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Mary Roblyn's avatar

What a joy to find your essay in my inbox this morning. You are a master at weaving your personal story into a narrative that brings us into a world influenced by the cultural, social, historical, and literary traditions that allow readers to relate through our own lives. We all have some equivalent of melon bread. Mine is “Christmas bread,” fragrant with cardamom and raisins, iced with an almond-extract glaze, a Swedish recipe handed down from my grandmother to my mother to me. I make it for special occasions throughout the year.

I don’t have memories of comic books - they were banned in my household - but a walk with my brothers to a decades-old library, bringing home a stack of books, reading them and returning for more, was a highlight of my Saturdays. I must have been about four or five. We stopped at Jack’s store (a bit seedy, they sold chewing tobacco and low-ABV beer) for penny candy along the way.

About the “Music has charms” misquote: it was a deliberate way for the publishers to sneak in some Shakespeare, with more than one possible reason. It was puritanical - oh, how boys would have been titillated (sorry!) by the word “breast!”; - a sly way to create respectability through literary allusions; and a genuine, widespread, innocent misreading of Shakespeare. Americans did not study his work until high school, if we did at all. “Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast” was, in fact, how I learned the quote.

Thank you again, Jeffrey, for a delightful read. Proust’s madeleine, intentional or not.

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Holly A.J.'s avatar

Oh, this brings back memories...

When I was in West Africa, the staple grains, millet and rice, were, of course, boiled over open fires. But they did have some beehive clay oven bakeries scattered throughout the village, where long thin loaves of imported white flour were baked, but only enough for the day, as the bread became iron hard overnight. If you wanted bread that day, you had to buy it early - by late afternoon, there would be none left. The neighbourhood food sellers offered whole or half loaves spread with a spicy bean sauce, called nebbe, for lunch. It was delicious.

In Athens, the neighbourhood bakeries made a wide variety of loaves. My favorite was identified as artos, which is the ancient Biblical Greek word for bread. Some artos is specially stamped in licensed bakeries for use in the Orthodox Eucharist, but other loaves of artos, baked in large squares and sold in halves or quarters, are for regular consumption. It tastes like a sourdough bread and, if well wrapped to keep the outer crust from drying out, will last for up to a week (although it is so good it is usually finished long before).

On Baffin Island, the Inuit traditional bread is bannock, which is essentially a doughy quickbread that could be baked over an open fire in a pan or even twisted around a stick. Baking with flour is something the Inuit learned from whalers and fur traders, but they have become masters in the art - their homemade doughnuts were second to none.

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