Lost Bread, Found Memories

By Ali Rouse Royster, 3rd Generation

If you were to take a poll of my Rouse cousins (and there are 17 of us, so make sure to bring a pen and paper to keep track of the tally), almost every one of us will tell you that our fondest memories of our grandparents include eating in their kitchen or on their back patio. Even more specifically, breakfast after a sleepover at Pa and Granny’s, which we did often, would be the resounding favorite.

My grandparents loved to have groups of their grandkids sleep over on Friday nights. I was in the “big girl” group with my cousins Ericka, Katie, Jennifer and Mandy — the five of us were all born within three years of each other. We would play in the backyard, climbing the big oak tree, running around playing tag or whatever make-believe game we concocted with our overactive imaginations. Around dusk we would eat dinner, sometimes BBQ or little pizzas on the patio if it wasn’t too hot, sometimes spaghetti or gumbo inside. After dinner, we would always play cards with Pa and Granny before baths and before playing in what we called the “blue room” in the back, which was a guest room that contained the closet designated for our toys.

Saturday mornings, we would wake up to the chiming of the grandfather clock and the smell of Granny cooking what you might call French Toast, but what Granny always called Lost Bread (in French this is “pain perdu,” which is what her parents called it when she was growing up in Eunice, Louisiana — her parents spoke only French). Granny loved to be in the kitchen, and on these Saturday mornings when our little nightgowned bodies would wander out of the bedrooms, still rubbing sleep out of our eyes, we would often find Granny over the stove, humming a tune and tapping her toes, already having had her first cup of coffee. When she served up piles of Lost Bread for us, she would ask if we wanted milk or coffee (which was mostly milk but also a splash of coffee, served in a mug — that made it way more grown up), and she’d sit and have another cup with us as we chatted about what we wanted to do that morning before our parents came to pick us up.

Food has been shown in many studies to be strongly tied to memory, evoking not just thoughts of the food’s taste, texture and look, but also of the time and place you experienced it, and what you were feeling then. For this, I am so thankful, because the memory of Lost Bread and Coffee Milk always brings such joyful images to my mind of my beloved Granny, Joyce Rouse.