On Bread Alone

Neni Panourgiá
Justice-in-Education Initiative, Heyman Center for the Humanities
Columbia University

The Beginning

My father would cut the bread against his chest. Winter or summer, dressed for dinner or half-naked in his bathing suit, sitting at the table in the dining room or under the fig tree at the summer house, he cut the bread using a knife that he sharpened himself at his lab. He sharpened all the knives of the house. He didn’t use a “sawing motion” as David Sutton has described in his Secrets from a Greek Kitchen (2014:50). Rather, in a sweeping draw he would slide the immensely sharp non-serrated knife along the axis of the always round loaf. He insisted on a non-serrated knife so much so that he would take the serrated bread knives to his lab and grind the edge to smoothness. My father was a chemical and mechanical engineer.

The bread against the chest was a dangerous choreography that never failed to solicit a deep breath from anyone who happened to be at the table, from us, the family, to almost total strangers. Because my father always cut the bread at the table, under the witnessing gaze of everyone. And the worry was always written on the witnessing faces. Is he about to slice his chest? Right at the heart? If the knife slipped, it would easily find and cut through his jugular. But the knife never slipped, and his shirt or skin never were in the least bit affected or threatened, as if complicit in the choreography that this particular topography, the topography of bread, engenders. The bread and the bread knife existing parallel to each other at a right angle to my father’s erect and unbending body that sat, in turn, at a right angle to the earth was, indeed, the architectonics of order that my father, a child of the German Occupation of Greece and the Athens famine of ’41- ‘42 with its 200,000 dead, sought to undo every day.

My father would place the bread right where his pulse originated, never missing a beat, never cutting an uneven slice. The bread was always crusty, slightly sour, slightly salty, with most of its wheat visible, able to hold the sauce of the dish, the juice of the tomatoes, the oil in the boiled dandelions even if getting a little soggy from the juice of the lemon that cut through their bitterness. He would pinch its crumb—its ψίχα/psiha— roll it between his fingers, squeeze it to determine if it was well baked. He would spurn the crumb that stuck to itself—too much leavening, too little kneading, too much summer wheat, not enough red wheat, underbaked, not enough salt, limp crust, no bakery smell, inedible. “Not quite kouramána but not far from it” he would say, referring to kommissbrot, the dark sour bread of the German army, made of rye and yeast. Heavy, stodgy but nutritious, after WWI it became the staple bread in the Greek army (since the King of Greece was a first cousin to the Kaiser himself) and, eventually, the bread distributed to the poor at soup kitchens in all of Greece in the post-German- Occupation period.

Occasionally my father would long for prósphoron, the bread for the dead that simply means “offered,” which, by the 1960s, had moved from its strict preparation at home and had become available commercially in the bakeries of Athens. Before leaving in the morning, he would place the (almost mischievous) request: “See if the baker has a prósphoro for today,” and we would be dispatched to the only bakery in the neighborhood that might. Prósphoron, also called leitourgiá, meaning that which will be blessed at the liturgy, is made with water, a smidgen of salt, white flour thrice sifted, and leaven that has been made of flour and water specifically for it and used for no other bread. Baked in a round loaf with the imprint of a liturgical seal, it comes out of the oven pale and shiny. It is used by the priest in the ritual of the Eucharist and the blessing of the dead the names of whom have been provided by the supplicant who provides the loaf. The bakery receives orders for prósphora to be baked on Saturdays and always bakes a few extra ones to be sold, especially during the All-Souls’ Days of the ecclesiastical calendar. It would be one of those extra loaves that my father would try to score.

In 2014 two friends in New York lost their son to suicide. As the fortieth day of his death approached, the mother wanted a prósphoron and kóllyva, the ritual offering to the dead of boiled and sweetened wheat. I made the kóllyva, but she wanted to make the prósphoron herself. She came to my house and in my kitchen she made the first prósphoron for her son as she asked me to stand by and bear witness. She lit a candle, burned incense, crossed the dough and pushed in the seal, and baked the bread in my oven, the first bread of any kind she had baked in her life. A bread for her dead son. The first bread that I had ever baked was, also, a prósphoron for someone’s son. Not in Greece but as a graduate student in the United States, when my childhood friend Panayés died in a car accident on the road to Corinth. A declared and avowed atheist, then as now, I took the prósphoron to the liturgy at the makeshift Greek Orthodox church in the city where I was studying, a congregation that once a month had use of the building of an Episcopalian church. Since then, I started making prósphora—for my grandfather, my parents, my in-laws, friends Greek and non-Greek, religious or atheists.

My mother never cut the bread. Neither did she even bake bread. Nor did she ever miss it. She, too, attributed this to the specifics of the German Occupation. Her father, having returned from the United States in 1922 to his grandfather’s place in the Northern Peloponnese, owned acres and acres of olive groves and vineyards where herds of sheep grazed. During the Occupation, the family was in want for nothing, except for bread. My mother always said that her parents felt its absence acutely while she was content with eating meat and vegetables. She never went near the dreaded bobóta, the thick gruel concocted of coarse maize meal and water. No salt, no sugar, no oil or any fat – just cornmeal and water. It was baked into heavy cakes throughout the country as a substitute for the familiar pre-war barley and wheat bread that had been made in the area continuously since antiquity. Because of the way that niacin (vitamin B3) binds into some of the components of maize, the consumption of bobóta caused pellagra in a large number of the population. It filled their stomachs so they wouldn’t growl from hunger, but it also wasted their bodies away, diarrhoeic bodies that carried the visible effects of malnutrition and starvation—distended abdomens, welts, mental confusion. Bobóta was considered a substitute for bread precisely because it was not considered to be bread. Still, even if she rarely ate it, my mother taught us the sanctity of bread: if fallen on the floor we had to pick it up, blow at it, cross it, kiss it, and then eat it. Never spit out a crumb of bread, never throw away bread, never waste any part of it. The crumbs of its crust, its kóra, that fell on the table were collected and fed to the birds. Sometimes my father would collect them in his hand and pop them in his mouth. When ill and confined to a wheelchair he would hide the crumbs in the cusp of his hand and toss them on the floor of his room to entice the wild pigeons at the balcony to come in and keep him company.

In the chapter entitled “History of Cereals” in her 2008 book The History of Food, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat describes the strict classification that has organized the edibility and utilization of substances since the beginning of agriculture. There she recognizes the classificatory rigid separation between cereals, Δημητριακά (Demetriaká), belonging to Demeter, the goddess of wheat and barley, and which were fit for human consumption, and seeds and legumes used for animal consumption, such as rye; originally considered a wheat weed, and although much favored by the Pontians, the Macedonians, and the Slavs, rye was despised by the Greeks for its smell and only used by the Romans blended with spelt to be fed to the humiliores, the lower classes; oats, which in the Dodecanese until the 1980s was a crop cultivated exclusively as animal feed; and maize, introduced from the New World through a complex process of colonization by way of the Levant and Egypt where it was cultivated as early as the 1500s, and was originally named “Turkey wheat.”

Greeks have been, since the beginning of cereal time, nothing but sitophágoi: Homer’s, the Pythagoreans’, Plato’s wheat and barley eaters. Athenaeus (Deipnosophists, Book III, 77) reports that sometime around 330 BCE Archestratus, the first gastronome to write recipes (and very complex ones at that), advised what types of breads would be good to eat with his dishes:

σοι ὑπαρχέτω

if they could be had,

στρογγυλοδίνητος δὲ τετριμμένος εὖ κατὰ χεῖρα κόλλιξ Θεσσαλικός

a Thessalian round, well kneaded by hand and formed into a circle

ὃν καλέουσι κεῖνοι κριμνίταν,

that some call crude

δ᾽ ἄλλοι χόνδρινον ἄρτον

but others call coarse bread

εἶτα τὸν ἐκ Τεγέας σεμιδάλεος υἱὸν ἐπαινῶ

I also recommend bread from semolina, Tegea’s son

ἐγκρυφίαν

that has been baked in ashes

λευκὸς ἁβραῖς θάλλων ὥραις τέρψει παρὰ δεῖπνον

and I find very pleasurable for dinner the famous white loaves

τὸν δ᾽ εἰς ἀγορὰν ποιεύμενον ἄρτον αἱ κλειψαὶ παρέχουσι βροτοῖς κάλλιστον ᾿Αθῆναι

the wonderful ones from Athens available to people at the market

ἐν δὲ φερεσταφύλοις ᾿Ερυθραῖς ἐκ κλιβάνου ἐλθὼν

that come from ovens where the lovely grapevines from Erythrae burn

Barley was produced everywhere in Greece but the best of it, Archestratus insists, is barley that comes from the town of Eressos in Lesbos because it is white “like falling snow.” He is certain that if the gods eat barley, this is where Hermes would go shopping for it. A gift from the goddess, he insists.

Thus barley, primarily, and wheat, secondarily, were the cereal crops of the Attican, Thessalian, and Boeotian plains where they were cultivated for millennia— until the 20th century, when these same plains were heavily bombed by the Allies during the Second World War and by the American and Greek air forces during the Civil War that followed. Along with their bombs, the Americans poured into the ruined country money through the Marshall Plan that introduced the uncritical industrialization of knowledge and production in the primary and secondary sectors of the economy. One of the many adverse results was that the entire ecology of bread was destroyed. Lake Karla, in Thessaly, which was so inundated by floods from heavy rains in September 2023 that agricultural experts say that it will be unable to produce any crops for the next fifty years, had been a vibrant ecosystem that sustained the area with fish, silt, and migratory birds until its drainage in 1962.

But drained it was so as to alleviate the dearth of cultivable lands in the country, especially lands for wheat production, and was subsequently so heavily fertilized that its natural salts would rise to the surface, requiring even further chemical interventions for desalination. Utilized to produce wheat, the soil of the drained lake was so depleted of any nutrients and so replete with chemicals that when the cataclysmic rains of 2023 happened it could not absorb the water and the area turned into a lake again.

The horses that had been used on the threshing floors of the countryside were decimated during the long war; the farming populations were forcibly relocated to urban centers by the government during the Civil War; the windmills that had been much maligned for allowing mice and pigeons to live within their walls were discontinued and replaced by mechanical mills. Abandoned and derelict, they became tourist attractions and photo-ops.

Mechanization and chemical fertilization replaced the immediate, affective connectivity of the wheat and barley farmers to the soil and the seed, invariably altering the relations of labor sociality that had sustained fellowship and intimacy over the years. Bread acquired gradations of white, from “peasant” (χωριάτικο) to “luxury” (πολυτελείας) with corresponding gradations of social status and inedibility. The flour, devoid and denuded of its wheat germ and wheat hull, had added to it chemically constituted minerals and vitamins— odorless, tasteless, and lacking the holistic nutrition of the old seeds. Thus began a new concern for the urban population: how and where to source “good bread,” wheat bread, still flavorful and nutritious. Not that the obsession with the whiteness of the bread is anything new. Elizabeth David tells us in her 1977 book English Bread and Yeast Cookery, that bread flour has been adulterated with alum, chalk, and even ground human bones and ashes, at least since the times of the Romans (191). Marc Bloch has insisted that as the whiteness of bread came to indicate social status there has been no clearer criterion of social class over the centuries.  “Know the color of your bread” the Romans used to say when they wanted to put someone in their place, write Judith and Evan Jones when they discuss the beginnings of bread on page 16 of their 1982 The Book of Bread.

After Lee Miller, the photographer, Vogue model, and “the girl with whom [he] was in love” had invited him, in June 1938, to join her for a July trip around the Balkans, the surrealist poet Roland Penrose wrote the poem The Road Is Wider Than Long which, in 1939, he produced in 500 hand-made copies as an art book and as a gift to her, where he interlaced the poem with his collages and Miller’s photographs from the trip. Together, Miller and Penrose traveled to “see something of Europe in remote parts where the pre-internal-combustion-engine era was not entirely extinct,” as he writes in his 1979 postscript to the book. Places where, in July 1938, there was “in the air the menace of approaching doom.” Part of Penrose’s poem is about wheat. In the art book he wrapped the lines about wheat around one of Miller’s photographs of horses on a threshing floor “somewhere in Thessaly,” placing himself, in the poem, in a position of solidarity with the wheat, reading (or gleaning) the abuse that it has undergone in the trajectory of its transformation from seed to flour to bread.  

they have filtered it churned it kneaded it
refined it driven over it in the open fields
thrown it to the wind beaten it with flails
ground it dried it baked it in kilns
 

The End

My mother’s name was Demetra. Not named after the goddess but given the name of her mother’s dead young brother, Demetris, who drowned at age of 23 in the Snake River in Idaho, in 1921. Ultimately, though, precisely because she had been given the name of someone dead, she was connected to the goddess of wheat and barley who had fought so fiercely for the right of the dead to return. Indeed, my mother never baked bread. But not a day passed in our house that bread was not on the table. And now, I bake bread every day that the temperature does not rise above 35 degrees Celsius. I make it with wheat, barley, oats, and, occasionally, rye and with it feed my family so that we can all remember that we know how and can make by ourselves the primary source of our sustenance, the first food that lands on the table. And I make it as a tribute and a debt to the dead, to the poor, to the embattled, to the first human who made a hearth and the first person who collected an ear of wheat and a seed of barley. As a gift to friends.

Editor’s note: The discussion of Greek bread in this post intrigued David Sutton, one of the blog editors. Next week, Sutton will follow up with a few questions for the author, which she has graciously agreed to field.