Bread of heaven

When I was 16 I went to the United States on a scholarship for a year (AFS).  One of the things I remember very clearly from that visit (1965/6) was that the bread looked amazing but tasted horrible.  (Hollywood had changed everything... looks more important than substance).  

Coming from a part of north London where Rumbolds Bakery was a world-class phenomenon, but where there were also many wonderful Jewish bakeries, I had taken it for granted that bread was just wonderful - to see, smell, touch and eat.  Bread like that, of that quality, seems to have disappeared now, in England, France, Spain, Denmark, and Sardinia….  

The bread in Sardinia is particularly disappointing. The one highlight is the widespread availability of a kind of crisp wafer-bread called Carasau, which is made from leavened wheat, rolled flat, baked till it puffs up into a sort of pillow, and then split into two halves and rebaked.  Like all the other breads we’ve tried, it’s pretty tasteless but has the merit of having this interesting production technique. The others - well....... 

There’s a big movement in labelling and packaging to promote artisan foods - breads, honey, cheeses, etc. - but the bread certainly lacks something. (I can see my children or grandchildren rolling their eyes and saying “She’s always going on about how things were better in the old days…”, but truth is, they were).   I think it must be down to the sort of wheat which everyone is using.  I am not a chemist but maybe the modern strains have more gluten so they rise more easily/quickly.  The old bread probably took longer and developed richer flavours.   By the way, I was told as a child that Mr Rumbold ran his remarkable chain of bread shops because he’d been a prisoner-of-war in Burma, enslaved by the Japanese and working, I think, on that infamous railway. He prayed to God and promised that if he survived he would devote his life to doing what he could as a good person, and that was baking. His bread was utterly superb.  Modern production and supply just cannot match it. 

We have the same disappointments about the fruits and vegetables… Even here, in this rich land of farms and sunshine, the supermarkets are stacked with stuff which looks ok but tastes of nothing. Tomatoes are really naff. We brought a very few with us from our allotment, which we ate in the first few days here, and they were divine, a shocking contrast.

My nagging disappointment about this trip is crystallised by discovering that the places which have (quite reasonably) turned to tourism for their fortunes, are all rather like this bread… looking ok but unsatisfying. They lack something. The heat has gone out of the old world's economies, production, knowledge... it's all mass-market, designed and made by machines or something. Oh dear.  

Our accommodation here was labelled as Tortoli but is actually in Arbatax, which is a much more interesting place - a working port and shipyard. At the far end of the road is a wide open space giving fantastic views of the most spectacular red rocks and other geology… 

    

     

The bay opens out to the north, cliffs have been quarried, the variety of rock colours is amazing… coppered green, bright red, glinting grey granites, all squeezed together. You can walk for quite a long way around the beaches to see it all.  A mile or so away the main drag of Tortoli seems to be a normal sort of modern place, shops, families, alleyways, cafes.