Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [116]
BREAD AND HISTORY
Bread is normally the only food that is kept on the table throughout the meal. The word is almost synonymous with food and, by extension, life.
The English “lord” comes from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning “keeper of the bread” and “lady” from the word for “kneader of the dough.” “Bread” is also an equivalent for that other indispensable commodity money. “Dough” and “bread” are common words used for money in America, and the French use blé—“wheat.”
In ancient Rome, following some hard times, grain was price-supported, and later it was distributed free—in Julius Caesar’s time to 150,000 adult males. Eventually this became free bread rather than grain, and also pork fat and even wine. Grain came to Rome from Egypt, Sicily, and North Africa, carried in ships to the port of Ostia and then in barges up the Tiber to Rome.
Although in ancient Greece there were more than seventy varieties that were baked, by the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, good bread was expensive, and by the time of the French Revolution, the price of bread was almost ninety percent of an average worker’s daily wage.
LA COUPOLE
La Coupole opened in Paris in December, 1927, with twelve hundred bottles of Mumm’s champagne. Its twenty-four interior pillars were decorated by local artists. Transformed from a wood and coal store, the restaurant was open from breakfast until after midnight and became the place to be seen. As was said between the two world wars, “Governments are made at Lipp, but they fall at La Coupole.”
Not to mention liaisons. Louis Aragon, a founder of surrealism in literature, who had had a long love affair with Nancy Cunard, met Russian novelist Elsa Triolet at the bar soon after La Coupole opened. She was attracted to him immediately and pursued him so directly that at first he thought she was a police spy. They married within the year. He later wrote, “My life can be summed up in one word, ‘Elsa.’”
FOODS OF INDIA
The Indian continent, with over a billion people and 150 languages and dialects, inevitably also has a vast diversity of foods, which vary according to the region. In the north, where the temperatures go from sweltering in summer to very cold in winter, meals are heavier and richer, while in the south, where it is almost always hot, less meat is eaten because it is too heavy for daily consumption. Availability of ingredients makes a difference, too, with coastal regions relying more on fish and arid inland areas consuming more lentils for protein. Rice is eaten all over India, but especially in the south, where it appears virtually at every meal.
In addition, there are religious differences in diet between the Muslim minority, whose Koran prohibits alcohol, and the Hindus, who don’t eat beef because the cow is considered sacred. Among the Hindus, there is also a division between the diet of the higher and the lower castes. The higher castes, including the Brahmins, often are vegetarians and tend to choose their foods to enhance both their spirituality and their health, with the focus on vegetables and fruits. The lower—and poorer—classes have traditionally eaten anything except beef.
Most Indian food eaten outside the country reflects northern Indian cuisine, such as tandoori dishes from the Punjab, in which meats are marinated in spices and then roasted over a wood fire, along with the regional wheat bread called naan, which is an unleavened flat bread, as are all Indian breads, including papadums, made of lentil flour into a tortilla-like bread