The other day, the Blonde in the house and I were in a grocery store looking at a couple of loaves of bread. The one loaf which was Italian was on sale for $2.60 while the other which was sourdough was at the regular price of $3.99. I was thinking to myself “Holy Moly how did bread get to be so expensive?” Back when I was a tad you could get a three course meal for that price. Actually, you could have purchased two meals! My mother used to send me down to the Vengold store with a dime in my hot little hand to buy a loaf of Wonder Bread. One day the loaf of Wonder Bread took a 10 percent increase to 11 cents so I had to trudge back home for a penny.
One of the hazards of buying Wonder Bread – no matter what the price – was that my Dad hated it. He would constantly mutter, “Wonder Bread, I wonder who can eat it!” The problem was that in little old Sandy Lake where we lived there were no bakeries so it was Wonder or nothing. I was just a kid who knew no better since it was just about all I had eaten. I did think that it was better toasted as the bread was so soft that it stuck to the roof of your mouth. Often my Dad’s work would take him out of town where he could buy some “decent” bread, and he would bring it back home.
The problem was that he expected me to eat it as well. He would bring home a loaf of dense rye bread which had seeds in it for Pete’s sake. I didn’t like the seeds or the rye for that matter. Another loaf which he liked was a heavy pumpernickel. I didn’t like it either! However, as I got older I decided that I did like various breads and in some of the cities we lived it was hard to get “good” bread even in the bakeries. After I had served my time in the Army, we moved to Roanoke, Va. where I had secured a job. We soon found out that all the stores and bakeries that we could find had bread similar to what I had as a kid.
One day, I decided to take the bull by the horns and I went into a bakery and asked if they ever had any pumpernickel bread. The response was, “Oh, yes, come in on Thursday and we will have our best pumpernickel!” Believing what I had heard, I did just that only to be given a loaf of the Wonder Bread type with a little grayness in from a sprinkling of pumpernickel flour. The crust was soft too. However, not everyplace we lived was that way. They had some great bread in New Jersey. There was one bakery a couple of towns over that had pepperoni bread. You had to eat it hot and fresh, but it was magnificent. They also had some great bagel makers, where you needed to go early in the morning to get them hot as they rolled out of the oven. They made a great breakfast. Back when I was a tad in Sandy Lake, I had never even heard of a bagel. I wish that I had!
Bread as you are most likely aware goes way back in time. The Egyptians get most of the credit, although there were probably folks in other areas eating it too. However, who had it first pales when compared with who invented sliced bread. This genius was none other than a good American, Otto Rohwedder who put his invention out in Chillicothe, OH. As I mentioned bread was being eaten for thousands of years before Otto came out in 1928 with an automated bread cutter. Sliced bread became a roaring success even until the present day.
The one problem with Otto’s cutter was that it was used by commercial bakers who made their bread very soft. The reason for that was that people had always made certain that bread was fresh by squeezing it to see if it were soft. Since cut bread could go stale quicker, they made certain that theirs would be soft when squeezed. Right there lay my Dad’s problem with Wonder Bread.
Life is full of mysteries!
Barry Evans writes about Life in The Villages for Villages-News.com