Toast · Chapter 2 of 8

The summer I really discovered bread.

You clicked Jump to Recipe. That is so sweet. You are going to need the context, though, and the context is in Italy.
Tuscany, 2011

I had never seen a hill before. Not really.

I went to Tuscany in 2011 to find myself. I found a hill. Then I found another hill, which was in many ways the same hill, and I stood between them and wept, because the light was doing the thing Nana Bev's kitchen used to do, except for free, and everywhere.

My guide was a man named Luca, who did not speak English and did not want to. Every morning he brought me a loaf of bread from his cousin's bakery and set it in front of me without a word. I came to understand this as friendship. Luca later sent an invoice.

Rolling Tuscan hills at golden hour, a row of cypress trees, and in the foreground, enormous and glowing, a single loaf of rustic bread on a stone wall.
The hills. The bread. The light. None of this is toast, and that is the point of the chapter.
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The loaf

What Luca's bread taught me.

Luca's cousin's bread had a crust you could knock on, like a door. Inside, it was soft, open and a little sour, like my marriage at the time, which I promise we will get to.

I asked Luca's cousin whether she ever toasted it. She looked at me for a long moment and said something in Italian that I have since had translated by three separate people. Two say it means “Well.” The third would not tell me.

I did not make toast once in Tuscany. That is important. Hold on to that. I will not come back to it.