The Miracle of Bread
Lynne Chatterton
Writing from Umbria, Lynne Chatterton reflects on bread in rural Australia and asks if it was as bad as some claim. If you have your own reflections on bread in rural Australia or in rural areas around the world send them to Lynne blchatterton@tiscalinet.it or to Lynn lynn.martin@Adelaide.edu.au.
How things change. I recently read in The Weekend Australian that "to city dwellers the bush [that is, Mildura] was a gastronomic wasteland where even a decent loaf of bread could seem like a miracle." This was, of course, prior to the emergence of the Grand Hotel and Stefano di Piero. And there’s no denying that Stefano and other great cooks have brought a new epoch to food not only in Mildura but also to those city dwellers who suffered when they went "into the bush."
But was it really like that? Prior to city dwellers coming to teach the locals a thing or two, was a decent loaf of bread like a miracle? Downstream, on the South Australian side of the border, there exists a gaggle of towns very similar to Mildura. They were created to cater for War Service Settlers (in those days nearly all white and Anglo Saxon), and were gradually ethnically enhanced by Greek and Italian fruit pickers, who stayed on and set up as growers or established businesses. These towns are now heavily reliant on tourism and the influx of people during the summer.
I was born in one of these small river towns and I remember well that from the time I started school until well into my teenage, bread was an important part of my day. My mother would give me sixpence to buy a high-top loaf from the bakery each day on my way home for lunch.
In our town, like all the other towns nearby, there was a bakery where bread was made and baked in batches from midnight to midday every day except Sunday. I would go into the warm, yeasty bakery where the men were cleaning the bowls and basins and hand over my sixpence to the white-hatted baker who would take the large wooden paddle that stood ready and open the oven to draw forth a warm, steaming loaf just for me. With his floury hands he would wrap the large crusty loaf in a loose leaf of tissue paper and I would tuck it under my arm and head for home. Not only do I remember the smell and shape of this bread, but I also remember the constant ticking off I got when my mother discovered that I had picked the centre out of the loaf on the way home–just too tempting to resist. If the warm loaf did arrive unmolested, the first thing to do was to cut a slice, slather it with the deep yellow salty butter we often made at home, ginger it up with a slather of Vegemite and bite deeply and satisfyingly.
It was thirty years later that sliced bread arrived in the Riverland. It didn’t take long for the novelty of the sliced bread to replace the real bread and the bakery and its neighbors disappeared. Some regained custom by going in for fancy cakes, buns and biscuits, but bread was no longer the backbone of the shop and eventually bread no longer tasted like bread. Strangely enough the rush to welcome and adopt sliced bread was in response to the influence of the city dwellers who adopted it first, proudly announced their progressive action, and then convinced country dwellers that it was the way to go.
Industrialised food was developed to make profits from large city populations, that is, city customers who wanted to spend less time in the kitchen and more time to do what . . . who knows . . . certainly not to cook.
We poor devils in the country found ourselves in a gastronomic desert because of the rush of the city dweller to grab with both hands the packets, tins, and wind and water trash that promised so much efficiency, so much economy, so much sophistication and that now makes up so much of our diet.
We were not blameless. We grouped together to drive our cars to cities to buy this marvelous "cheap" food from the newly emerging supermarkets, and this put pressure on our local shops to either provide the same products or put up prices or get out. Most turned themselves into mini supermarkets and became part of the great food chains that have almost killed home-cooked food and may yet kill us. Bread might have been one of the first victims of this relentless march, but it is not the only one.
The irony of it all is that real bread is now making a comeback, but not as the simple, cheap bread we once knew. Now it is surrounded with mystique. Chefs earnestly explain to us how we must do this, do that, don’t do the other, check temperatures, use recherché equipment if we want to make bread at home. We read their exhortations, note their winks and nods, sigh the sigh of the exhausted and go out and pay exorbitant prices for someone else’s "real" bread. Or guiltily slip our sliced supermarket product into the toaster and tell ourselves that at least it is "wholemeal" or "four cereal"–it must be good for us. Or, worse, throw a few packets into a magic "breadmaker" and fool ourselves it’s better than the fluff we buy at Woolworths or Foodland.
Since I’ve lived in the bush in Italy I’ve had to rediscover how to make bread at home. We live too far away from the nearest shop to go each day for fresh bread. In any case, Italian bakery bread has a very hard crust, often has no salt (in Umbria this is the case) and does not keep well. Yet Italian food demands fresh bread daily. Ask Italians to eat at your house and forget to put several loaves on the table and, while they are too polite to say so, you just know that you have blundered. Put out a couple of home made loaves and they are ecstatic.
I spent our first two years here grappling with recipe-book versions of bread. One day I said to myself, hell, peasant women have made bread for centuries without fancy utensils or controlled heat or hard kneading; if they can, I can. I put the books away, took flour, yeast, salt, water and oil, mixed them all up in a bowl until they felt right, let the dough rise, knocked it down, shaped it up, put it in a corner to rise again and cooked it. In summer I take advantage of modern technology by using an electric oven. In winter I revert to peasant methods and use the woodburning stove with its capricious oven; either way, the result is good fresh bread that I make once a week. Brian tends to pick the middle out of the freshly made loaf these days, but I still revel in the first warm slice, but spread with olive oil and a slather of Vegemite or honey.
Old habits die hard. My bread is much cheaper than any I can buy at the supermarket; it tastes better and it stays fresh for as long as I need it to. I hardly notice the time it takes me to make it. And I’m proud that I’ve rebelled against the gastronomic desert that city dwellers have made of the bush.
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