Bread and butter

"Perhaps the most beautiful and uncomplicated thing you can put into your face." Joy the Baker

During the night I did not feel that well. My digestive system was protesting about something I had eaten - maybe the last of the leftover soup I had for lunch - who knows - other than to note that David did not suffer, so it must have been something that I alone ate. There were no explosive exits from

either end of the digestive tract, although I did wonder whether I might be sick. The middle section however, protested with much rumbling and gurgling. The weirdest thing was the blocked nose. Overall I just felt 'bad all over' as the Alka Seltzer little man used to say and I hadn't even touched a drop of alcohol.

However, eventually I went to sleep and today I feel much better, although not really in the mood for very exotic foods. So what to eat for lunch?

And here I retreated to childhood in a sense, because I retrieved one of my supermarket damper-style rolls from the freezer - how very ordinary can you get? and when it had defrosted I slathered butter all over and topped it with basic cheese - Coles' Finest ash brie - a very mild and creamy brie on one half and Cracker Barrel cheddar on the other. All so basic, primeval even, but all that I could face at the time. And it was just what I needed - or felt that I needed. Simultaneously supremely bland - even with respect to colour - and supremely delicious and comforting.

In his memoir Toast, Nigel Slater describes his mother buttering a plain loaf of bread:

"The vigour with which she slathers soft yellow fat on to thinly sliced white pap is as near as she gets to the pleasure that is cooking for someone you love."

Which made me think this might be why I derive such pleasure from white bread and butter, for we too would return from school to find a plate of white bread and butter waiting for us to scoff down. We were home, mum was there to greet us and all was well with the world. Sometimes there was jam too but more often than not it was just bread and butter.

And here I shall digress slightly to remark that when I was looking for pictures to illustrate this post, there were very, very few of fairly ordinary bread and butter. The bread was almost always sourdough or some such - as here - or it was actually toasted. So much toast and so many toasties. Simple bread and butter - not a lot - and yet as you see here, it can make a beautiful picture.

The British do like butter on their bread, and nothing illustrates this better or more charmingly than A.A. Milne's The KIng's Breakfast, in which the court is thrown into turmoil because there is no butter for the KIng's breakfast. Marmalade just wouldn't do. Which is a bit how I felt when looking for delectable pictures of just bread and butter.

And there has to be lots of butter. For me anyway -as Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon says - it has to be "applied generously enough to leave bite marks when you nibble on it.". I shall also note here, that the French and Italians - probably others too - do not generally add butter to their bread - at least not at mealtimes, where slices of baguette are provided to wipe up the juices and sauces left on the plate. Cheese is either eaten in small pieces on their own or placed on a small piece of plain bread. No butter. I vaguely remember my Australian daughter-in-law remarking once that it seemed to only be the British who put butter on their bread when they have cheese. I sort of see the point - two different milk sourced flavours at the same time, with one potentially drowning out the other. But for me and most of the British it's pretty essential.

These days restaurants always give you some bread and butter whilst you are waiting for your meal. On Tuesday we dined at Paris Go to celebrate birthdays. Their bread is absolutely delicious, and their service is just right leisurely. And so whilst we waited the bread was consumed, particularly by my two sons, and so we ordered two more refreshes of the bread. Not for free of course. Canny. And the other thing about restaurants and their bread and butter is that generally speaking there is not a lot of butter, although in the posher restaurants - like the one on the left shown here it is often stylishly presented, of high quality and often flavoured.

The British are not alone in liking butter on their bread of course. All around the world that, or oil I suppose, is often brushed on to the flat breads of the world. Of which there are thousands. As here with the ghee - clarified butter, being brushed on to Indian naan.

But let's go back to my lunch today and my childhood plate of bread and butter and the health ramifications thereof. Yes I know - butter - pure fat - and bread - plain stodgy carbohydrate. To which I added yet more fat in the form of cheese. Cholesterol and just filler. Well yes, but as my grandmother used to say "a little of what you fancy does you good" or a little more grandly:

"Rarely in life do we give ourselves that kind of permission, to eat with gratitude instead of apology." Mary Elizabeth Williams/Salon

And today's lunch was more than just physical nourishment it was restorative and massively comforting.

Besides "Fat is also necessary for brain function and mood" says Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon, quoting research. And bread has more in it than stodge, there are minerals and grains - well highly modified grains I will admit in my white roll but still. And it is just one of the things I am eating today. For dinner there will be pastry topped with vegetables, including the current superfood - chickpeas - and more cheese. With a side of a green salad.

Enough of such sentimentalism. For the foodies - is there anything you can do with bread and butter other than just eat it and without adding other things? Well almost not. After all, even I added cheese.

At the simplest level we have croutons and breadcrumbs - not to be sneezed at as they lift the quality of soup, salad, pasta - all manner of things.

However, there are also often additions of herbs, garlic, spices ... Particularly to the butter:

"The soft, almost cake-like crumb of soda bread is especially good toasted and worth making a special butter for," Nigel Slater

On the right his shrimp and dill butter - a very fancy butter, and on the left three other flavoured butters.

The simplest and the most popular - and common - of these options is garlic bread of course - sliced bread sandwiched with lashings of butter mixed with garlic and herbs - covered with foil and baked in the oven. Make some of that at a barbecue and it will be devoured in no time at all.

What about sandwiches? Well these too, picture-wise were mostly of complicated and many layered sandwiches - or toasted ones, but then I was reminded by Felicity Cloake in The Guardian Newsletter, who directed me to a brief article by David Tanis on that most simple of sandwiches - the ham baguette:

"If, for instance, you happen to be in Paris, you can still walk into nearly any bar and get a simple ham sandwich on a fresh baguette, and it will somehow be just right. Fresh bread, good butter, good ham. That’s it." David Tanis

Indeed you can. In fact I can remember on one of our trips to France, which began at the tgv station at Charles de Gaulle airport, looking for something to eat in the station snack bar and finding just that. Perfection - what a way to begin a holiday in France. A new world. A new culture. A new way of preparing food. Class.

So here's to bread and butter - one of the first foods of man - the bread anyway - maybe the butter came a little later, and its power to revive when you are feeling less than 100%

"In a world increasingly moving towards the complex and the elaborate, the bread and butter duo is a reminder that sometimes, the most straightforward things can bring us the most pleasure." Mary Elizabeth Williams/Salon   

YEARS GONE BY

March 27

2024 - M'jadrah - the smell of onions

2023 - Sage and onion

2022 - Hasselbacking - variations on a theme

2021 - Some more weekend oddments

2020 - Deleted

2019 - Nothing

2018 - Rosella - you learn something every day

2017 - Nothing