Comfort Food
Sometimes everyone needs comfort. Maybe it’s just rained on your actual parade. Or maybe a great wave of sadness has just crashed over you, leaving your face streaked with smudgy blue eyeliner. At these times, you don’t want any witnesses. That’s when to seek out a big round loaf of bread.
I say seek out because, let’s face it—baking a loaf of bread takes way too long to be provide the kind of emergency rescue that’s needed in the wake of a catastrophe. Baking bread (good bread, anyway) requires planning, foresight and more than one day.
You need comfort now.
Step One: Turn the oven to 400 degrees then go find a bakery. Or a grocery store. You’ll want a loaf that’s at least 12 inches around. Avoid baguettes. They’re too skinny. Too brittle. They’re likely to snap before you do. And that’s the last thing you need when you just can’t take it anymore.
And don’t buy anything sliced. That will only remind you of how you feel like everything is coming apart—as if some vast exterior force seeks to reduce everything and everyone to a uniform pieces ready to be consumed thoughtlessly by people who never, ever think about the cost of their own banal convenience.
Return home and proceed to the next step.
Step Two: Lock all the doors and windows. Draw the curtains lower the shades and turn off your phone. No one should interrupt this moment. It’s all about you.
Step Three: Put the bread into the oven and set a timer for 10 minutes.
Step Four: Locate a clean towel, washable throw or blanket (a baby blanket is more or less the perfect size if you happen to have one around).
Step Five: When the timer goes off, remove the hot bread from the oven, wrap it in the blanket and hug it straight to your stomach. Feel how warm it is—how the scent of it permeates your clothes. Stay like this for as long as necessary—or until the bread gets cold.
Step Six: Remove the bread from your stomach and ponder what to do with the loaf now. You can, if you choose, eat it. You can do this in whatever way pleases you—by ecstatically ripping hunks off it or by carefully slicing it or by hollowing it out and cramming the cavity with every indulgence you can think of before descending on it in a hedonistic frenzy that leaves your hands smeared with chocolate and raspberry jam.
Alternately you could not eat it at all, opting instead to chuck it at a passing car that offends you. Or you might bury in a shallow grave in the back yard where it will lay decaying and never be spoken of again.
Step Seven: Open the curtains and reestablish contact with the outside world. Stronger. Nourished. And probably no longer so very hungry.