Bathed Bread 🛁 🥖

A Spicy Tuna Salad Sandwich

Hello everyone. This week I’ve written you a recipe for a great spicy tuna sandwich (with a link to a video), plus a bit about bread, evolution, civilisation, and salad Niçoise. Enjoy!

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It would be whimsical to say that bread was the birth of civilisation, but I recently got my poetic license from a 10 week online course, so I’m going to go with it. Bread is older than farming and in many ways, older than civilization itself.

For a long time, we thought it came after agriculture, that humans domesticated wheat, then figured out what to do with it. But the oldest bread we’ve found, discovered in Jordan in 2018, was baked about 14,000 years ago, 4000 years before the first fields were sown. It was flatbread, made from wild einkorn and barley, ground by hand and cooked on a hot rock or the ashes of a fire.

Once we began farming wheat around 10,000 BCE, everything changed. Farming tethered us to the land, gave us villages, then cities, then kingdoms. Bread was no longer just food but a measure of life itself; harvests meant survival, failed crops meant famine. Grain stores became power, bread became tax, offering, and even metaphor. Our bodies changed too. The enzymes that let most of us digest starch became more common, our jaws and teeth shrank, our guts adapted to a cereal-heavy diet. Wheat, barley, and rye quite literally rewired us. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari makes a compelling argument that in a way, wheat domesticated man more than man domesticated wheat.

Somewhere along the way, perhaps Egypt, a forgotten lump of dough began to ferment and bubble, and bread began to rise and become light and leavened. From there it travelled everywhere; soft and pocketed in the Levant, chewy and charred in North Africa, dense and dark in Northern Europe. Each loaf a marker of its place and climate, a story of grain and fire repeated for millennia.

Yesterday’s Bread

Ever since humans have made bread they’ve been finding ways to use it up. Because bread making originally comes from the ‘fertile crescent’ (the arc of land stretching from modern-day Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jordan and Syria up through Southeastern Turkey and down through Iraq and Western Iran) this is where a lot of leftover bread recipes originated, and spread from across the Mediterranean.

These come in all shapes and forms. Stale bread is mixed with meat or vegetables to become stuffings, soaked in broth to become the base of soups and stews like Portuguese açorda and Tunisian leblabi, or torn and fried to bulk up salads. It’s this last category, bread salads, that we’re dipping into today. Levantine fattoush, Italian panzanella and Cretan dakos are all good examples. You get lots of adjacent dishes too, North African salads like Moroccan taktouka and Algerian hriss sometimes have stale bread mixed into them, and even Spanish pan con tomate isn’t far away.

Despite being French, having 3 restaurants, 6 Michelin stars and 2 accents in her name, Hélèn Darroze’s salad Niçoise, which includes cooked green beans and potatoes, was labeled as "a massacre of the recipe", "sacrilege", and a violation of the "ancestral traditions" of the salad.

Salad Niçoise

The most famous salad of all time comes from the Provençal city of Nice in South East France. It’s not exactly a bread salad, but bear with me. You will have all heard of salad Niçoise, you’ve probably eaten one too. It might have been good, or you might not get what all the fuss is about. The bad version is the culinary equivalent of a Ryanair flight to Nice: recognisable, but shorn of all romance. The lettuce, always lettuce, comes in damp, anonymous shreds, probably from a bag that says ‘washed & ready’. The beans are limp and khaki, the tomatoes taste of less than nothing. There are no anchovies, because someone in the kitchen is “not sure if people like them.” Instead, there is a heap of wet, grey tuna that could double as grout. A surly drizzle of balsamic glaze, the international symbol of culinary surrender, zigzags over the top like crime-scene tape. The whole thing is cold, miserable, and vaguely accusing, as if it knows you wanted the chips instead. Don’t worry, we’re going to make a good one.

The earliest recipes for salad Niçoise are nothing more than tomatoes with anchovies and olive oil. As time went on, other ingredients from the area were added. Niçoise olives, red pepper, hard boiled eggs, maybe artichoke hearts. Then, sometime around 1960, someone decided that enough was enough and no more ingredients were allowed. Now, any attempt at deviation is met with cold fury.

Despite being French, having 3 restaurants, 6 Michelin stars and 2 accents in her name, Hélèn Darroze’s salad Niçoise, which included cooked green beans and potatoes, was labeled as "a massacre of the recipe", "sacrilege", and a violation of the "ancestral traditions" of the salad. She was warned that it is "dangerous to innovate". Phew.

The Bread & The Bath

Disputed contents aside, where niçoise becomes a bread salad (sandwich) is when you put it in between bread, at which point it becomes ‘pan bagnat’, literally ‘bathed bread’. You find this sandwich in bakeries all over Nice and the idea is very simple; it’s a way of using up yesterday’s bread by ‘bathing’ it from within with a filling of juicy salad. Let’s talk about that bread quickly. It varies from hearty, crusty, country style rolls to softer white baps. The choice is yours. If your bread is a couple of days old, that’s great. If not, slice it open and lightly toast it. Traditionally, they’re big rolls and they’re stacked with filling; if some of the contents doens’t fall out the back when you bite it, there’s not enough in there.

My version below stays fairly true to the original but borrows ideas from a few of those close cousins I mentioned earlier. There’s another great tuna salad sandwich from just across the sea in Tunisia called ‘friccase’ which is similar, but does include cooked potatoes (sorry Nice) plus a lively swipe of their beloved chilli paste harissa. I’ve also grated some of the tomatoes a la pan con tomate to spread directly onto the bread, something I saw Felicity Cloak do in her version. If you can find it, I like the jarred tuna you find in Spain and Portugal. It’s quite a step up from the tinned stuff in terms of taste and texture, but tinned is fine too.

A final though - I’m a huge fan of a pestle and mortar and use mine frequently. Lot’s of recipes that use one often suggest a small blender of food processor as an alternative, and you can of course do that. But, I think that you often get a better result, more easily, with a pestle and mortar. Plus, they’re easier to clean. In this recipe, I would suggest finely grating your garlic as an alternative if you don’t have one.