Step Across This Line (2002)
“It wasn’t “real.” “Real” bread was the chapati, or phulka, served piping hot; the tandoori nan, and its sweeter Frontier variant, the Peshawari nan; and for luxury, the reshmi roti, the shirmal, the paratha. Compared to these aristocrats, the leavened white loaves of my childhood seemed to merit the description that Shaw’s immortal dustman, Alfred Doolittle, dreamed up for people like himself: they were, in truth, “the undeserving poor.”My first inkling that there might be more to leavened bread than I knew came on a visit to Karachi, Pakistan, where I learned that a hidden order of nuns, in a place known as the Monastery of the Angels, baked a mean loaf. To buy it you had to get up at dawn—that is, a servant had to get up at dawn—and stand in line outside a small hatch in the monastery’s wall. The nuns’ baking facilities were limited, the daily “run” was small, and this secret bakery’s reputation was high. Only the early bird caught the loaf. The hatch would open, and a nun would han...d the bread out to the waiting populace.MoreLess
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