BREAD AND BUTTER

"Bread and Butter"




Several months ago, some neighbors invited me over for dinner. It was an unexpected treat as I sat down to a plate with stuffed peppers, mashed potatoes and green beans.

My neighbor's daughter went back into the kitchen and came out with a plate of buttered sliced bread and set it on the table.

Although I was engrossed with my stuffed peppers, I took one look at the buttered bread and so many memories flooded over me.

It had been ages since I'd eaten buttered bread with dinner, and yet it was on the table every night from the time I was a child well into my adult years, and my grown sons would serve sliced bread with butter for dinner nightly. But somehow, over the past few years, we've all switched to rolls, flat breads, or the like, instead of the basic staple of sliced buttered bread. And it's just not the same.

When I was little, the only time we had rolls was on Sundays or special occasions, and I continued that practice as an adult.

Bread has been a human staple for thousands of years, and it's available in so many forms. It's sad that the practice of removing fresh, sliced bread from its wrapper, buttering it, and serving it with dinner seems to have gone by the wayside. Is it simply not haute cuisine anymore?

Progress and commercialism has helped us in so many ways, yet sometimes we forget to appreciate the simplicity of certain foods. Don't get me wrong--I love trying new things and have enjoyed much haute cuisine in my life. But as I sat at my neighbor's dinner table, eating a slice of buttered bread, I savored how good something so basic could taste.

Bread is one of life's staples. Just as wonderful in its most humble forms as it can be as a gussied up dinner roll.

I'm grateful to my neighbors for reintroducing me to something that was such a longstanding part of my life, for reintroducing something I had been missing-simplicity.

This coming Thanksgiving, when everyone sits down to eat their big meal and give thanks for all that we have, let's not forget that it is the simple things in life for which we should be grateful.



Sherry Hill

This was published in the WV Gazette