daily bread

This morning I was in the bakery near work, and got to thinking of how endearing these places are. There's the crowd of old guys in the corner that obviously meet every morning for a long gas over coffee, watching the traffic of people arriving and departing. There's the little box of toys in the corner for the kids (as with almost every shop and restaurant), the steady stream of construction guys with their paint-dabbed steel toe boots.

Bakeries here are fortunately more in the European facet of Iceland, not the American one, so they are plentiful and very much a part of the routine. They sell all kinds of breads, from the light and fluffy to the most weighty seed-loaded varieties (I love the type with flax seeds!) plus the more interesting sweet and gooey stuff, like the vínarbrauð, a complicated confection of pastry, with almond paste, frosting, and a sprinkling of nuts. I prefer the pecan variety which just focuses on pecans without all the frosting and chocolate and so forth.

Then we have snúður, the old standby, a yeasty swirl of dough, glazed and drooled with a choice of frostings. I prefer the caramel one, but they come in chocolate or a mysterious pink one. These can be consumed all by yourself but I prefer when they're shared. These are nearly as big as my head so a quarter is plenty for me!

One thing you will not see is muffins though. Muffins have not established much of a beachhead here in this country, so it's going to have to be scones, crumpets, or something else borrowed from another land to the east of us. Sure, Iceland does have its unborrowed baked goods traditions, but they tend to be pretty simple, such as the soðbrauð, basically a fried bread studded with caraway seeds, or the holiday-essential laufabrauð. This one's kind of a fatty cracker made with fancy cutwork patterns. It's pretty evident that centuries of shortages didn't make for much ability for super creative pastry inventions. Still, I'm quite pleased that Icelanders were so willing to borrow the best of other lands and make them so freely here.

The only caveat is that the morning service can be astoundingly slow. Perhaps it's the early hour, maybe it's just the way bakeries work, but this morning I watched one woman buy half the store, including stacks of sandwich toppings (these boxes of "shrimp salad" and and "potato salad" almost require a post themselves), about a dozen loaves of bread (all having to be sliced, of course), five liter-boxes of juice, and when I left she was still adding on cakes and pastries. The other guy in front of me had a good 10 minutes to ponder his order thanks to miss buying-for-half-the-Icelandic-population but when he got to the counter he was all "bara... bara.... sko... bara..hérna" (just.. just... so...just..here). I have to confess that my American give-me-fast-service! kicked in and I was left shifting about impatiently while he decided that what he really needed was two croissants. Yep, borrowing from France too.