Old
Skool
Agége
Bread
A(gE)2Br
As I contemplated the epic task of producing Agege bread that
would turn out as as good as it originally used to be, I became flooded with recollections of my past - with Agege bread. I believe this was even before the bread became popularly known as Agege bread.
Backtrack to the late 70's....our neighbor, Mrs. Ade---- was a retailer, and would have fresh bread in wooden boxes delivered like every other night by a bread van. I'll never forget the aroma that permeates the air when the plastic sheets used to cover the bread boxes were removed. Lucky me! I was never starved of that same aroma for years because by sheer providence, there happened to be bakeries around my original birth home in the Palmgrove area of Mushin, and present home in Dopemu-Agege, and the air was constantly filled with that same sweet aroma late in the afternoons and early evenings when baking usually began.
Mrs. Ade**** would always send a freshly delivered loaf or two to my kid sister whom she loved so much and called 'loly' (funkified version of Lola), and we would all dive right into it...hot, fresh, sweet bread. At least five breakfasts per week in my family was bread, eaten with stew (obe ata), boiled or fried eggs, beans (ewa riro), Planta or Blue Band margarine. Whatever happened to Planta!
I still remember Tuesday and Wednesday mornings at Command Secondary School, Ipaja-Lagos. Those were my best days in boarding school. We called bread 'loaf', and it was the same wonderfully tasting Agege bread. We had bread with geisha stew on Tuesday mornings, and bread with corned beef stew on Wednesday mornings (Hmmm, Nigeria was still very good in the early 80's). We had a bowl of the stew to a table of ten, and I can still vividly picture the designated table head, dishing out the stew into loaves that have been slit right through the middle to form retaining pockets, the stew overflowing and running down the sides of the loaves on days when the bowls were fuller than normal through cook error or excess........... My, oh my!
I remember the days of surplus "loaf" (that's what we called bread), when Senior Friday (Food Prefect ~ '82/'83) and Senior Jacob Okperin (Food Prefect ~ '85/'86?) would walk around the dining room, throwing excess 'loaf' at tables, and the mad scramble that usually followed. It was against the rules to take food out of the dining halls, but bread was the easiest to 'smuggle' out - thanks to the compressibility of Agege bread; We just squashed the loaves into our plastic cups, swung the cups like there was nothing in there and successfully crossed the kitchen border. We also had variety nights that featured a loaf-eating competition, where contestants had to eat a loaf of bread in as little time as possible without the aid of any fluid.
Then came the late 80's when government introduced SAP (Structural Adjustment Program), instituting a ban on the importation of some food products including wheat. Bakeries started mixing cornmeal with wheat flour to supplement the cost of bread. That period brought about the appearance of the worst types of bread I ever ate (Buredi alagbado). I call it disintegrating bread because that's exactly what happened when you tore a piece off the bread. It just disintegrated.
Fortunately, somewhere along the way wheat flour Agege bread returned - I'm lost on the history of the comeback though. Maybe someone out there can help out with the comeback history :) Maybe it was the flour embargo during SAP, or the brief recipe improvisation that's responsible, because Agege bread never did make a full recovery back to what it used taste like prior to SAP (at least for me). Nevertheless, it was a well welcomed return, compared to the disintegrating cornmeal version, and I guess we all got used to it. But I still haven't forgotten the quality of the 70's and early 80's, so I decided that if I am going to make Agege bread, it would have to be replicated after the original, old school Agege bread... and that's exactly what I have done.
Kay
