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Daily Bread, Holiday Breads
Appears in
Published 1989
Give us this day our daily bread was not an idle prayer in the old Savoie. All the sources to which I have referred for information have stressed that bread was no more no less than sacred to everyone. One look at the slopes on which the grains used to make it were grown gives away one of the reasons for this reverence. Cultivating and gathering this grain was exhausting work, and it was not unusual to gather barely enough to last the full year.
So whoever made the bread dough traced the sign of the cross on it; and so did whoever cut into a new loaf. The ritual was that the man of the house was in charge of preparing the dough, a charge that a husband would fulfill when he was present, but delegated to his wife or daughter when, out of necessity, he was away working in a foreign country (see emigration).