Crumpets

I would love a hot buttered crumpet with strawberry jam right now. The delight of a crumpet is the slightly spongy, internal cellular structure. The butter melts into the little cells, like a sponge, producing a delightfully-oozing sensation when you chew it. The strawberry jam is pressed against the palate, intensifying its flavour. Crumpets: their invention (or discovery?) must surely mark one of the high points of global civilisation.



A hot buttered crumpet
(Image by LoopZilla, Wikimedia Commons)

The Paradoxes of Buying Bread in Italy

Even if you find a baker's open on Sunday in Italy, they won't have any bread. They'll have cakes, biscuits, whatever - but no bread. Ditto specialist cake shops (pasticceria, easily mistaken for bakers, especially if you are looking for bread).

Today (Sant'Ambrogio, a holiday in Milan), I found a baker's open and bought some bread, but the shop assistant told another customer that although the shop is open tomorrow (the Feast of the Immaculate Conception), they won't have any bread.

Big supermarkets sometimes have bread on Sundays, but if they've sold out you have to get "friselli", a kind of rock-hard granary bagel that you have to soak in olive oil before it's soft enough to eat.

To infinity... and beyond!

Language ‘makes infinite use of finite media’.

Wilhelm von Humboldt, quoted by Stephen Pinker in The Language Instinct.

Loafers

In Italian, the little crusts of bread you use to wipe the last bit of pasta sauce from your plate are called scarpette – literally “little shoes”.

Flip-flops in Italian are known as ciabatte (”ciabbatas”).

(Flip-flops are also known as infraditte (”between the toes” – ditte in Italian means both fingers and toes), a reference to the litle stalk that you grasp with your toes to stop them sliding off. In Australian English flip-flops are called thongs – similar idea.)

Pan carre and un toast

Buying bread in Italy is a semi-sacred activity, a rite. Italian bread comes in a bewildering variety of shapes and textures, although the staples are of course ciabatta (moccasin-sized and -shaped), panini (rolls) and French-style baguettes. If you go to a small bakery (panificcio) there are hundreds of variations reflecting local, regional and seasonal characteristics. This is even truer when it comes to cakes, which in Italy aspire to the condition of an art form.

There is no real equivalent of the British supermarket sliced loaf. The nearest thing available is called pan carre, which is a tiny sliced loaf of very soft white (never brown or granary) bread used to make ‘un toast’ (pronounced toe-ast). Un toast means a sandwich containing ham and soft cheese cut diagonally and not quite toasted enough to be called a toasted ham and cheese sandwich. Invariably, a bar in Italy always has a solitary ‘toast’ left in the afternoon after the main rush at lunchtime. If you turn up at 1.00 you can get a fat, fresh ciabatta filled with prosciutto (ham), mozzarella and plump sliced tomatoes. Get there at 3.00 and you’ll not only get a derisory look and a forward-thrusting shrug (translated as: why are you eating lunch at 3 o’clock – alone?); you’ll also get un toast with the edges curling up slightly.

Italians buy pan carre to make toast (in the English sense). However, it is invariably unsatisfactory and usually disintegrates inside the toaster (if you have one). Making toast using ciabatta or a baguette produces better results, although the result can be quite tough.

As for a slice of day-old granary bread from Tesco’s popping up out of the toaster, then smothered in butter or margarine and topped off with strawberry jam, forget it...

The cultural significance of toast - part one

Toast is a state of mind more than a type of food. Eating toast evokes a number of associations for British people. You eat toast when you can't be bothered to cook; it's a quick simple way of getting something hot inside you: more solid than soup, less stodgy than a sandwich. The crunchiness and chewiness of toast makes a pleasing contrast; it combines the transient brittleness of the crunch with the durability of the chew. You can put just about anything on toast and it always seems to taste better than on untoasted bread: peanut butter, Marmite, cheese, jam...

Toast is ideally eaten in the morning or late at night. It is a prelude to the day or an epilogue. Toast for lunch or dinner always disappoints; it's not really a meal. As a mid-morning snack or afternoon stopgap toast comes into its own.

Much of the pleasure of toast comes from the anticipation of taking the first bite as the slice of bread lies under the grill or stands inside the toaster. The moment at which the bread becomes toast, but before it turns to charcoal is critical. Slightly burnt and just too hot to hold is the perfect state of a slice of toast. Consumed immediately, preferably heaped up with something gooey it never fails to satisfy - and yet leaves open the possibility of serious eating within a comparatively short time.

Welcome to Reality on Toast

This blog is a sort of suitcase stuffed full of various odds and ends that I have picked up or thought of over time. Some of the material has appeared in older blogs and websites, some has been reworked and some of it is completely new. Enjoy.