Sacred.

R.W. Apple on the spirituality of rye bread ...

Bread matches people, in a way. It's as hard to imagine a Frenchman, full of Latin flair, choosing pumpernickel every day as it is to imagine a stolid German with a baguette or a ficelle on his table each morning.

I have heard it said (only by gastronomic philistines, of course) that rye bread is for peasants, white bread for the more discriminating.

Maybe that was true 200 years ago, though I doubt it. For me, rye bread was part of the sacred Midwestern German-American trinity that I grew up with: sauerkraut, dill pickles and chewy rye with caraway seeds.

Rye bread can make a meal fit for a kaiser, as it does at the Hotel Adlon, the sumptuous new establishment near the Brandenburg Gate, where the breakfast buffet includes up to 15 breads from three local bakers, plus house-baked walnut bread, to say nothing of Danish pastry from LeNotre in Paris and bagels, donuts and muffins from Starbuck's -- for homesick Yanks, no doubt.

It can make a philosopher happy, too, as I discovered a decade ago when, thanks to an introduction from a mutual friend, I ate lunch with the late Isaiah Berlin at the Garrick Club in London. Arriving at the table, the Russian-born scholar asked whether I liked bread. When I replied that I did, he said the club's bread was wretched, reached into the ample recesses of his black suit coat and produced two great chunks of rye, one dark, one light, both wrapped in wrinkled brown paper bags. It was the best thing we ate that day, and it went very nicely, thank you, with one of the club's elegant clarets.

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