Friday Bread Basket 9/13/24
A New Beginning
Hello from the Wordloaf Friday Bread Basket, a weekly roundup of links and items relating to bread, baking, and grain. Yesterday, I sent a second draft of the front matter for Breaducation to my editors, which I wish felt like more of an accomplishment, but as it is approximately 40,000 words too long and I have much work left to do, it barely registers. I know you all appreciate when I write long on narrow bread topics, now to convince my publisher to let me do the same in book form.
A loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter
Back in May, The Animation Obsessive shared a profile of Jim Simon, the groundbreaking animator who created some of the most iconic shorts for children in the 70’s, including Sesame Street’s memorable, I Can Remember (Bread, Milk, Butter). Despite his work’s enduring influence, Simon faced headwinds in his attempt to create a studio in Hollywood focused on the lives of Black children:
Bread, Milk and Butter comes from Sesame Street. It first aired in November 1972, around three years into the show’s run. And it continued to play through the early 2000s. Along the way, it became one of the series’ best-known cartoons.
The short stands out right away. Its story is a naturalistic take on the everyday life of millions of kids. Its scratchy, expressive design blends with a style of animation that’s at once limited and free-form. The look and the jazz-funk soundtrack channel the spirit of the time in a way that few cartoons did. And it centers Black characters who look and act nothing like the stereotypes from old Hollywood cartoons.
Bread, Milk and Butter was one of Jim Simon’s very first films as a director. It was to be the beginning of a much longer, much more complicated journey.
Two great tastes that taste great together
At Eater, Bettina Makalintal wrote about restaurants that are including a dish of olive oil and butter with their bread service, a trend I can get behind:
The selection of breads certainly is good, but it does prompt the question: What to dip them in? Olive oil feels right for focaccia and fine for sourdough, but wrong, for some reason, for rolls. (Is that just me?) Butter would then win out as the best bet, but is that boring, especially when butter has been having even more of a moment than usual? Raf’s skirts the issue by serving both with its bread basket. And while this would not be notable in the slightest if the restaurant had served the two in separate containers, it didn’t — instead, it put the softened butter and the olive oil side by side in the same vessel, like a yin and yang of light gold and dark green.
The effect was that you could get a little of each at the same time. Swiping a knife through the butter necessitated running it through a little olive oil, and though the arrangement would have allowed you to dip some bread into the olive oil alone, if you were careful, why would you be, when the butter was so tantalizingly close and soft? Against the olive oil’s bitterness, the butter — the good Rodolphe Le Meunier stuff — seemed sweeter and grassier. Where the softened butter felt thick and dense, I found myself appreciating the looseness of the olive oil by comparison.
The organisation of mass and tension
At the ever-interesting The Onion Papers, Margaux Vialleron discusses the work of Belgian multi-media artist Francis Alÿs, and relates it to the interaction between humans and dough:
Doughs and skins have similar complexions. It isn’t rare to read adjectives such as homogeneous in both recipe books and advertisements for beauty products, setting the societal standards for either a good dough or a beautiful skin. Both hold chemical properties that make them part of a whole – a skin nature or a kind of dough – and specific factors that make each dough and skin unique. I could give you a piece of my sourdough starter, along with a note detailing my bread routine, and you would go home and set to bake a loaf of bread, and yours would taste different from mine. We could put a group of children in the same room, give them clay, and they would mould different figures and find a way to make them play together – to be individual within a group.
It is a coping mechanism to think that what doesn’t look familiar is either irrelevant or unachievable. That it can’t touch us, either physically or emotionally, yet walking amongst children playing, on their own or with a group, echoing one another in their search to carve a space for themselves in this world, it became obvious that anything we think and do, either escaping or confronting, is adding towards our collective subconscious.
That’s it for this week’s bread basket. Have a peaceful weekend everyone, see you all next week.
—Andrew
Thank you for mentioning The Onion Papers ❤️
Olive oil and butter mixed together? Umm, I don't know. But what I do despise ... chain and sit-down restaurants that try to get cute with honey butter, maple butter, and so forth. Uggggghhh. Just give me a good quality dish of salted butter (and not the rock-hard foil-wrapped rectangular butter that you have to cut into to slather on the factory-produced roll).