My father was great cook, a serious foodie and a wonderful story teller.
And a lot of the stories he told me about his younger days somehow involved food.
Food he grew up with. Food his mother used to make.
Food he ate during the times he was abroad.
One thing that stuck in my mind is how he reminisced that when he was young and in Paris, sent there on a government grant, he would see a lot of people buying french bread or baguettes from the bakery, sticking them under their arms,
tearing off pieces and eating the bread along the way.
He said he found it so intriguing -- the bread was probably freshly baked, still warm, it would have been crusty and chewy and really good bread. No need for butter, he used to say.
Somehow, he never got the nerve to do it himself.
So tonight, New Year's eve, as we had just come from our favorite boulangerie and we had bought a baguette for tomorrow's breakfast, I realized that the bread they gave me was still quite warm -- fresh from the oven.
It smelled so good -- so I tucked it under my arm and tore off the crusty end that was poking out of the paper bag, and started to eat it as I was walking back to the apartment.
It was exactly what I had imagined the taste to be.
Daddy, you would have loved it too.
No comments:
Post a Comment