Pantry Note:
The State of Bread
19 July 2018

For a week now, a loaf of Matthew’s Golden White bread has reposed on the dining table. After a big shop at Fairway, I unpacked all the bags at the table, and almost everything got put away — everything but the bread. There is nowhere to put a loaf of bread in the kitchen. Well, another loaf. There’s plenty of bread, of different kinds, here and there. There are English muffins, of course. Some top-sliced Frankfurter buns that have gotten a bit rocky. A loaf of Bread Alone’s Peasant bread. Levy’s Seeded Rye, somewhere, I think. But none of my own. It’s a sign of my poor spirits that I haven’t baked bread in months. 

Time to rethink the kitchen cabinets. 

One of the great things about my kitchen in the country was open shelving. Plenty of it, and no doors. Everything was immediately visible. (It helped that the shelves weren’t too deep.) Most people seem to think that cabinet doors keep the contents clean, or at least free of dust and grime. I think that it just makes them mysterious, or at least easy to ignore. 

The impossible ideal: a kitchen that stocked everything in the way of ingredients and equipment needed to make just about anything — but that still looked empty. 

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