Bread

Peter Hitchens:

I once took bread for granted, and thought it dull. The bread of my childhood was plain stuff, smeared with a little butter or (I suspect) margarine and given to us to fill us up. ....

At school our morning break saw the distribution of “doorsteps,” thick white slabs designed to keep us going through a tough morning of learning the dates of battles and kings, the principal products of the empire, or Latin. Occasionally bread would turn up toasted (a luxury) or spread with beef dripping, a delight which has now almost completely disappeared from English life. At breakfast we often ate fried bread, now regarded as little better than poison but the perfect accompaniment for fried eggs and bacon. ....

Years afterwards came my first visits to France, and my introduction to its wholly different bread, which crackled as you broke it and had been perfectly designed to be eaten with the sort of cheese which moves of its own accord, or with the red wine which is of course the ultimate accompaniment for bread, for reasons which took years to dawn on me. I had never really understood the expression “break bread” before I broke a loaf in Paris. ....

No wonder that Christendom’s greatest prayer is a petition for bread. No wonder that the central ceremony of that religion is (whatever you believe takes place at it) constructed around bread, and of course wine. Only water, at the heart of Baptism, is more powerful as a symbol and fact of abundant life. I have myself always liked the 1662 Prayer Book’s stipulation about the loaf used at the Lord’s Supper: “It shall suffice that the Bread be such as is usual to be eaten; but the best and purest Wheat Bread that may conveniently be gotten.” ....

Peter Hitchens, "Irregular White Disks," The Lamp, Nov. 15, 2022.