"Bread of Heaven" v "Bland of Hope and Glory"

When did we English lose our love of bread? When did we consider bread to be something without taste, without texture, a product of Chorleywood that balls up on the pallete and does little for our fibre-loving bowels.

Here in Germany the bread has character, even the bread in supermarkets like Aldi. It has a range of colour from natural white (not the luminous white so beloved by the British sliced loaf) to a black so deep it would need Dylan Thomas to describe it. And taste! Breads sit there on the shelf, pugnacious, crying out, "Go on, try me, I dare you!" German bread needs a taste scale. Scovilles aren't quite right but along the right lines.

For the uniformed tourist (i.e.us) each loaf is a voyage of discovery, selected randomly from names we can't pronounce nor will remember later. Today's is rich, tangy, ebony brown and laden with seeds. The next loaf is even darker without the seeds, a challenge yet to be undertaken.

Then there's the hams...