Jam Sandwich confessional

Hi, my name is Crit, and I have a problem with bread. It’s true. Fresh, thickly sliced white bread is like a drug to me, I can easily eat a whole loaf without really trying. I’ll just keep cramming it in and chewing mechanically, reaching for more before the last piece is in my mouth. It’s kind of terrifying. I remember reading Heidi, as a smallish child, and the section where she goes to the big city and they have white bread rolls with dinner, and she stashes them to take home to the mountain? I identified with that.

I grew up on sensible wholegrain, seedy bread. I quite liked it, but I craved the fluffy white bread that other kids had. One of my memories associated with school is of being allowed, occasionally, to order my lunch from the canteen. My lunch of choice then would be a Devon (baloney for you US readers) sandwich, on white bread, with tomato sauce. It was the bread I wanted. Bread was used as a class divider “people like us” didn’t eat white bread. (It’s OK if you want to kill me now, I’m used to it. I got a lot of that.)

When I was older, I read ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ by Solzhenitsyn, where bread features prominently. Not the fluffy white bread that I craved, but a solid rye, that I learned to love as a university student in the 80s and 90s. Shukhov can weigh his bread in his hand and thinks he knows if it is underweight or not. How he knows (when it is always underweight, and therefore he hasn’t anything to gauge it by) is anyone’s guess. Bread as currency. Bread as the staff of life. Bread and circuses….

I don’t let myself buy the kind of bread I crave very often, because I know what will happen. I’ll start out strong. Touching it reverently in the shop, carrying it carefully to the checkout and then to the car. Trying to pretend everything is fine. I can’t resist it for long though, and once I’ve started eating it, I’m pretty well lost. Lost in the sensory pleasure of the carbohydrate: cutting it: spreading the butter; scooping the jam with a spoon to avoid crumbs and butter blobs in the jar. Then eating it. I think, not based on anything scientific, that bread isn’t very good for me. Anything that makes me want to eat it until I explode isn’t good.

My grandparents were all born in this country. My paternal grandfather, who I never met, was born in 1903, and died in 1966 from stomach cancer. My father was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2005 (I think there’s a hint there). My paternal grandmother once told me, of her husband, that he never ate both butter and jam on the same slice of bread. Having experienced both great wars, he was a man of frugality, so the idea of having a piece of bread with two toppings was excessive, and perhaps wasteful. He was, by all accounts a fairly harsh, severe and critical man.

My preferred jam is probably raspberry, though I’m also very partial to quince jelly. Jellies are a much more labour intensive process than jams. When you’re making jam, you just bung all your fruit in a pot, add the sugar, and boil the crap out of it. Jelly requires straining, and that’s a total pan. My maternal grandmother used to make jam. We would go berry picking and bring our buckets home to her hot hot house, where we’d stand over the stove stirring pots of spitting lava-hot jam. I remember she would put marbles in the bottom of the pot to stop the jam from sticking, which was fine until the time she used a clear marble with a yellow streak in the orange marmalade. It escaped detection in the bottling process and ended up on my grandfather’s toast one morning. Her raspberry jam was divine though. Jim talked about preserving as the best method to keep the flavour of delicate berries alive, and I have to agree. They don’t travel or even just keep well past a few days, so jam it is.

Tonight I ate at least three slices of good bread. With butter. And jam.

Crit

I’m a mother of two boys. I work selling organic produce to gullible locals, and in my spare time I run as far as I can. Oh, and I live in Australia, married to a US citizen.