Colm O'Regan: Bread and circumstances — and keeping the mould away!
Colm O'Regan: Bread is now ever-present on the shopping list. I don’t know when a slice lasted long enough to go mouldy. Picture: Roger Kenny
Give us this day our hourly bread. I don’t know where the sliced pan is disappearing to these days. Well, I do. It’s The Two. They’ve turned into bread mills. In the sense that they are milling into the bread.
On weekend mornings, getting up by themselves, making their own toast. It’s cute until you see how they dug into the butter like they were mining it for rare earth metals.
Bread is now ever-present on the shopping list. I don’t know when a slice lasted long enough to go mouldy.
Only a slice that actively tries to escape behind the glacé cherries or other seasonal goods might make for enough days to acquire a bit of Rhizopus stolonifer — to give bread mould its more scientific and far cooler name.
I think I’ll name the villain in my non-existent sci-fi novel set on an asteroid, Stolonifer Rhizopus.
Before children, we briefly went through the ‘blame bread’ phase whereby it was bread, not beer and cake, that caused soft centres. “Yeah we barely even EAT bread now,” I’d say to someone who was bored. “It’s almost a delicacy here. If I have to, it's an ancient grain one.”
This was rarely true. There was bread. But we often struggled to keep old Mr Rhizopus from the door.
The bread of choice at the moment is the Brennans Be Good model. I am not promoting the product although part of me wishes I had been in the running for the job of Old Mr Brennan in the ads.
A voiceover gig that would effectively ‘see you out’. It was given to proper actor and voiceover Owen Roe ( and a rake of stuff) a few years ago. It used to be a fella called Bill Golding since 1382.
The choice of bread is dictated by The Two. They sense when you try to pull the wool over their eyes and for now the little emperors’ favours rest with new Old Mr Brennan.
They are also partial to Best Of Both sliced pans (and their Laldi and Tesco equivalents). I have to admit my scepticism about a sliced pan which is a mixture of brown and white.
It looks like a White Sliced Pan that is just back from its holidays somewhere sunny but I’m happy to believe the science if the wrappers says it’s the best of both or ‘Two Good’. I presume if brown bread is supposed to be healthier than white bread, then what white bread is bringing to the table is ‘tastes good with a hangover’.
It’s a return to basics for me. Growing up it was all about the bread. It was a snack and sustenance. “If you’re hungry can’t you eat bread,” said my mother like a realistic Marie Antoinette.
But I didn’t always do that. For a few years in primary school, I disliked my cheese sandwiches. I could swap some of them with another boy who had mainly Mikado biscuits for his lunch. He wound up a foot taller than me. But he couldn’t absorb all my cheese sandwich surplus so there were soon generations of sandwiches moulding in the bag, leading to a large ergot sum.
Bread consumption would still pale with the Middle Ages though. They didn’t have chips and lasagne then, so bread was often the staple. Up two pounds a day. More than a full sliced pan. Bread was the centre of food then.
It caused religious strife all through the Middle Ages as people argued over what bread should be Holy Communion. If you ate rye bread with the fungus Claviceps Purpurea on it, you caught St Anthony’s Fire, a disease which caused hallucinations, boils, your limbs to fall off, and death.
So by comparison, a few spots of Rhizopus stolonifer are okay. If I ever see it again.
