I've been reading "How to Cook a Wolf" - a strange and strangely interesting book by MFK Fisher written during WW II when everything was rationed, shortages were at their worst, and everyone was living on very little (the wolf in the title refers to the wolf at the door). I came across this passage which I thought too wonderful not to share. This is from a chapter on bread. She writes about all the possible bread pans you might find, borrow, or improvise, and then goes on to say:
"Why can you not make the kind of round loaf, perhaps with a cross slashed on the top of it, that you used to see through a cellar door when you walked home from the theater late at night in France? The white-faced baker's boy, with flour in his eyebrows and his pores and probably his lungs, slid it surely, intensely, on a long shovel into the blaze of the open oven. It was naked, like a firm-hipped woman, without benefit of metal girdlings. It came out, in an hour or so, ready for next morning's breakfast, round and brownly even, and filled with an honorable savor. It was good bread and you can make it. You can forget the soggy sterile slices that pop up dourly in three million automatic toasters every morning and instead cut yourself, it you will, a slice of bread that you have seen mysteriously rise and redouble and fall and fold under your hands. It will smell better, and taste better than you remembered anything could possibly taste or smell, and it will make you feel, for a time at least, newborn into a better world than this one often seems."
The woman can write.
