Reading about Jackie’s peanut butter and jelly sandwiches set me thinking about bread. I rarely buy loaves, sliced or unsliced, and never, ever, buy sliced white bread! I use sliced bread in sandwiches, such as salmon and cucumber, but it’s always brown or wholemeal. I was once told by a house decorator that they use sliced white bread to fill cracks in plasterwork. If you squeeze it between your fingers, he said, you quickly turn it into a clay-like putty, rather like plasticene. When it dries in the crack, it hardens. Well, for walls, maybe, but not for me.
I usually eat filled rolls rather than sandwiches, again choosing wholemeal (for everything except hot dogs). When I’m offered bread in a restaurant I usually pass it up unless the food needs it. Then I notice that I usually pick bread with things in it, like olives, sun-dried tomatoes, or walnuts. My white bread seems to be mostly croissants (which in Britain are usually too bready compared with French ones). And there’s Italian bread like ciabatta. For many years I had an intolerance of wheat gluten and acquired a taste for substitutes, including rye bread used in Danish open sandwiches. Mostly it meant I simply got out of the habit of eating bread, and even though I can now eat it, I don’t eat much of it.
The sliced white, ‘plastic’ bread affection is purely one left over from childhood. I get through bread so slowly that I keep my loaves in the freezer, and my one big headache is trying to figure out what the American term for ‘wholemeal’ is. Wholemeal has such a dry, crumb-y texture, one that I cannot find replicated on US store shelves or in bakeries. So I do the best I can, buying wholegrain loaves with as much fibre per serving as possible, enhanced with things like flax seeds or oats on the crust if possible. I wish there was some expert I could write to with this dilemma!