Advent 4

Volume 4 (Brain to Castin): Bread.

There is a silly game you can play with Britannica - you measure the cultural worth of a topic by the size of its entry in the encyclopaedia. By this measure today's entry is an important one - four and a half pages of dense text and two pages of photographs of the manufacturing process. Let's get the definition out of the way:

Bread is a baked product made of dough that has been raised by yeast or other gas-forming agent. Some of the gases are trapped in the dough, which is hardened by yeast.

But that's enough of the technical stuff. Let's talk about Big Fat Pig's favourite bread - I give you naan bread, specifically keema naan, a meat-paste filled Indian flat bread. I love a good curry, most particularly those late-night convivial curries with fellow rugby players at the Light of Bengal in Perry Common. I have long been of the persuasion that you don't need rice with a good curry, just a good keema naan. As to my favoured curry, well my tastes have varied over the years from the very hot to the mild but these days I would nominate the Paneer Peas, and just to prove that I am not a vegetarian I accompany that with, yes, a keema naan.