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  3. L'EMPORDà DE MANEL COSTA-PAU

L'Empordà de Manel Costa-Pau

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For a long time we have been suffering the disappearance or disfiguring of lifestyles, customs, and traditions. From time to time we see attempts of variable effect to recover some elements, a show perhaps, a festive element, or some meal. Usually it’s an article that businesses believe can be successful in contemporary consumer-society. An example is the three-crusted bread.

According to variations found in our linguistic horizon, it an also be called bread with three horns, tres corns, or simply crostons bread, or cantells, cantons, colze, corona, canonge, or simply funeral bread.  It used to be served at funerals. It is bread with a rustic crunchy crust, fine and spongy within. Above all, it has to be prepared with very white flour. Wheat flour. Mediterranean wheat that demands cold winters, hot and dry summers, and rain in the intermediate seasons.

This bread has been very successful. Brought back from oblivion, it is becoming famous. This year the Federation of Bakers Associations has given the three-crusted bread a prominent position in the show of historic Catalan breads it made for the president of the Principality. Probably this good luck is due to the 1200 reproductions of the bread that adorn the walls of the Torre Gorgot in Figueres. Salvador Dalí commissioned the plasterer Narcís Pericot to make them according to a model formed and baked by the baker Masó Fábrega, from Salt.  See Pa amb tomaquet by Jaume Fàbrega. It wasn’t in vain that the three-crusted bread was one of Dali’s aesthetic amulets, like the bent watches or the skin of the sea.
Fort the centenary of Dali’s death in 2004, the baker’s guild of Figueres put up 1500 three-crusted breads for sale in a large tent on the Rambla of the town. Increasingly, bakers relate the recovery of this bread and artisan bakery in general with an explicit desire to reclaim and pass on this tradition.

What we cannot recuperate, and nobody is trying to do so, is the spirit with which Saint Honorat, who had been baker, invented the procedure to make our three-crusted bread and which became a Catalan baker’s tradition.

As a youth I never once saw funeral bread exhibited in a baker’s shop, for the three-crusted bread was taken directly from the bakery to the funeral. Pure, clean wheat. Like the soul of a well-confessed deceased.
I remember people when I was young who loved going to funerals because of the delicious three-crusted bread.//                      

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