The simple Luxury of Daily Bread

Photography by Roberto Bigano

“Once upon a time, in Sardinia, everything was harvested at home, processed at home, which is why there were little rustic cottages surrounding the courtyard, each one named for the gifts of the soil contained within: olive oil house, wheat house, fruit house, and of course, the bread house, a sort of altar or Etruscan tomb, with sieves and palm leaf baskets (small ones, còrbule, and large ones, sas canisteddas) hanging on the walls. “Neighborhood women would assemble to bake the bread; it was quite the undertaking. There was dough to knead and then roll out into broad sheets, handed one after the other to the woman seated at the oven’s mouth, her headscarf tucked high and her face glowing amid the surrounding shadows. She’d lay the sheet of dough atop the blade of a thin, smooth peel: a model made in deep winter by the shepherds of Tonara. Snowbound, they’d carve the peels and, come spring, ride them down to Nuoro on their gaunt horses and sell them. She slid the wooden peel into the oven where the dough, if properly made, would swell in the heat into a great balloon. It was then handed to another woman sitting cross-legged before a small bench, who used a knife to cut it along its edges. Thence issued two steaming wafers that gradually hardened and turned crisp. Stacked high, they were ready to be placed in the sideboard.”