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.

Celluloid Bites (5): When Harry Met Sally

Sit at a table in a French restaurant and, in the clumpiest of un-Gallic accents, order a wine which displeases the chef as an accompaniment to your main, and he will march into the dining room, sommelier in tow, to look you square in the eye and tell you that the restaurant will serve you no such wine with your meal. Or so we have learnt watching that country populated by terribly surly, or terribly charming, people (for there is no middle ground) that so often passes for France in Anglophone, and particularly American, films. I imagine this is a Libertarian’s idea of how far that busybody and interfering matron they call the nanny state can whoop us Europeans into submission: not only are we duped into believing in free universal healthcare and unemployment assistance; we also are happy to be told which wine to drink with our meals. Don’t hold it against me but, entre nous, I would love it if, appropriately subsidised to match my spending power, I was told what wine to drink with every meal I eat at a restaurant. It would save me that tiresome ritual of choosing the second less expensive wine and pretending that I care or know what I am doing when it comes to tasting it.

Not so Sally Albright in When Harry Met Sally, who as a patron of formidable exactitude in her restaurant orders, embodies the American ideal of demanding individuality in several scenes where all manner of ingredients are to be substituted, served on the side, or entirely eliminated, to please her taste buds and dietary requirements. To watch Meg Ryan’s concentrated frown under a panoply of outmoded hairstyles as she peruses a menu that she will shortly blitz until it is barely recognisable, is to witness a transformation that is as entertaining and charming as it is ground breaking. For here we have all the ingredients that traditionally made for the insufferable shrew of male-centred chauvinistic nightmares: the brittle demands and know-it-all self-sufficiency coupled with the frosty and forthright sheen of the waspish hyper-educated woman. This time, however, those same ingredients are expertly handled and turned into comedic gold by Norah Ephron, who not in vain was an excellent cook as well as a very sharp scriptwriter, and thus Sally Albright emerges to honour her surname in every sense of the word: verbally sparring the lackadaisical but zingtastic Harry Burns and managing to hang on to her thought through idiosyncrasies in every frame of the film. So that for the first time we have a romantic heroine who only changes the length of her feathered hair and width of her shoulder pads to signal the passing years for absentminded viewers but does not budge an inch to meet the demands of love or marriage.

Norah Ephron’s script is commendable to a quasi-Aristotelian point: it seems to generate its own perfect brand of romantic comedy, one where laughter and common sense are expertly matched, and where a feminist outlook is effortlessly paired with hetero-normative romance. In When Harry Met Sally, Ephron managed to prove that opposites attract to an extent that goes beyond the purely dramatic to enter the terrain of ideology. I imagine the world it depicts and the narrative it unfolds as a sort of Heaven for straight female overachievers: a place where professional acumen and steely resolve are a clear sine qua non for women but one where women and men make each other laugh and form friendships so valuable that the thought of losing them seems a more frightening prospect than the dreaded spinsterhood of yore. By showing us that a woman finds love when she meets a man who is happy to be her equal, Ephron and Reiner manage to give us one of the first feminist fairy tales on the silver screen. No fairy tale that delivers its moral through a woman faking an orgasm in a crowded Manhattan deli could be otherwise.

If we are lucky, we will also have what Sally is having.

Air tapas

Friends turn crammed and cold spaces into cosy warm nooks. They turn the itch of irritation that you are starting to feel into a tickle that makes you break into laughter. They make you feel like you are walking on air when you are strapped to a corporate chair. In their company you scan an overpriced unappetising menu and find the golden olives, the crunchy oily crisps, the earthy nuts and the Spanish red.

Here’s to health, peace and prosperity for my bright, witty, warm and generous friends in 2016!

Walk away, now

I was in Vilnius recently and having just ordered some food in a “traditional Lithuanian tavern” on Pilies Street I realised that, in a city that is not short of nice cafés and restaurants, I had chosen the equivalent of the King of Paellas in the lowest common denominator most anglo-centric part of the Costa del Sol. Of course, in the large scheme of things, it is no big deal to err in your choice of restaurant: soldier on through the bland, unlovingly and thoughtlessly put together fare, wash your disappointment away with coffee and cake somewhere else and avoid throwing the hissy fit that only a Sunday Times restaurant critic can get away with. No point in pretending that it is not a frustrating experience nonetheless, particularly if, like in my case, you only have one day to make up for your mistake.

For that reason, eaters of the world united, to aid you in your choices when navigating alien lands, I have designed a list of tell-tale signs that should make you turn away on your heels and look for food elsewhere even if suffering from hunger pangs. So by all means avoid:

1. Menus with photographs of the dishes. Actually, make that menus with any photographs.

2. Staff dressed in traditional costume.

3. Dishes translated into more than one language. Ideally avoid menus translated into any language.

4. Cart wheels hung from walls or ceilings. What’s the story with the ubiquitous cart wheel? It should replace whatever is on the UN flag.

5. A separate menu for children/vegetarians.

6. Opening times running continuously from morning until night.

7. A piped medley of folk muzak.

8. A flag by the door.

9. Purposely multilingual staff.

10. Purpose built “rustic” furniture.

11. Punters of more than five nationalities and no natives.

12. A variety show with your dinner.

13. A “traditional” dish that no native has heard of.

14. Three variations of the same main: I.e. Pork chops with rice/mash/vegetables differently but arbitrarily priced.

15. A wine list that itemises wine only by the colour. I.e. Red wine: 10 euro, White wine: 12 euro.

Be aware also that for some reason, the above do not apply to Asian restaurants.