What do you do when your bread goes stale?

1. Grandmother

“Bread is bread,” my grandmother would have said. Stale or fresh: bread is bread. Our Father, give us our daily bread. Let’s break bread. It is their bread and butter. She thinks she is the best thing since bread. He knows which side his bread is buttered on.

This young woman, exhausted and broken at only thirty years of age in her minute unfurnished kitchen never throws bread out. It is a sin. Bread goes fast from under the fingers of hungry children in post war Spain. Two little girls, my mother and one of her sisters, fight over a piece of bread. Tooth and nail.

The fight was so fierce their oldest sister remembers it to this day. “Who won?” I ask. “I cannot remember.” She replies. All she can remember is that they went at it like cats. Four years of age. Five years of age.

Bread could hardly go stale in a house full of fiery hungry girls. If it falls on the floor you pick it up. Bless it. Lightly kiss it. Put it back on the plate. Hastily eat it before it is claimed by anyone else.

Bread going stale is like seeing the tail end of a rainbow after heavy rain. Bread going stale means a piece of lard or a slice of ham; turnips on the roast; a fistful of chestnuts. Bread going stale signals a temporary windfall, a pair of brackets on the long text of hunger. How can bread go stale when there is nothing else to eat but runny lentils or the claw of a chicken thrown into a clear broth of onion and tears?

2. Mother

 I am six, seven, eight years of age and every day my mother sends me to buy a stick of bread after school. It costs twenty-five pesetas; she carefully slides every coin onto the palm of my hand and makes me close it into a fist before I take off. On my way back I eat the top crust skipping over the cracks on the pavement. When I reach my tower block I burrow my fingers in the hole and pull out its fluffy white dough to stuff it in my mouth as the lift goes up to our flat. The fresh smell of bread and the stale smell of bleach mix up as I am taken up to the fourth floor. I push the bread into the cloth bag before giving it to my mother, maimed.

Fresh bread every day and plenty more: jars of Nutella; Marietta biscuits; apples and oranges; soupy rice; boiled ham and cured ham; slices of chorizo; crunchy carrots; Manchego cheese; a glass of flavoured milk; popcorn; chicken wings crisply fried you think nothing of; a fried egg; green beans with boiled potatoes; crisps; a pomegranate deseeded into a bowl.

Yet every morning, my mother brings me a bowl of yesterday’s bread broken into a bowl of warm milk with a sprinkle of sugar. She lets me sit on the edge of her bed in my nightgown and side-by-side, in silence, we eat our bowl of stale bread in warm milk and we listen to her favourite serial on the radio.

3. Daughter

 I am sitting across from a close friend in a fashionable restaurant in Dublin city. We scan the menu before we make our selection. We have commented on the décor being to our taste: just-so hints of modernism in the carefully contrived veneer of its sparseness. The turquoise blue of the velvet banquettes, we sigh. The leather tan on the chairs, say no more. The aluminium industrial frame of the legs of the tables shining over the parquet, she nods. I admire the deep blue tint on the wall before a tall glass partition. She peers beyond the glass to our right, trying to see beyond the railings of a balcony that hovers over the inner courtyard downstairs. I’d like to have an elderflower martini later, I say. Fat chance with all the revellers downstairs crowding the cocktail bar.

The waiter comes to take our order. I hesitate between having the asparagus and prosciutto salad or the Tuscan Panzanella salad for starters, not knowing what the ingredients are in the latter. The waiter tells me that the main ingredient is bread soaked in a tomato sauce and I nod. I will have that.

When the salad arrives we realise that the bread is a version of our “migas”; our “picatostes”: stale bread given a second wind in a marinade of vinegar and tomato. It is the first of three courses for me. I have my elderflower martini at the table at the close of the meal.

A hunger dyad

1. Individual, as hostility to the corporeal self: the body shuts down when the spirit is heightened. In elation, the spirit is like a balloon about to fly away, we try to hold on to it with the tip of our fingers but it will soar leaving the body behind. In sorrow and trouble, it is the maddened kite that is wrenched from our hands, mouth and stomach recede until they are a blackened dot in faraway earth. Nourishment, and by extension, gastronomy are for those at peace. Banal contentment ought to be the first ingredient in a cook’s larder.

2. Communal, as hostility to the other/oppressor: Shakespeare captures it well in The Merchant of Venice when Shylock replies to Bassanio who has suggested he dines with him: “Yes, to smell pork; to eat of the habitation which your prophet the Nazarite conjured the devil into. I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, and so following, but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you.” Note how eating and praying are equated here. To break bread with the oppressor/other is to begin to forsake your identity and weaken your resistance.

An emotional encyclopaedia of food: heartbreak

1. Heartbreak: the pit of the oesophagus contracts to the size of a small weather beaten Roman coin; the head of a blind worm; a slit on dried up muddy earth. Food is an invading army that cannot break through the gates of your fortress. From the top of your tower you watch it advance knowing it will be repelled, your senses cannot be ravaged.

You are how you cook: nouns and verbs

As I explain at the end of this post I sat down to write something else: an inoffensive post about a recipe from my grandmother’s village. That post took an unexpected detour into family history but also Spanish history and politics. I hope you will be able to read the love between the lines, but also the anger. The anger will explain the terrifying photograph of small children doing the fascist salute as they visit their incarcerated Republican fathers in jail in 1939. I find it so upsetting that I almost censored myself. I now realise that news about the possible discovery of the location of Lorca’s unmarked grave have stirred me.

For someone who has spent the last year assiduously thinking and writing about food and its cultural purchase I have very little interest in recipe books. I wonder why this is: I do like books and food as separate items. I don’t have a problem with the aspirational consumption masquerading as creation they embody. The same thing can be said about books about design and, in fact, most coffee table books and I love those. I used to live with a friend who treasured them: they lined the wall of the kitchen we shared. They were as a rule sturdily yet lavishly put together: thick covers, inventive fonts and layout, expensively lit and studiously composed shots. Yet not even once did I cook following their recipes. I suspect my parents and their own disinterest in cookery books may be behind my own.

I think of their approach to cooking and I realise that it reflects their character, their gender, their age. My father, like most men of his generation in Spain, is an occasion cook. He will prepare the roast lamb we invariably eat on Christmas Eve. He makes a fabulously colourful seafood salad filled to the brim with prawns, mussels, crab, and tuna when he wants to fete friends: the salad reflects his largesse. This material generosity is reflective of his character and attitude to life: he is a man of deeds rather than words. Love walks the walk with him. It also goes beyond his individual history and temper: most Spaniards of his generation pile food on their tables out of an anxiety born out of early deprivation. Madridians like my father grew up in a grey city haunted by a Civil War that had barely ended when they were born. Misery and squalor hollowed the stomachs and starved the spirit of its working class. A fried egg was a Sunday treasure; children plucked the leaves of a tree tellingly known as “pan y quesillo” (“bread and cheese”) and stuffed them in their mouths to stave off hunger; a handful of marzipan figurines were the only present received on the day of the Epiphany. These children were used to the smell of fried innards wafting from corner bars; rarely had proper chocolate; were given a bright orange “American cheese” that came in aid packages. So older Spanish men show their prosperity with their well-stocked larders and generously furnished dinner tables.

My mother, by contrast, although never ungenerous, is thrifty and riffs like a Jazz musician in her daily shopping. She leaves the house to buy hake and comes back with keenly priced steak after extracting a solemn promise that she will not be disappointed and a couple of chorizo sausages from the butcher. She brings marvellously unexpected combinations of fruits: a pineapple that bursts in your mouth sweet and sourly, bags of mahogany chestnuts, pomegranates that she patiently deseeds until her fingers are tainted red and wrinkled. How could she have any interest in the tyrannies of recipe books full of unheard of spices and cream? Memory, necessity, and pleasure, dosed measure by measure, inform her cooking. These cannot be found in print anywhere.

When it comes to food, my parents speak a language that is all nouns and verbs. There are no adjectives: they will never subtitle their dishes in brackets. Food hits the stomach and the palate with a forceful thud. Ingredients transition from counter to pan and then on to table with admirable integrity: an honest steak, roughly chopped then freshly grilled vegetables, a piece of fruit that you peel at the table.

Today I sat down to write a recipe from my grandmother’s village: I was going to dissect it and for once give you what most expect from a food blog. Another time. I now live in another country: I am not my grandmother, or even my mother; I am a woman of another time that speaks another language groping in the darkness of food memory and culture. The book that can guide me has not been published.

Appetite for destruction

I must confess I don’t know real hunger. The closest I have come to it was when I went without food for a day and a half when I was in my late teens. As a privileged Westerner, my experience of hunger, if not voluntary, was, by an accident of my own making, my responsibility. It was the product of mismanagement and its effects were so negligible that it has become part of my repertoire of anecdotes. I tell it when I want to illustrate my more improvident wilder years: the years before I learnt a modicum of husbandry. One and a half days of hunger: a pair of closed brackets in a very long text.

Because I don’t know real huger, the closest I have come to suffering through my stomach was losing my appetite. Hunger has no face; the loss of appetite always wears somebody’s mask. If you close your eyes and you think of the times you could not eat, the times when food was an unwelcome visitor in your mouth, you will see a face. You may be in love or you may be heartbroken. Love and heartbreak are next-door neighbours: sit on one’s fence; fall in the other’s garden. The person that made you lose your appetite because their existence was enough to sate you is the only person that will hollow your stomach through grief. Beware of that face, it is only so long you can survive on an empty stomach.

The Hunger

As a teenager in the late eighties I watched my share of American TV series. Then as now, television was largely the monopoly of American culture with the exception of a few locally produced and worthy adaptations of Spanish literary classics and the occasional release of highly theatrical BBC dramas. As a result, thanks to the excellent Hill Street Blues I had to, among other lessons that are only useful to feed the pop culture idiot savant in me, learn to decipher the unknown code underlying the snappy repartee of cops and lawyers battling their respective corners of law enforcement in New York City.

Be careful out there and have a sandwich or something

Watching LA Law I also learnt a few lessons regarding the combination of feathery hair, shoulder pads, tan tights, and clip-on earrings (mainly not to wear them all at the same time) that have served me sartorially for a couple of decades now. Although I must confess that, as a child, I used to consider the un-clipping of the said earrings to take a phone-call the height of sophistication. Again, to my surprise, the judiciary world in LA revolved around a heady palette of pastel colours, far removed from the moral black and whites that one would expect in the presence of justice. I confess I still have not figured out, however, how one plain clothes detective in Miami, namely Sony Crockett in Miami Vice, could own a Ferrari Testarossa without being flagrantly corrupt, nor, more urgently, how he could be in pursuit of criminals, wearing loafers with no socks, without tripping at every move.

Eating dinner in Miami Vice: a risky business wearing an all-white suit

The quality of TV series has exponentially improved since and I will spare you yet another article about the HBO-led renaissance of the last decade. The series I am currently watching, The Good Wife, a thought-provoking crime and legal drama, has dispensed with the inoffensive pastels of LA Law, to emphasise the moral greys that sully the conduct of those involved in the legal and political systems in Chicago. One thing has not changed, though, and that is the alarmingly poor dietary choices of characters in crime and legal dramas. As a teenager, my parents and I mined the “walking and talking” scenes of American series for laughs. Could these people ever stop on their tracks for a minute to have a conversation? And what was that strange tick they had of lifting things (a folder from a desk, a ringing phone from its hook, a jacket from a chair) as they moved along firing one-liners at their equally kinetic adversaries? Most hilarious was the tendency not to eat at all or, when compelled by what must have been pangs of near starvation, to wash a stand-bought hot dog with a coffee as they marched down some skyscraper-lined avenue in pursuit of a greater truth or a bigger lie.

Will and Alicia: will they, won’t they ever have something to eat?

I admire American culture in many ways: its greatest writers, filmmakers, and now TV writers, have produced work that is simultaneously compelling, complex and often a direct challenge to its citizens’ self-perception. There is, however, an aspect of American culture that I instinctively link with the sterility of corporations and the heartlessness of capitalism that manifests itself in the perennial lack of food outlined above. I don’t think this is a conscious motif in American TV writing but when I watch the characters in The Good Wife go hungry from one episode to the next, I realise how poorly I would fit in their milieu: the hunger for power, money, and status that oils the capitalist machine leaves me cold. I am afraid I would always insist on getting lunch and being home for dinner.