Bread and Salt
Bread from local bakery, Girona
One week into our stay in Girona (a small town about an hour north of Barcelona in Catalonia in Spain) and I have two overwhelming impressions of the food.
First, wonderful bread is everywhere, better than I remember from Barcelona a couple of years ago. Within about three blocks of our apartment are half a dozen bakeries, each belonging to a small chain with three or four outlets. The bread, mainly round loaves like the one shown, or long ones, is quite wonderful.
Second, salt is so important for the flavor of the food: for the charcuterie, for the olives, for the anchovies. Coming from Mexico, where different chiles carry much of the flavor, where drying is a common way of preserving, where the Spanish salt meat kitchen really didn’t make it, I can’t help but be struck by the omnipresence of salt as preservative and flavorer.
Bread and salt seem like good places to start, the ancient symbols of hospitality. The salt goes way back. The bread–well, yes. But the peasants can’t have been eating white bread. And the good citizens can’t have been eating peasant bread. I suspect the present bread culture to be recent.
Bread culture can be quite complicated. In the UK, accounts of the diet of the poor in the 19th century are full of accounts of the rejection of brown bread by the poor: From one of the poor commissions;
“What is the usual diet ?—To breakfast, tea or coffee, occasionally milk ; dinner, potatoes, and a little bacon, or other fat; supper, same as breakfast, or perhaps potatoes; bread to breakfast and supper, generally without butter. The bread is now commonly made in cakes from good second or fine wheat flour, and always made at home, but sometimes baked at a common oven. Brown bread, made from meslin, was formerly the common bread of the poor, as well as of farmers and their servants ; it still remains to be used commonly by the latter; but the poor prefer white bread, and are of opinion that it is cheaper; brown bread, therefore, is now gradually disappearing ; rye and barley bread are now unknown, though in scarce seasons 30 years ago in use; cakes made from bean-meal, once used, are now unknown.”
In the above comments there is a nice distiction between the diets of the ‘poor’ and that of farm servants.
In the North it appears that a lot of people switched from a non-wheat diet (oatcakes in various forms for instance) to white bread, without ever really taking up the consumption of brown bread. I guess that part of this was due to the importation of relatively cheap wheat into the UK at a relatively early date.
Hi Adam, agreed, the bread question is complicated and it would be important to know when in the nineteenth century this poor commission was. The rural poor almost always ate worse than the urban poor. Both preferred white bread and for good reasons, I think. And I also have the impression, as you say, that the UK changed to a wheat diet earlier than other places. My suspicion is that millet was the grain of the country in this part of Spain but I need to check.
In any case, I doubt that the wealthy wanted what is now revered as the crusty peasant loaf. Soft bread was what the elites wanted until it became readily available.
I’ve always suspected that a large part of the attraction of white flour/bread in past times was the fact that it’s easier to spot insects and other debris in it?
It’s certainly an important part of the appeal.