Appearances

   It happened to me again.  Yesterday.  I popped into the bakery in the village.  On the upper shelf of the display case:  four beautiful slices of fresh banana bread with walnuts wrapped in clinging plastic wrap to both protect and display.  Beautiful.  I bought them, along with the bread which had been my original purchase, and we hurried home.  We waited impatiently while the tea kettle did its job and the tea pot did its.  Out to sit in the gentle sun of autumn late morning for fresh, hot tea and beautiful, lush banana nut bread. 

      One bite for each of us told the story:  not banana nut bread with walnuts adding crunch to the sweet, slightly gooey, rich texture.  This is bread.  Plain and simple.  Multi-grain bread.  Bread. 

      Worse, these are not walnuts, but chestnuts!  Ever had chestnuts?  In my opinion, they are bland  but with a mealy texture.  Flavorless but leaving a bad taste in the mouth.  Of course, others do not share my opinion.  They are adored by many people in Europe and lauded in that Christmas song.  Chestnuts, or castanhos as they are called in Portuguese, have been added to the bread adding insult to my injured taste buds.

      What to do?  I heaved the two half slices—each one minus a bite—over the fence.  We took the other 3 slices in their lovely, deceptive wrapping to our friends Pete and Ros who have professed their love for castanhos.

      Portuguese pastries are like that.   They look light and flaky or rich and gooey but are quite often rather dry and not very sweet. 

      Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, John Lennon and many, many other people have written clever maxims on the disparity between appearance and reality.  That doesn’t mean the lesson is learned easily.  Next time I’m in the bakery, I’ll look more closely at the tempting wares, but you and I both know that one day soon I’ll buy something that looks completely different from its reality.  We keep doing that, don’t we?