On Friday mornings, I usually drive to Breads Unlimited in Bethesda and buy a challah. And I pick up some other things for the week, like whole wheat bread and maybe a Danish or two (or three). It’s about a 2 mile drive.

The challah is pretty good, but we waste most of it. After all, how much can two people eat on a Friday night, and (unless you use it for French toast – which we really never do), what are you going to do other than eventually throw it out? I’ve suggested to the bakery’s owner that she should sell smaller challahs (even if the price is the same) for smaller families, but she shrugged off the idea.

Now, I can get prettier challah less than one half mile away if I go to Bread Furst (named after the owner, Furstenberg), but beauty is only skin deep and my experience is that Bread Furst challah is pretty tasteless. Supermarket challah loses both on taste and looks. So I drive to Bethesda.

During my early years in St. Louis, dilemmas like this didn’t exist. When we lived with my mother’s parents (until I was 8), we got our challah every Friday from my grandfather’s aunt, Mima Gitel. Gitel (a very old woman – what do you think? Seventy?) lived with her husband Duvid (spelled David), her daughter Myrtle, Myrtle’s husband Oscar and their son (5 years younger than I am) Neil. It turned out they were a hard luck family. After Gitel and David died (as I remember it), Oscar had to close his liquor store in Wellston MO (Happy Hollow Liquors) and perhaps went bankrupt and died, and then Neil (again as I recall) became the victim of drug use and he died very young as well. Myrtle lived a long time, and it is to her that I owe a copy of a partial family tree suggesting that we are the descendants of the Baal Shem Tov.

They were a very traditional Orthodox family, and every Friday Mima Gitel baked challah. Now, I don’t know how many loaves she baked each week, but every Friday my grandfather would stop by their house (it was only a few blocks from ours – they lived on Princeton and we on Delmar in University City) and would bring home two challahs. One was a full size loaf and the other a mini-loaf. And it was just for me. Why? Because I was my grandfather’s first grandson, and therefore deserving of this special treat. The origin of this custom (if it was indeed a custom)? I have no idea.

But I ate my challah, and to this day (because Mima Gitel’s challah was the best challah ever made), I remember the texture and the taste. Nothing can compare.

In those days (I am talking about the late 1940s), grocery shopping was much different from today. My memory is that our extended family got produce from Al’s in the Delmar Loop (that’s where the streetcars from downtown looped around and headed back east), poultry from Vogt Bros. on North and South Road (Avenue?), general groceries from Rapp’s supermarket. Dairy was delivered to the house by Sealtest, and someone named Sam (a distant relative?) delivered eggs. I am not sure where meat came from. Or bread, for that matter.

Later, my mother had very different food shopping habits. She did almost all of her shopping at Straub’s in Clayton. I could never figure out why she did this, as it was probably the most expensive place to get groceries in St. Louis. But she liked the fact that all the meat was graded “prime”, she liked the baked goods, and she liked the fact that everyone in the store knew her by name. So that’s what she did.

Enough for today. One point of trivia. I read a Newsweek article about the very low level of the Mississippi River today. I was struck by one line: it said that 1/3 of the rain that fell on the United States wound up in the Mississippi. Can this be true? (At grade school drinking fountains, when someone took too long, we used to say “You drinking up the whole Mississippi?” We were exaggerating, but today it might not really be much of an exaggeration.)