intake on health grounds. I find that sad given the importance that it has been through my own life.

I may have to go all clandestine in my consumption. That should be easy enough. It just trying to explain my sudden accumulation of small denomination coins that may be more difficult.