Open Writing

Life is full of little surprises. For instance, the simple word 'crumb' has been used in English for over 1,000 years. Well, not with the same spelling. It was originally cruma, meaning a small bit of bread. Geoffrey Chaucer used a later spelling in 'The Second Nun's Prologue':

Thynk on the womman Cananee, that sayde,
The whelpes eten some of the crommes alle
That from hir lordes table been yfalle;

[Think how the woman of Canaan said
That even dogs may eat of the crumbs all
Which from her master's table fall;]

Later, it became crome, crom, crume, crowm, crumbe, crumm and eventually our well loved crumb. In the 1500s, 'to pick up one's crumbs' meant to regain weight, to become healthier. Crummy meant fat and fleshy — in 'Martin Chuzzlewit', Charles Dickens has one of the characters say, 'Too much crumb', meaning too fat. 'Crumbs!' as an exclamation of dismay didn't come into use until the later 1800s but its origin seems to be a bit of a mystery.

All this is well and good, but we now have a new meaning or, at least, a new form of the word. In the freezer section of the supermarket there are products such as fish and fritters which, the labels tell us, are coated with a crispy crumb. It might be a light crispy crumb. There is even fish in my fridge which is coated with an 'original crispy crumb'.

Original? The usual antonyms for that are borrowed, stale, used, worn. In general use the opposite might imply that it is a copy or an imitation. In Art, the opposite could be fake or counterfeit. We should be thankful, then, that the frozen fish in question is not coated with an unoriginal crispy crumb.

Of greater concern is the fact that it is a crumb, in the singular, just one crumb. How can a piece of fish be coated with one crumb, original or otherwise? We must analyse the crumb.

My neighbour has given me a packet of Dehydrated Bread Crumbs which are well past their use-by date. He didn't want them and I don't want them, but the list of ingredients on the side of the box is, in a word, extraordinary. At the risk of driving you out of your mind, let me tell you what some of them are:

wheat flour, wholemeal what flour, kibbled rye, linseed, granary malt, kibbled corn, triticale (yes, I had to look that one up, too), kibbled barley, rolled oats, kibbled maize, baker's yeast, rye flour, vegetable fibre (old dried cabbages, is it?), gluten, salt, canola oil, wheat bran, oat bran, sunflour (I think they must mean sunflower) kernels, sesame seed, kibbled soy, soy flour, vinegar, roasted malt flour, semolina (takes me back to my childhood, that one), molasses, fish oil, milk... and the list goes on and on.

All that, just to make crumbs.

However, we are discussing a crumb, just the one crumb which is used to coat a piece of fish. Perhaps there is something in the composition of these crumbs which enables them to be crushed, pressed, pulverised, atomised, compounded, cohered, reconstituted and elasticated. All very mysterious. I pressed my finger into the packet, and found that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these versatile entities had stuck to the end of it. How manufacturers actually process one for coating a whole piece of frozen food will be, when the secret is revealed, another of life's little surprises.

© Copyright Brian Barratt 2009