Black Bread and Honey

Everyone’s had the experience of savouring a bite of food and being transported to a different time or place. Something in the taste or texture of the food triggers a memory, say from childhood or when you first fell in love.

But the taste can just as easily trigger some revelation in the present. A sunset can be transformed into something more sublime than it has otherwise been. Or a piece of music playing in that instant might fuse with the flavour you’re experiencing and become forever associated with the melody or vice versa. A few lines from a poem can make you thankful for being alive!

These “triggers” could come from anywhere and take you anywhere in your life at any moment. A poem could transport you to a mountain top you’d hiked to the last time you were with your mother, a friend, or your dog. A summer rainfall by a lake might overwhelm you with the grandeur of nature. “This good, good earth,” you might say to yourself.

Certificate of authenticity

These moments are your certificate of authenticity of being human, proof that you have lived life and are capable of reflection.

They can just as quickly take you to dark moments, places you don’t want to think about, or fears you’d prefer to be rid of. They’re all the same energy, which can be uplifting or terrifying.

I’ve been reading A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, a U.S. author. The title sounds a little like John LeCarré or Graham Greene, but the novel is more Marcel Proust. 1.

It’s loaded with these moments of clarity or remembrances of things past as the main character, Count Rostov, confronts moments of his life before the Bolshevik Revolution. As he observes the last gasps of Tsarist Russia, he is forced to find his place in the new society. He’s an unrepentant Russian aristocrat who a party tribunal has sentenced to life imprisonment in (of all places) a luxurious Moscow hotel, The Hotel Metropol. 2.

Remembrance of things past

The novel is not really about Moscow but the cauldron of history and people who flow in and out of the hotel’s lobbies, hallways and rooms. Rostov has been “imprisoned” for publishing a poem that appeared to sympathize with the aristocracy. 3 Other aristocrats continue to live in the hotel as if nothing had happened, but it is otherwise occupied by bureaucratic officials and offices of the Communist Party.

The novel offers much to learn about the years following the revolution and the tumultuous change it brought to Russian society and the world. But the core of A Gentleman in Moscow is Rostov’s emotional discovery of self.

Rostov’s aristocratic demeanour is mostly torn away, and he moves to a shabby room in the servant’s quarters. Ironically, his reduced quarters allow him to unravel layers of society and find meaning and place in the larger world.

Jennifer and I have been watching a recently released TV production of A Gentleman in Moscow starring Ewan McGregor.

News on the world

I’m nowhere near the novel’s end, but one scene made me think about taste and how human senses can open new eyes to the world.

Count Rostov has discovered a way out onto the Hotel Metropol’s roof in one beautiful scene. He beheld the skyline of Moscow circa 1923. It is dawn, the blue sky is crisp and clear, and the horizon is illuminated in a pink sunlight glow. Rostov takes in Moscow’s panorama, the buildings and precincts of the city, wondering where his old haunts are, noting new buildings that have appeared since his incarceration.

He is ecstatic to see Moscow’s broad sweep. He thinks he is alone, but an old worker repairing the roof interrupts his reverie. The “handyman” is as startled as Rostov is to find him there.

They discuss the city and its changes. The handyman asks if Rostov would like to join him for coffee. The tastes of coffee, a slice of black bread, and honey open worlds of memory and human connection between the two men: a lowly member of the proletariat and a former aristocrat.

Moscow skyline, 1923

The old handyman led the Count to the northeast corner of the roof, where he had established something of a camp between two chimneys. In addition to a three-legged stool, there was a small fire burning in a brazier on which a coffee pot was steaming. The old man had chosen the spot well, for while it was out of the wind he still had a view of the Bolshoi that was only slightly impaired by some old crates stacked at the edge of the roof.
…

“Can I pour you a cup?”

“Thank you.”

As the coffee was being poured, the Count wondered whether this was the beginning or end of the old man’s day. Either way, he figured a cup of coffee would hit the spot. For what is more versatile? As at home in the tin, as it is in Limoges, coffee can energize the industrious at dawn, calm the reflective at noon, or raise the spirits of the beleaguered in the middle of the night.

“It’s perfect,” said the Count.

The old man leaned forward. “The secret is in the grinding.” He pointed to a little wooden apparatus with an iron crank. “Not a minute before you brew.”

The Count raised his eyebrows with appreciation for the uninitiated.

Yes, in the open air on a summer night, the old man’s coffee was perfect. In fact, the only thing that spoiled the moment was a humming in the air—the sort that might be emitted from a faulty fuse or a radio receiver.

“Is that the tower?” the Count asked.

“Is what the tower?”

“The humming.”

The old man looked up in the air for a moment, then cackled.

“That’ll be the girls at work.”

“The girls?”

The old man pointed with a thumb to the crates that compromised his view of the Bolshoi. In the predawn light, the Count could make out a whirl of activity above them.

“Are those . . . bees?”

“Indeed, they are.”

“What are they doing here?”

“Making honey.”

“Honey!”

The old man cackled again.

“Making honey is what bees does. Here.”

Leaning forward, the old man held out a roof tile on which there were two slices of black bread slathered with honey. The Count accepted one and took a bite.

The first thing that struck him was actually the black bread. For when was the last time he had even eaten it? If asked outright, he would have been embarrassed to admit. Tasting of dark rye and darker molasses, it was a perfect complement to a cup of coffee. And the honey? What an extraordinary contrast it provided. If the bread was somehow earthen, brown, and brooding, the honey was sunlit, golden, and gay. But there was another dimension to it. . . . An elusive, yet familiar element . . . A grace note hidden beneath, or behind, or within the sensation of sweetness.

“What is that flavor . . . ?” the Count asked almost to himself.

“The lilacs,” the old man replied. Without turning, he pointed with his thumb back in the direction of the Alexander Gardens.

Of course, thought the Count. That was it precisely. How could he have missed it? Why, there was a time when he knew the lilacs of the Alexander Gardens better than any man in Moscow. When the trees were in season, he could spend whole afternoons in happy repose under their white and purple blossoms.

“How extraordinary,” the Count said with an appreciative shake of the head.

“It is and isn’t,” said the old man. “When the lilacs are in bloom, the bees’ll buzz to the Alexander Gardens and the honey’ll taste like the lilacs. But in a week or so, they’ll be buzzing to the Garden Ring, and then you’ll be tasting the cherry trees.”

“The Garden Ring! How far will they go?”

“Some say a bee’ll cross the ocean for a flower,” answered the old man with a smile. “Though I’ve never known one to do so.”

The Count shook his head, took another bite, and accepted a second cup of coffee. “As a boy, I spent a good deal of time in Nizhny Novgorod,” he recalled for the second time that day.

“Where the apple blossoms fall like snow,” the old man said with a smile. “I was raised there myself. My father was the caretaker on the Chernik estate.”

“I know it well!” exclaimed the Count. “What a beautiful part of the world . . .”

So as the summer sun began to rise, the fire began to die, and the bees began to circle overhead, the two men spoke of days from their childhoods when the wagon wheels rattled in the road, and the dragonflies skimmed the grass, and the apple trees blossomed for as far as the eye could see.”

— A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel by Amor Towles, 2016

I think anyone who works in food, including this humble Happy Monk baker, secretly hopes that something he or she cooks (or bakes) will inspire the same revelatory response Count Rostov experiences here.

I can’t imagine a greater reward!

ADDENDUM: Watch for a new Happy Monk take on Borodinsky Bread, a take on Russian Black Bread.

---

---