Stick it!

While we have not quite finished the vast amounts of bread that just happen to be left over from the time that there was too much bought – for various reasons – we do find that there is an occasional need for more. Like when I have to take some lunch with me when I go to work, or when I need to find something quick and easy to eat for dinner and have lot of soup on hand, the logical accompaniment being, of course, toast. So every now and then we go out there and get some bread, but not the nice soft squishy white kind, not for a while now, at least. But there is invariably temptation that crunches at the bakery, be it the very warm and familiar Yazdani, in the Fort area, the better lighted and more accessible by road City Bakery in Worli, not too far away from where the office is located, or the close-to-home Front Street, which is, the sign has said for a while now, moving to another location not too distant from its current site. There are others, equally good, but further off my beaten track, of which I shall speak anon. And that temptation comes in the form of breadsticks, also called soup sticks, which all three of the shops I generally prefer specialise in.

Yazdani has plain and simple breadsticks, with an occasional tinge of garlic, jeera or even cheese. These are not very long, stout and uneven, which makes for a wonderful distribution of taste and mouth feel, and almost always very crunchy and crisp. They come in crackly plastic bags heat-sealed at one end and perma-sealed at the other, not hard to open but rather noisy to sneak into during a meeting. City Bakery has a wider range of flavour – there is the ordinary breadstick, crunchy, thick, occasionally siamesed with a twin, identical or, more likely, fraternal. Then there is the cheese stick, which is tangy-salty, a pale orange in colour, with the once-in-a-while bite that will spark the cutting edge of chilli powder in your mouth when you least expect it. And there is the ajwain breadstick, which happens to be Small Cat’s favourite, which has the distinctive flavour and smell of the herb-seed sprinkled through it. Front Street is more assembly line, with both white and whole wheat breadsticks of uniform size and length, though not boringly so, most of the time crunchy and perfectly salted.

The others – for now is the time of the ‘anon’ I spoke of before – are a-plenty. Moshe’s bake shop and deli at Crossword, in Kemps Corner, has long thin breadsticks with a herby tinge. But they are not always crisp and go stale very quickly, so I tend to prefer the lavache instead, which Small Cat also likes rather a lot. The Bake Shop down the road towards Nana Chowk is also a good place to find really delicious and fabulously crunchy breadsticks – both the white and the whole wheat are thick, not too long, hard and incredibly noisy; they do not break on demand, but snap where they want to, and almost hurt the teeth as you try and bite into one and then chew it up to the last yummy morsel. I have a veritable passion for the whole wheat sticks, even though I know that eating too many of them is not exactly a good idea, given that I am not stick-like and slim any more, even though I do have my moments of crispness.

But in all this, it is very rare – in fact, I cannot remember any such occasion – when I have eaten a breadstick the way I am reliably informed it is meant to be eaten: with soup. Often in the bread basket in fancy hotels, I tend to hold on and break it as a sort of conversational change of direction, if I am with a casual friend, or a moment of emphasis, if I am involved in converse with a close buddy or a fond parent. It is also useful when waved as a sort of filler during an awkward hiatus in speech, or when a bubble threatens to burst out of your tummy and gauchely forth as a crass burp. And, when you are irritated by what someone is saying to you and need a diversion of thought, a breadstick is a very valuable weapon; you can hold it and break it sharply, pretending it is the neck of the person who is annoying you at that time.

But a breadstick is all about finger-play, having something to deal with while you are thinking about what to say and how, having a diversion from the actual emotion that you may feel that has an unfortunate habit of showing on your face and when you want to laugh but know that it would not be politic to do so. And, for all those reasons and more, I bless whoever thought them up.