Chleb

Until a loaf is opened it has a custom attached to it. In many Polish households the knife marks a small cross on the underside of a new round before the first slice comes off, and a piece that falls to the floor is picked up and kissed, a habit people describe as respect for something that was once scarce. Accounts of these habits come from family memory and regional ethnography rather than from any single dated source, so they read as texture more than rule. The bread itself is the plain one, chleb, the loaf a bakery sells without a modifier. It is a wheat-rye crumb in most shops, dense enough to stand a knife and mild enough that a buttered slice disappears at breakfast without a topping to help it.

Because the loaf is cut at the table, the kanapka starts with the heel. A long knife goes in at a slight angle and takes a slab about a finger thick, and the crust gives with a dry crackle while the crumb underneath pulls a little at the blade. Butter goes on to the very edge, soft enough to spread without tearing, and then the slice takes whatever the fridge holds: boiled ham, a wheel of tomato dusted with salt, twaróg mashed with chives, a slice of yellow cheese. The tomato leaks first. Within a few minutes its juice reaches the crumb through the butter, which is why a slice is dressed last and eaten promptly, while the butter layer still holds the wet back from the bread.

A wheat-rye loaf sits between two extremes, and that middle is why it became the default. Pure rye is heavy, dark and sour; pure wheat is pale and tender but stales by the next afternoon and tears under cold butter. A mixed dough takes the chew and the keeping quality from the rye and a lighter, rounder crumb from the wheat, so the same loaf serves as breakfast slice, wrapped lunch and the base for a supper of cold cuts and pickles. Day-old slices toast well in a dry pan, and a dried-out heel goes into soup or breadcrumbs. Households that buy a loaf every day rarely think about the flour at all; they judge it by whether the crust still crackles at four in the afternoon.

Bread and salt carry the loaf's ceremonial side. A guest, a bride and groom returning from church, or a new arrival at a family farm can be met at the door with chlebem i solą, a round loaf on a cloth with a small dish of salt beside it. The phrase works as a greeting on its own. The offering uses the same everyday loaf as the breakfast table, and the guest tears off a piece and tastes it with the salt. The gesture offers what the household eats every day.

The sourness at the edge of a mixed loaf changes with the starter and the baker. A shop loaf raised mostly on yeast comes out lighter, with a thin crust and a faint sweetness, and it goes soft by the second day. A loaf from a bakery that keeps a rye sourdough smells of toasted grain and vinegar when it is cut, keeps for most of a week and sours further each day. Between the two sits the supermarket loaf with a bit of both, sliced and bagged. Each of them goes by the same name at the counter, so the buyer reads the loaf by weight in the hand and the colour of the crust, a darker shell usually signalling more rye and more time in the oven.

Origin and history

Rye was the grain of the Polish lands for most of the Middle Ages because it tolerates cold, sandy soil, and bread baked from it, or from rye mixed with wheat where wheat could be had, fed towns and villages alike. No record names a first Polish loaf or a baker who set the proportions, and sources do not say when wheat first joined rye in the everyday dough. The recipe for a household's daily bread was whatever the local mill and the season provided, and the wheat share rose and fell with the harvest and the price.

The mixed loaf gets a dated outline in the twentieth century, when the state wrote it down. A decree of the Minister of Internal Affairs of 27 March 1930, issued with the ministers of the Treasury, Industry and Trade, and Agriculture and published in the Dziennik Ustaw that year, allowed commercial wheat-rye bread to be baked only from a dough of 25 parts wheat flour and 75 parts rye flour. It replaced a decree of 12 September 1928 that had banned baking wheat-rye bread altogether, and the Polish legal database lists it as repealed on 18 August 1938. The decree rested on the 1926 presidential order on securing the supply of everyday goods, which put loaf composition in the same legal category as the price of flour.

So for eight years in the interwar republic the bakery loaf sold across the country had a legal recipe, three parts rye to one of wheat, and a baker who went over the wheat share could be prosecuted. The decree says nothing about sourdough, crust or shape, which stayed with the bakers. A loaf bought in any town in 1932 therefore carried the same grain ratio, and that ratio was printed in the statute book beside rules on flour supply.