FOOD FOR THOUGHT: (Austrian) French Bread

Bread has always been a staple in my diet. Even as a young boy I would often choose a sandwich over another food, usually peanut butter and jelly or baloney. And as a youngster I was fortunate enough to have homemade flatbread somewhat regularly. This is something I took for granted at the time. I would make my beloved pb & j or baloney sandwiches on flatbread and roll them up like tacos. Nowadays this would be called a "wrap," a name coined by savvy food marketers a few years ago. Of course, during this period I also ate a lot of spongy plastic-tasting "supermarket-style" bread. I didn't know any better, nor did I have anything on which to base a good loaf. This all changed when I took a trip to France as a young man and ate really good artisan-style bread. It was there also that I had my first excellent baguette.

I was traveling with my friend Dave during the mid-1980s, and to conserve funds we took a slow overnight ferry across the channel. The hydrofoils and faster boats that ran during the daytime were more expensive, and the Chunnel did not yet exist. We shared a cab from the train station to the hostel with another fellow traveler and realized after about our third trip around the same block that the cabbie was taking us for a ride, literally. After haggling with him about a mysterious "luggage charge" because we loaded our backpacks into his trunk he finally stopped in front of the hostel, which looked familiar because we had already driven passed it a few times. The hostel, we soon found, didn't accept new boarders until 7:00 am; it was only 5:00. Conveniently there was an all-night brasserie close by, which we made quick use of. We had been in Paris less than an hour and between the three of use we knew about six words of French. After bumbling through the restaurant with our backpacks and finding seats we were confronted with a waiter in a floor-length apron asking us -- we assumed -- what we would like. "Um...three coffees and toast please...I mean s'il vous plaît." With raised eyebrows he repeated simply, "toast?" "Yes, toasted bread," we seemed to say in unison. "Ah...oui...yes," said our now-friendly waiter, and then speaking in heavily accented English, "three coffees and toasted bread coming up." It seemed as if the waiter got a kick out of speaking English, and later we discovered that he had spent a short time stateside. Anyhow, when the coffee and toast arrived it was incredible. Maybe it was the delirious state of all-night travel, or the thrill of finding myself in a country where I couldn't speak the language, or quite possible that my brain cells hadn't recuperated yet from spending too many nights in London pubs, but our meager breakfast hit the spot. The coffee was the traditional morning brew of café au lait, and the toast -- ah the toast -- was made with thick, cut on the bias, slices of creamy in the center and crusty on the outside baguette. And the thing that I remember most was that the bread tasted like something, it actually had a flavor of its own.

At the hostel each morning we had the customary breakfast of coffee, bread, croissant, and jam. And baguette sandwiches for lunch were one of the cheapest meals a money-strapped traveler could buy. In fact, we survived on baguette sandwiches during our entire stay. It sometimes cost extra to eat sitting in a restaurant so we would stand and eat our sandwiches on the sidewalk. When we left Paris Dave and I bought some provisions for the train ride, including baguettes that we strapped to our backpacks.

A few weeks later we found ourselves in the magical city of New Orleans. After our European trip we had almost no money remaining; we may have been backpacking but we were in no way frugal. We actually began to refer to ourselves as the "eat-drink men," two activities we did a great deal of. Those first weeks in New Orleans were desperate ones. We barely had enough money for which to eat, but somehow always managed to scrape up enough money to buy really big paper cups of beer. Luckily, though, I landed a job at a French restaurant on our third day in the Crescent City, and Dave got a job in a hotel kitchen a few days later. The problem was that our first paychecks were not due to be issued for two weeks. We walked around a lot trying not to think of food. New Orleans is a tough city to be in when one is hungry; the smell of food is everywhere. Hunger makes a person think irrational thoughts, like taking food and not paying for it, which is exactly what we did one night when we gorged ourselves on food and drink at a restaurant knowing that their credit card machine was broken. We "paid" with Dave's revoked credit card. We even left the nice waitress a very substantial and make-believe tip.