Ours is a bread-loving family. Bread in all its many forms baked as a staple in countries all over the world isn't called 'the staff of life' for no reason. It's not just its portability as a food in parts of the world where that is a plus, given that carbohydrates and proteins as so vital to the human diet, but its appeal is universal; when people are hungry they think of bread. Bread and salt were once considered the basic necessities of survival in a hungry planet.

My husband recalls fondly yeast-raised coffee cakes his mother used to bake. Friday night baking, he remembers, was a fun occasion when his mother cooked and baked with another woman, in a practise that became a comforting tradition; they lived upstairs, the other family downstairs. They brought with them recipes from Eastern Europe to North America. As did my own mother and her sisters. My mother's older sister was a practised and perfect cook and baker, unlike my mother for whom everything seemed to turn out lumpy, dry and overbaked.

Our daughter and our younger son can bake bread effortlessly. Our older son's wife can too, as she is the most capable and knowledgeable-about-everything woman I've ever met, but she turned her creativity toward theology and empathy, not much one for domestic affairs. My husband, years ago bought a bread-making machine and he was fascinated with the technique of piling in ingredients and allowing the machine to take over.

In my 62-year kitchen experience I liked to experiment with various types of yeast-raised bread doughs. Baking breads, rolls, and pastries of various types. Producing a yeast dough is amazingly simple; the ingredients themselves simple, though they can be alternated in any number of ways with replacement ingredients or ingredients that add a special character to the resulting dough. Pizza, which is so resoundingly popular universally, is a snap to produce, the dough requiring only yeast, sugar, water, salt and flour; a bit of olive oil. There's the dough, work with it, topping it with the ingredients of your choice.

I read a feature article in last weekend's newspaper on bread and found it quite interesting. I don't keep up with trends, simply not interested. So I'd heard of breads like ciabatta, knew of the popularity of wood-fired ovens, and artisanal breads boasting to be replications of authentic period breads that grab peoples' imaginations for superiority over current bread products. And if one instantly thinks of rough, dark 'peasant' bread (think Heidi) as opposed to the softly marshmallow texture and limpness of white sandwich bread the impression left is that the bread of the past was vastly superior.

Then that was punctured by the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, Nathan Myhrvold, researching bread, its manufacture, reputation and origins and publishing a six-volume set titled Modernist Cuisine, with co-author chef Francisco Migoya whose 2,438 pages and $625 pricetag didn't stop it from becoming a runaway best-seller among food cognoscenti. They pricked the fiction of authentic early period breads being superior to what can be produced today (definitely not the cotton-batten sandwich bread of today) with superior ingredients and ovens maintaining a constant temperature and more knowledgeable techniques.

Interesting how suggestible human nature is. Interesting how vital to our existence simple ingredients with their chemical and nutritional properties mated properly satisfy our most basic needs.