Bread and cheese

As a kid, my idea of bread and cheese was Wonder white and Kraft singles. Commercial offerings in these markets have developed exponentially. The choices of sliced breads in even the most humble supermarket forces me to know my own tastes too well. The ways that cheese and cheese-like products are offered to the shopper are even more various. Cheese is available in so many varieties, but it's the cheese flavor and the cheese texture which find their way into products on nearly every shelf.

But these are two of the oldest foods that mankind makes. They aren't going anywhere. Bread is a part of every cuisine on earth, and cheese a great majority of these as well. Still, the producers push them and sell them as if somehow we will forget that we like bread and we like cheese. It may even be possible that over the millennia that our species has been eating them, our genetic disposition to these foods has made us dependent on them, like water.

Most of us get interested when we smell bread baking, when we feel the warm texture of it against our lips and when we get that first rich taste of it. Buying bread can't give you that. Baking bread is the way to have it, and it hasn't been limited to grandmothers and downtown bakeries for quite a while. Baking bread is a pretty notable hobby, with most bookstores having at least one shelf of the cooking section devoted to books on baking bread. It's a simple activity, with rich and tasty rewards. Plus, the varieties of textures and flavors are practically endless.

However, just as bread is easily made at home and tastes best when freshest, cheese is not such a common homemade item, and certain known for not being best at the moment of completion. True connoisseurs of the craft of cheesemaking would say that a cheese isn't even complete until a certain amount of aging occurs. Eating cheese, in its many forms, and appreciating the art of the craft, is enough of a hobby for most of us serious cheesophiles.

Improving on either of these long-lived products is unlikely, but eating them together is definitely a treat that multiplies the effect of either of them separately. Nothing goes on a fresh slice of bread quite like a slice of a good cheese, and nothing offsets the sharp creaminess of cheese quite like the bouquet of warm bread filling my mouth.

I sit here enjoying fresh warm whole wheat bread from a recipe I just tried, with a bit of Gruyere cheese I bought this week. Together, this is a meal I think I could spend the rest of my life eating.