Let us eat bread

It's doubtful if the queen was quite so callous as this, to flippantly ignore her subjects' needs, in spite of her involvement with affairs at court. Besides, if I had been a peasant, I'd still have preferred the bread.

After all, bread figures highly on everybody's list of important things. We ask for it daily in our prayers; half a loaf is better than none; a jug of wine, loaf of bread and thou, said Omar. I still laugh at the quote on a church message board that read, "Jesus, not bread, is the staff of life. Come in and have a slice."

In the old South, bread was the soul of the dinner table.No meal was complete without a basket of warm homemade cookies, rolls or corn bread, sitting next to a freshly churned butter cake.

Each family had its high-biscuit. Ours was Perkins, acolyte of my mother, who was the chief in charge until they arrive with horrific, cardboard boxes tasting chilled version wrong. She stood beside the kitchen counter, rolling and cutting the dough with a glass of juice. She gave me the leftovers, I train with my doll, Elizabeth, Pin Wee stock and sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. Mine were allowed to bake alongside the real thing, and my father and I ate them with gusto, never mind the cooked-in dirt spots and stains.

We had biscuits and gravy made with fat back for a main dish, biscuits with sorghum molasses mashed in butter for dessert, biscuits with blackberry jelly for breakfast, little hard beaten biscuits for a dainty ladies' luncheon treat.

Frank Austin, longtime principal at Southwood Elementary, recalled taking ham, sausage or pork chop biscuits to school in his lunch pail as a boy. How he envied the fellows who had a bologna sandwich on store-bought bread. "I didn't know how good I had it," he laughed.

Raised dough, as opposed to rolled dough, was a special treat. Miss Annie was our baker of my favorite pocketbook, aka Parkerhouse, rolls. She'd dust her hands with flour, brush butter on a round of dough, fold it over and pop it into the pan with several dozen others to rise and bake to a golden brown. Our grandmother made loaf bread to go with her stewed chicken, crusty on the outside with a soft middle. It was the best part of her big barbecued chicken backyard feasts.Aunt Sadie kept a bowl of Angel Biscuit dough in the fridge, "ready to shape into rolls or buns in a moment's notice.

Best of all was the bread birthday, which was our name for the cake sugar Moravia. When he was in the oven "down home" aroma drifting across the East Center Street area, making your mouth water for everyone. If we were lucky we would get to push Hokes in the dough before it was cooked, put the pieces of butter, and sprinkle with brown sugar and cinnamon.

Girl Meets Physicist: Almond Strawberry Quick Bread

The Physicist LOVES to garden. Because of this, every summer, we tend to have a LOT of produce. Right now, I'm in the thick of our strawberry season. Last week, he picked about 7 pounds of strawberries. I'm giving them away, having them at every meal, making jams and ice creams to store them. And I'm making Almond Strawberry Quick Bread. I found a recipe online (for Walnut Strawberry Bread), decided I didn't like half the ingredients, changed it around, and made it. Then I decided it had WAY too much sugar! (Strawberries are already sweet, people!) It was like eating candy. So I changed it again, cutting WAY back on the sugar. Now, the bread tastes like strawberries. And you know me, I like things with fruit in them to taste like the fruit.

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