Travel and Food–Gold Winner: Breadstick Hydra
By Matthew Frank
The front room is filled with fresh pastas and truffle emulsions, meter-long grissini breadsticks and lady-kiss baci di dama cookies. I am in Barolo, Italy’s Panetteria, the sole local bakery, and am enjoying its silence, its farmland smells, the sight of three shadowed heads work-bobbing behind the kitchen’s glass door. They don’t see me yet and I’m glad for this. I’m tempted even to hide between the shelves of olive oil and the shelves of vinegar, becoming the bridge that brings the two ingredients together into a nebulous vinaigrette.
I squat to examine the pastries in their glass cases—hazelnut buns, chocolate-fruit truffles, and again, those stretched, cat-after-a-nap breadsticks; the grissini dusted in what appears to be flakes of semolina. My eyes stray upward over the lip of the counter and I hold them open with my fingers, water them into focus.
The three-headed kitchen monster whirls about in obvious oven-heat, sputtering with rolling-pin effort, palms surely greased with butter, egg, oil, flour, salt, dough. Two of the heads boast long, grassy, tied-up hair. I can see the loose strand shadows bursting from their rubber-bands and dancing airily about the heads as electrons. The third head is what frightens me most, slides me back under my bedroom covers, flashlight tight in hand. It is the squarest head I’ve ever seen, made even more angular by the fact that it sits featureless in heat-shadow. The square-headed figure—male in shape alone—carries a continuous army of trays first into, then out of a smoke-spewing hole in the wall.
With each added tray, I can hear this brick animal inhaling, then exhaling, doing its job of cooking, rising, browning, melting, toasting, crisping, finishing, each removed tray wearing the label of DONE. I breathe with it, trying to inflame my own coals into a large enough glow to summon one of these frantic heads from its lair. I want a stick of grissini as long as my arm and two sweet baci di dama to kiss it down.
My eyes turn back to the front door. Silver bells lie dormant at its top frame. I inhale again, the wheatfield air rinsing me, taking me, car windows down, at peak speed through western Nebraska, then eastern Colorado—the breadbasket before the mountains. But there is something different here: not just the smell of flour, but the smell of floured mushrooms.
I spin to face the kitchen again and see that the Hydra has lost two heads. Only the square remains. Before I can tear my eyes from the kitchen door, I hear, in angelic choral unison, in an identical-twin hum straight from a microphoned womb, a luscious, lady-kiss of a “Ciao.”
Each voice extends the vowel at the end for just a second too long, then cuts out all at once as if some hidden conductor had waved a rod of grissini in a downward swipe through this fresh-baked air. I swear I see granules of yeast sputter all around me. They are standing side-by-side behind the glass-case counter in matching white aprons, greased in all the same places. Smiles threatening to burst the confines of their faces, they are shoulder-to-shoulder, wayward blonde hairs maning their forty-something faces, strands locking them together as if Siamese twins. Mouths equally abundant, they are obviously sisters, richly identical, each defining the other as not one, but two warm slaps across my face.
So, not to deny either one of them, I say “Ciao,” exactly twice.
In a ridiculous sideshow feat, they break apart, as if the air itself were a scalpel, and each walks to an opposing end of the counter for balance. They look like weights on the ends of a straight-from-the-oven barbell. My tongue rings in my mouth as I ask about the grissini.
“Oh, grissini,” the woman on the left says.
“Grissini,” the woman on the right overlaps.
It’s now that I notice that the woman on the left (as opposed to the woman on the right) is wearing eyeliner. This tiny difference settles my heart. They go on to tell me, each interrupting the other mid-sentence, that the grissini dough is made simply from flour, yeast, egg, milk, water, olive oil, and salt. It is rolled by hand into meter-long narrow sticks, painted with a coat of egg-wash, then baked in the hearth. It is not semolina, but cornmeal that gold-dusts the sticks after their removal from the oven to prevent sticking together while they cool.
The eyelinerless sister bends behind the counter and I’m stunned to see just the one standing there. I’ve never seen a more solitary sight. She looks like an amputee. Soon, the sister rises from behind the counter with a stick of grissini in hand. I spread my arms to accept its length. The cornmeal sloughs from the crust, pushes beneath my fingernails and falls to the floor. I look down and see that the floor is covered in it. Instinctively, like the desire to crush a beer can after the last sip, I break the grissini in half and am surprised to find its interior still soft, pliable, and barely warm. The simple smell of pure bread rushes at my nose, captures me like a cold stone plucked exhilarated from a river bottom. I moan even before I taste.
And the taste… My teeth break through the outside crust like a dessert spoon through caramelized crème bruleé sugar, the brown shards dissolving on my tongue and bragging the cornmeal coarseness that so arouses the roof of my mouth. The interior of the grissini, still warm with oven-memory, goes porous and gummy as I chew, its saltiness, as earthy as soil, as oceanic as brain coral, brings all hemispheres of my mouth together into one smooth swallow. I remember Henry Miller’s manifesto on bread—“The Staff of Life”—and wonder if he ever experienced grissini like this. I can eat this stuff until I die.
“Mama mia,” I quake, already embarking on my second, third, ninth bite.
The sisters laugh as one. In the kitchen, Square-Head evicts a spray of sweat from his brow with both hands. The entire meter goes down as easy as an inch.
“Dove resta?” Eyeliner asks.
“Si, dove resta?” Eyelinerless echoes.
The kitchen breathes hard behind them as if stifling a laugh.
“A Il Gioco dell’Oca,” I say, “per uno mese, due mese, tre mese…” I shrug and smile. They laugh.
“Una camera,” Eyeliner says, forehead wrinkling, fingers rubbing together to indicate the expensiveness of a bed-and-breakfast room for one or two or three months.
“No, no,” I say, “Io resta in una tenda.”
“In una tenda?” they bellow in unison, smiles cracking their cheeks into fault-lines.
Together, they descend into laughter. I laugh too, picturing the dark greens of my tent: my home, my bed, my wine cellar. They speak to each other so rapidly; their mouths careen as unmuffled cars around a tight curve. They crash beautifully again into laughter.
Disintegrating into coughs, the sisters notice me staring through the kitchen door’s window at Square-Head.
“Nostre fratello,” Eyelinerless hacks.
“Si, nostre fratello,” Eyeliner hacks back.
He is their brother. The Hydra is a family.
Before I can ask for a bunch of grissini, before I can point to the baci di dama, the two sisters turn for the kitchen and their square-headed brother, and disappear behind the door. I am alone again in the front room and confused. Was it something I said? Was it the way I chewed? Have they decided not to associate with this unshaven American—beard sprouting as wheat—who lives in a tent? I touch the glass case of pastries, my fingerprints staying there to do my begging for me. As I prepare to leave, the kitchen door swings open; a plume of warmth and grain billows into the room.
It is Square-Head. He is shorter than he looked in the kitchen, in his fifties, and topped with gray hair. His white undershirt is drenched in sweat and his arms burst willow-wise with salt-and-pepper hair. His glasses, each lens as wide as a wine coaster, match the shape of his head. He is holding a cluster of grissini in one hand like a nuclear family of magic wands. Without a word, with only a rhinoceros grunt, he waves me toward the open kitchen door with his grissini-less hand.
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It’s cruel what bread can do sometimes: the smell, the taste taking you someplace deceptively familiar, deceptively simple; not the womb, but the conception of the womb in middle-age; a lovely false implanted memory; the soil you only think you’re from; the home you always wish you had.
Belted by the warm kitchen air, the smell of a farm breathing, I return to central Illinois, to my college years, to my get-rich-quick schemes conjuring “back-to-the-basics” advertising for the Ford Motor Company. I sat at an outside iron table with two of my childhood friends—a warm spring Champaign day at the Kopi Café, riddled with coffee and idea. The air was dense with cow and flower. Jeff, Keiter, and I, all with hair down to the middles of our backs, spoke of the Everyman-Middle America ad campaign into our collective dictaphone before we ever met the Everyman, before we knew what Middle America might be about. We envisioned a Ford truck parked at the edge of a farm at sunset, flashers on, the flannel-clad driver down on hands and knees in orange or rose or blue light, face in the soil. Then: a black screen with the slogan Smell the dirt…Ford. We saluted one another and our obvious genius with another round of Ethiopian Harrars.
Bread and coffee: that’s what I smell; an elixir so intoxicating I feel I am breathing not underwater, but under-liqueur. The circus of Eyeliner, Eyelinerless, and Square-Head call me into a silent barbershop trio of sweat and flour and a better life.
My body, as if possessing a brain outside my brain, answers the call, pushes its dimes of sweat from beneath my skin for their first breaths of air since my waking. My hands, like a mouth, water. And as Square-Head, with a hairy right-angled wink, calls me “Viene, viene qua,” to a stainless steel surface coated in a flour-and-egg sheen, I know my hands will not leave unsatisfied.
Heart beats, forehead sweats, hands touch. And I touch a voluptuous mound of dough, yellow as lemon, big as a cantaloupe. I swear I am grasping the culinary world’s spirit animal, its orb, its crystal ball, and if I can somehow squint right, I can tell the future; I am only on the antipasto, sure, but with this circular soft immortal in my hands, I have the power to see the dolce.
Square-Head plucks at his apron strings and I expect to hear a symphony in C. He pulls the white oiled cloth over his head and holds it to me: the uniform, the armor, the grissini-baton. Hands absorbing the dough’s clairvoyant energy, I know he’s going to say Prego before he does. And before he does, I wink at the dough and wonder if it knows where it is going; if it knows it is only in its adolescence—from flour to dough to oven to mouth. I breathe hard, yeasty air sweetening me like syrup all the way down.
“Prego,” he says and unfurls the white apron like a shroud.
I loop the straps over my neck, lace the ties around my waist and feel as a knight: impermeable, sword-wielding, shining like a Champaign soil. Square-Head pinches a section of dough and pulls it from its whole with a thumb and three fingers. His pinky, it seems, wants to remain innocent. The twins coo at the smaller bit of dough as if at a chick stepping freshly from the hen. I picture the larger dough ball running maniacally over the work surface with its head cut off. Yes: this dough is ripe for the slaughter. I want its blood.
Square-Head, shaking his head in ecstasy or showmanship, lets loose a cirrus cloud of flour from his hair and teaches me the art of grissini. It is in the hands. He rolls the smaller dough piece between both palms—there is no escape now—until a forearm length snake dangles just millimeters above the floor. It is sheepish; a hesitant toe reaching to test cold, cold water. It knows it will eventually recoil. As Square-Head then takes the other end, looping the snake into a chest-high oval, and shakes the dough into full extension, demonstrating its impossible elasticity, I wonder if I’m trapped in a Bible story. Surely, there is a first moral to be found in this kitchen and this dough. Surely, the twins mean something, don’t they?
“Prego, prego,” Square-Head says, rolling the raw grissini in cornmeal and setting it on an oiled baking sheet.
Like the toe, I reach in and pinch a piece of dough between my fingers. When I don’t recoil, I expect the ball to scream like a boiling lobster, but …nothing; no sound at all; just a soft easy give like a biscuited hand to a toothless old dog’s mouth. The dough and my fingers come together all gums and jowl and liver snack. Rolling the dough between my hands, palms going the way of oatmeal, Eyeliner sings, “Si,” Eyelinerless echoes, “Si,” and Square-Head undertones it all with an I’ll-be-damned “Si” of his own. Today, I am making grissini. Tomorrow, the world.
Behind me the hearth hushes us all with its awaiting whisper. I am lulled into a rhythm: pluck, roll, breathe, pluck, roll, breathe, wipe the forehead, smile at the siblings, pluck, roll, breathe. Soon, I have made an entire tray of grissini, dusting the dozing dough-strings with a grainy blanket of cornmeal. Go to sleep, go to sleep, close your big egg-yolk eyes.
Square-Head, knowing obviously when to take matters into his own hands, slides a wooden paddle under the baking sheet and carries it to the oven. When it goes in, the fire leaps to embrace it, and gives up, at the same time, a sheet of finished grissini to Square-Head’s reaching paddle. The hot grissini (don’t you dare call them breadsticks) lie cooling like coppered armbands unrolled, waiting patiently for the proper ceremony. I am drenched in sweat, covered in cornmeal, gritty as a swimmer going straight from ocean to sand. And I do smell a slight sea-saltiness rising from the hot, hardening grissini. For what must be the ten-thousandth time since I’ve been in Italy, I kiss my fingertips.
“Sale del terra,” I say to them all, the twins now unwrapping brand new dough balls—the grissini mothers—from their plastic wraps, Square-Head nodding with his hands on his hips, admiring his craft and his student.
Salt of the earth. When the twins lead me back to the front of the store, my hands full of grissini—some mine, some theirs—I feel as if I’m not only stepping into a meat-locker, but into the 19th century. Time and temperature unspool around me. I am shocked to see that three hours have passed since I entered the Panetteria. I wonder if the crystal dough ball somehow transported me, somehow anticipated the synchronous “Ciaos” from the twins, the vicious wave goodbye from Square-head in the kitchen.
The front door’s silver bells throw their light at my feet like refugees. Somehow, they too have slipped through space, found their way back to me. I am F.D.R., Margaret Thatcher, Joan of Arc, Tarzan. I have made grissini. I am going to the street. When I open the door, those crazy, fantastic bells ring above me. The cobblestone is new and old all at once. The spell is breaking, but it’s not broken. When I turn back into the store, before I allow the door to close, I am somehow not surprised to see that the twins’ goodbye-waves are not identical at all.
