Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Slices I Count Back
A baker finds the day's counter slices sold off over his own count, and the slices he cuts for the shop tasting, every one, as if they came off the far side of the loaf.
- dated: "the early doughs"
- narrator: "Sydney Boon, baker"
**Monday, in the early doughs.** Mine is the counter bench and mine the cutting, and it has been eleven years: the day's tins come down at four, I set and score and cut, and the cut rounds go up on trays, and the shop sells off my trays by the slice or the half and enters it on the morning book against my bench number. I cut to a count — always cut to a count, it is the first thing they teach and the last thing you keep — and whatever the shop sells, the count is my cover. Tonight the evening book shows a full tray and a half sold off my cutting, and my tray count says I cut two fulls and a third short of that. The difference went out of the shop door in slices I did not cut. No name stood against it in the book. Not a loaf gone short, note — slices, entered as sold, in the column they enter mine in.
**Wednesday.** The tasting, then, which is the habit of thirty years and not one I give up for a book. Heel slice off the show loaf, warm, first mouthful before the ovens are down. And for a fortnight now every loaf of mine tastes the same wrong way: like bread cut from the far side. Off-side. As if the knife went through and came out on the far side of the loaf and brought something of that cut back on the crumb. I know my own bake like my own hand, and this is my own bake, and it is not. The crumb is right, the salt is right, the proof is mine. The taste is of a loaf cut somewhere I was not, an hour or so after mine had gone, and served thinner.
**Friday.** I sat up with the tally at the bench to catch my own arithmetic out. Cut the show batch to number: twenty-one rounds cut, counted back twice on the board, crumbs swept. Signed the tray off to the shop and went home. The morning book has twenty-three rounds sold off Sydney Boon's bench, both lots entered tidy, tickets taken, till answering to the penny. Two rounds over my count, sold in my name, paid for in full. You can go far asking a till to stop answering, and I have not gone far with it; the money does not miss and nobody is short and the shop wants the bench number kept and the cutting kept to count. I signed. The rounds are sold. I did not cut them, and I signed.
**Saturday night, late doughs.** I tried leaving one tin back — my own supper loaf, not on the shop trays, marked in pencil for my own oven at home. Went up the yard to bank the ovens. Came back down the passage and the tin was on the shop rack, top shelf, scored standing, and it was scored in my hand. Not cut — scored, waiting on the knife, the way I set them at four.
I do not know that anything is eating off my loaves. I will put down only what the books hold: the slices sell over my count, the taste comes back off-side, the tin stands scored in its own place, and the till wants none of it made good. The question I take up the yard with me tonight, past the ovens banked and breathing low: each night I cut a count and each morning a count-and-a-bit is sold of it — so whose knife is scoring my second set into the bread, and whose tickets are they taking at the counter to buy it with.