"Bread is revered in Hungary... and country folks still call it 'life.' As a child, if I dropped a slice of bread, I had to kiss it before eating it."
~George Lang, The Cuisine of Hungary (1971) p. 345
How simple and natural an extension from this, to love of the Blessed Sacrament-- and vice versa! (Yet Lang himself was Jewish.) Faith seems so intertwined with a grateful awareness of basic needs; of dependence; of survival...
Does a society lose its faith when its loses its concept of a "staff of life"? (Here I'm probably trailing into the ideology of the Back-to-the-Land Movement...!) Of course, it isn't as simple as this: if it were, then we'd be done with the matter in one exhaustive historical study.
Still, today in the kitchen I'm taking a fresh look at my pantry staples. Potatoes. Bread. Barley. Rice. Building blocks of Life in more than one way?
The Lang quotation is interesting. We were also taught to kiss the bread when it fell on the ground ... and feed it to the birds.
ReplyDeleteGod bless.
(Chuckling)... Since we had pet dogs, the bread was always caught in midair!
DeleteI'm rethinking bread these days, as I tweak our bread farther and farther from white. It doesn't add anything to your discussion, but it resonated!
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