The Best Thing

I’ve never really grasped the phrase “the best thing since sliced bread.” I understand the meaning of the slang, of course, and I know where it comes from. In ancient times (like, before the internet!), purchasing a loaf of bread was a normal thing, but once you got it home you had to slice it yourself. No one minded this apparently strenuous task until some jerk in Iowa invented a bread slicing machine and the idea of having to cut one’s own bread became unbearable.
I would classify the results of this invention as fairly convenient. I mean, sure, it’s nice to just stick your hand in the bag and yank out a couple of pieces of bread, but if we didn’t have a fancy automatic bread slicer, it wouldn’t stop us eating bread. Although, we would have to say “the best thing since wrapped bread,” since this was the previous innovation to rock the baking world.

When I was a kid, I didn’t understand the history of the phrase. What I also didn’t understand was how anyone could think that there was anything better than bread fresh out of the oven, sliced as thin or as thick as you wanted it, the crust thicker than bread bought at the grocery store, but warmer and more delicious than any store-bought brand could ever hope to be.

The best thing since sliced bread is making food for yourself, in your own kitchen. As much as I love Amigos (a small Americanized Mexican food chain native to Nebraska), there is something much better (and fresher!) about being able to add each spice one at a time to the meat. It’s also very satisfying to know that I can prevent my husband from retreating to Pizza Hut to purchase buffalo wings, since the ones he and I make taste much better. And I’ve got Olive Garden’s Chicken Marsala recipe; only next time I’m planning to slice the mushrooms a little thicker.
The other day I was excitedly discussing a recipe I had had great success with in my new crock pot, and a friend asked me, “When did you learn to cook?” I shrugged. Cooking for yourself isn’t hard, mostly it’s just following instructions. I have one or two basic cookbooks, but lots of the recipes I try come from the internet, which has tons of websites bursting with recipes for delicious-sounding food.

My mother, on the other hand, has a mountain of cookbooks. Thick, hard bound books with everything from apertifs to after dinner mints, thin, paperbacked books that only discuss the various ways to prepare cheesecake, different magazines specializing in recipes, and of course, a plain old notebook that she has lovingly stuffed with newspaper clippings of recipes and index cards scrawled with delectable ingredients, so full that she has to keep it in a big bubble wrap-lined manila envelope. One of these recipes has got to be the one she followed to make bread when I was a kid.

On the days when my mother made homemade bread, our house would change. It wasn’t anything overt, just little things: the scent of yeast, the warmth of the kitchen as the oven was heated and the bread was rising. Then the sharp smell of the transition from squishy dough to crisp crust. I can still smell it in my memories.

The best part was watching my mother flip the bread pan over to knock the bread onto a wire rack to cool, and waiting for the moment when she would slice into it and cut a chunk for my brothers and I, spreading butter on it so that we could watch it melt into the warmth of the bread.
It was the best thing. Ever.

So it seemed like blasphemy to me when my mother purchased a bread machine. (We’ve got some jerk in Japan to blame for this one.) She was (and still is) thrilled with it, bubbling about how all she has to do is dump the ingredients in, push a button, and wait, and then she has bread!
My response to this has always been an unimpressed facial expression, and something along the lines of “Well, Mother, it is missing one thing: love.” She usually just shakes her head at me, so apparently with the look on my face and the sarcastic remark I am unable to convey to her how much I loved those days in my childhood and how delicious her homemade bread was.

Recently I was telling her about the pizza crust recipe that my husband and I like, and mentioned that the worst thing about it was the fact that we had to drag the laptop into the kitchen with us every time we made it so that we could see the recipe. Even though this complaint was more due to our broken printer than anything else, she didn’t miss the opportunity to point out, with an unimpressed look on her face, that the thing I was missing in this situation was love. She was probably just trying to convey that I shouldn’t sass my mother.

With our differing opinions, my mother and I are both trying to make the same point: the best way to show love is by giving your time, whether it’s spent making bread for your children or by painstakingly compiling the recipes that you will hand down to them someday. Love is the best thing (since sliced bread).