Bread

la recherche de pain perdu.

During college I spent one miserable summer in San Francisco at the house of family friends. There was a big stainless-steel bread box and matching toaster in the kitchen, and an endless supply of Orowheat Wheatberry bread, which I ate compulsively, half a loaf at a time, toasted or made into peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The father of the house was a cheerful drinker who, after downing five or 10 gin martinis, began to recite Shakespearean monologues. His own children fled, but I, desperate for company, would hear him out. Together we performed a kind of clumsy kitchen ballet. He'd thunder forth while unobtrusively gliding between the ice tray, the gin bottle and the olives, while I'd listen rapt during peregrinations to the bread box, the peanut butter and the jelly. I gained 15 pounds, not to mention verbatim knowledge of several famous monologues, including Falstaff's paean to sherry ("sack") and alcoholism in Henry IV Part 2: "If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be, to forswear thin potations and addict themselves to sack."

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La Brea Bakery

624 S. La Brea Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Category: Restaurant > Bakery

Region: Melrose/ Beverly/ Fairfax

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Da Pasquale Restaurant

9749 Santa Monica Blvd.
Beverly Hills, CA 90210-4201

Category: Restaurant > Health

Region: West L.A.

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• Toto Spaghetteria
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• Bread
• Eating Out

Back at school in Iowa, I learned to make quite a good French bread, from a woman named Rosalind, the art-history professor's wife. Because there was no decent bread available at any price, she felt forced to make her own. Rosalind's bread was white and dense and crusty, quite good, especially toasted. Yet, it is not Rosalind's bread recipe that has stuck with me all these years, but her toast-making technique, which remains, to my mind, the apex of all toast-making techniques, and as an act of great generosity, I'll now pass it onto you:

Cut bread into 3/4-inch slices and toast one side under the broiler. Open broiler and turn toast. On the untoasted side, lay not-thin squares of cold butter. Stick slices back under broiler until the butter is melted and the toast browned. Eat, if desired, with additional slices of cold sweet butter.

Twenty years later, when I quit smoking for good (knock wood), such toast comprised a significant portion of the 20 pounds I gained. One minute, I'd be working at my desk; the next thing I knew, I'd be three blocks away in the checkout line of a supermarket, a bag of French bread and a half-pound of butter in my hands. Heaven. Better than smoking. Worth every added ounce.

In the last decade, I attended seminary for two years and there, at chapel services, they used bread for communion. Large, round, unsliced loaves of white were broken at the altar, the pieces dipped in grape juice and handed to the supplicants. I, personally, didn't partake. When I was 11, I spent Saturday night at a friend's house and the next morning went with her family to mass. My friend encouraged me to take communion. Later, her older sister authoritatively declared that I would go to hell for receiving communion a) unbaptized and b) without going first to confession. This set me against communion for life. Once, at chapel in seminary, there was a big kind of multiculti communion where different ethnic groups - Samoans, Africans, Mexicans et cetera - brought their different breads and, well, it was simply irresistible to a bread lover, hell or no hell.

Bread is the staple, the comfort, the great love of my eating life. If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them would be to forswear thin potations and addict themselves to BREAD.

Recommended breads: La Brea Bakery, 624 S. La Brea Blvd., (213) 939-6813; Angeli, 727 Melrose Ave., (213) 936-9086; Da Pasquale, 9749 Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 859-3884; Osteria Nonni, 3219 Glendale Blvd., Atwater, (213) 666-7133; Toto Spaghetteria, 11047 Santa Monica Blvd., West L.A., (310) 312-6664; Joe's, 1023 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, (310) 399-5811; Patina, 5955 Melrose Ave., (213) 467-1108; The Grill, 9560 Dayton Way, Beverly Hills, (310) 276-0615; The Daily Grill, 100 N. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 659-3100; Musso & Frank Grill, 6667 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (213) 467-5123; Julienne, 2649 Mission St., San Marino, (626) 441-2299; Il Fornaio, 301 Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 550-8330.