'Thoroughly Droll'

“How he would recommend this slice of white bread, or that piece of kissing-crust.” 

A hefty volume, Lamb on Food and Drink, could be assembled from the letters and essays of Charles Lamb. Mercifully absent in him are the shame and health-obsessed earnestness our age attaches to what we eat and drink. Though fussy myself, I enjoy the spectacle of trenchermen eating their fill and more. Tom Waits has called such people “pioneer[s] of the palate.” It seems so liberating, so contemptuous of the merely fashionable.

 

The delicious word that grabbed me this time is “kissing-crust,” in Lamb’s Elia essay “The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers.” The OED defines it as “the soft part of the crust of a loaf where it has touched another in baking.” Anyone who has ever baked bread will recognize and be charmed by the word. In Defining the World (2005), Henry Hitchings, in his chapter titled “Pleasureful,” writes of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary:

 

“. . . “[I]t abounds with curious words: some amusing because of their sheer unusualness, others because they suggest ideas or practices that sound thoroughly droll. Some are funny because they seem ludicrous and overinflated; others are obsolete but rewardingly succinct ways of capturing a particular trait.”

 

Among them, according to Hitchings, is kissing-crust, which Johnson defines as “crust formed where one loaf in the oven touches another.” Both Johnson and the OED cite The Art of Cookery (1708), a book-length poem by William King, in which he imitates Horace’s Ars Poetica: “These bak’d him kissingcrusts, and those / Brought him small beer.” The OED also cites Lamb. Kissing-crust is folk poetry, coined by some long-forgotten baker – sweetly human, crunchy and good for you.