Friday Bread Basket 1/21/22

Welcome to the Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket, a weekly roundup of links and items relating to bread, baking, and grain.

Purple Prose

My friend Nicola Miller has written a beautiful love letter to one of the greatest books of all time, Harold and the Purple Crayon, a book that had special significance for her as a young child living in Mexico, far from her English grandparents, and later in England, at a time of personal tumult and transition:

To this day, every double-crust pie I bake must be round. Whenever I bake one, I think of Harold, what it means to be real, and how something becomes real. Living so far away from my grandparents in England meant they existed only in my imagination, much like Harold’s pies did in Mexico. The early years, of which I remembered nothing but about which I came to be told everything, seemed unreal. Must we experience things to be ‘real’, or can they simply exist in our minds? What happens when we manifest them? These questions form the crux of Crockett Johnson’s book.

I love Nicola’s writing, and I can think of no better person to pay tribute to this purple gem of a book.

Harold and The Purple Crayon

"Crockett Johnson shows us that a crayon can create a world.” (Philip Nel)Tales From Topographic Kitchens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Miss Thorne was my first teacher in the UK, and she was American. A flinty cliff of a New Englander, her lon…

Tales From Topographic Kitchens

Meet the Beagels

Perhaps if, like me, you found the new Beatles Get Back film a wonderful document of artistic creation at its finest, but also in-term-in-ab-ly long at times, you might appreciate the brevity of this video of Paul McCartney describing his preferred way of making bagel sandwiches:

Rare Bit

The other day I was searching eBay for bread-related ephemera and stumbled upon a listing for something called “Rare Bread.” It had the odd starting bid amount of $174.55, along with the following succinct description:

Rare Bread.

Bread

It does appear that, yes, this seller is auctioning off a not-particularly-special-looking slice of bread, to which I say: Good for you, bigbi3188.

I put the item on my watchlist, and not surprisingly, it remained unsold after 5 days. The good news is that the item has been relisted, should you want to place a bid on it yourself.  (Though if I were you, I’d ask bigbi3188 for an updated photo of the slice in question, given that it has been for sale since late December.)

Jersey Boy

Eater.com has published another video you’re going to want to see, this time going behind-the-scenes with Razza pizzaiolo Dan Richer:

Even after making thousands of pizza pies, Richer doesn’t call himself an expert. “It’s always a work in progress. It’s not done, it’s not finished, it’s not perfect by any means, and it won’t be until I never show up in this building again.”

A Good Bread Tweet

Are you playing Wordle yet?

That’s it for this week’s bread basket. I hope you all have a peaceful weekend.

—Andrew