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Bread: Historic staple, riot-starter, loneliness cure
SBS Audio
18/10/202328:50
There's no need for a spork when you have a crusty loaf around – in fact, you could argue it's the most convenient kind of cutlery available.
Just talk to , a lifelong advocate for substituting your knife or fork with bread. The program director of nutrition and food sciences at the grew up in a Greek Australian household and often turned to the staple as a meal-enhancing utensil.
"When I went back to Greece and visited friends and relatives there, they would use a fork and they would have a bread in the other hand, and the bonus being that then that bread becomes soaked in the cooking juices," she told me on the bread episode of my podcast.
Back at home, she’d also maximise every drop of dressing in a Greek salad: she'd dip her bread to sponge up every last bit of feta, olive oil and tomato juice on the plate.
"But you know we always have to remember not to do it when we've got guests over because it's the sort of thing you do just with your family around," she said with a laugh on the podcast.
I think this no-waste way of eating Greek salad should be proudly done in the open, as it's ingenious and deserves lots of attention – no shame or secrecy required!
Roti canai.
Not only is it sustainable and lets the bread absorb the summery, bright and salty flavours of Greek salad, but it also has a healthy side effect as well. You can "sort of" dilute the impact of salt in your bread by eating it with potassium – and fruits and vegetables are a great source of the mineral, the dietitian explains on my podcast. So dipping your bread through the glorious mess of tomato juice that remains at the final stage of consuming Greek salad is a really good move.
That bread becomes soaked in the cooking juices.
I'm all for using bread as cutlery, especially as it saves on dish-washing duties: you can use a loaf, pita or to wipe your plate clean of sauce, hummus or curry and you're minimising your cutlery-cleaning, too.
Or in the case of , the spongey sourdough is actually the plate AND the cutlery. Which means there's even less to stack the sink with afterwards.
The professor also endorses the bread-as-cutlery approach for other Greek dishes, like , where you stew okra in tomatoes, spices and olive oil. Letting bread sponge your plate or bowl clean is in keeping with budget-friendly, peasant-style dishes (think Italian ) where every last part is consumed. "Because it's too valuable. So the oil is eaten as part of the meal as well," the professor tells me in a follow-up interview for SBS Food.
"It's funny because I remember one meal [of bamies latheres me domata] with my aunty in Greece. She'd made this dish and I didn't feel that hungry that I needed all the extra bread and so I was just eating it with a spoon, right?" she adds. "She got really angry at me. She goes, 'you can't eat it like that!'"
Okra, tomato and potato casserole. Credit: Mark Roper
While Dr Mantzioris says wielding bread like cutlery is something she'd only do with people close to her and not at a five-star restaurant, she’s aware that in Greece people are much more comfortable doing exactly that.
"It was actually funny because people did it at fancy restaurants there… they just dug in and didn't ask and I thought, 'Oh that's interesting, it's still so typical and accepted to do it here'."
It's salad o'clock
Panzanella (bread and tomato salad)
That's not the only situation where it’s highly welcome.
On SBS' bilingual podcast , presenter Massimiliano Gugole discusses the Apulian love of eating sea urchins with "a scarpetta", which he describes as "the Italian tradition of soaking anything saucy with a piece of bread". There's something so vivid about the name "scarpetta" (shoe) and the accompanying phrase "fare la scarpetta" (make the little shoe): I imagine a raft of bread, shaped like a tiny kid’s boot, transporting the last flavoursome scraps of a plate to someone’s mouth. is that it comes from a time that "when people were literally so hungry they’d have eaten the soles of their shoes".
It's too valuable.
We've all had to stretch our pantry at one point or another and there's something so universal about using baked dough in this meal-maximising way: from dunking flaky ruffles of roti into a well-spiced curry or , and then using the bread to scoop up the soup as well.
Locally, I'm delighted to hear that cautioning diners not to BYO bread to sponge up the leftover sauces – the fact that guests just instinctively want to smuggle in their own flavour-soaking carbs and have to be officially warned against it, well that just tells you how strong the natural instinct is to mop bread with everything!
Fried cowpea balls fritter Credit: The Good Cooks
From dunking a loaf through dips to reshaping flatbread to transport your sauce or stew, bread proves endlessly versatile as a cutlery substitute.
"Different breads, different uses, different scooping techniques, different shovelling techniques," says Dr Mantzioris.
And it's cutlery you can actually eat, too, which makes it an extra win on both the dishwashing and appetite-appeasing fronts as well.
