FEATURE
WHITE SLICED BREAD By Simon Carlo
As a child the first time I was allowed alone off the road on which we lived, it was to fetch bread. Google now tells me the distance was 160m, though to my little sparrow legs it seemed a lengthy adventure, with one fairly quiet road to cross before I navigated the gentle bend on the way to Ray’s corner shop. Guarding the pound coin in my clasped fist, with my other hand firmly clamped around that hand for double protection, I entered the shop. I headed straight to the centre aisle, looking for the amber hues of the Warburtons Toastie paper packaging. I paid, carefully counted the change which was mine and made the quick call to get either a Wham bar or bag of Warheads, knowing I had to be quick or else my parents would come looking for me if I wasn’t back. I left to find Dad waiting on the corner. He had followed me there all along. That bread shaped my childhood. It was toasted and heavily buttered as a vehicle for either baked beans or spaghetti hoops, and formed the backbone for 18
the crisp sandwiches I begged for as a treat. Even now, as an adult of sorts, my favourite food memory involves white sliced bread: curry sauce and chips in a tray from the local Cantonese takeaway with three slices of the stuff so heavily buttered that the liquid elements would merge into a nuclear yellow gloop and run down your arm as you ate it. I’ve said for years it would be my ‘Off Menu’ main course until someone pointed out it could technically qualify as my side dish. So now it’s main course and side dish. But it has to be the toastie cut. Any less and it will tear, any more (I’m looking at you Super Toastie) and you’ll never make it to the inside of the fold. It’s the bread that never goes off. The kind that will stick around as fodder for the termites in the event of a nuclear war. Nobody really knows what it is made of and equally nobody really wants to know. In the age of sourdoughs and focaccias and gourmet ciabattas hand massaged by moustachioed men on the hour, it still has a place. Only the absurd would stick Cibare Magazine
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