Baked Crusade

Hello.

I wrote a short story which takes place in a famous fictional city where a superhero who dresses like a bat lives. But it's not really about that. I obviously don't own the copyright to some of the things I'm talking about here, so I'll take it down if this is illegal in some way.

 Anyhow. Hope you enjoy.

Baked Crusade 

 What most people don’t realise is that since ancient times, Gotham City has been the site of some of the greatest incidents of invention and progress known to civilisation. That almost all of these moments of historical significance are related to bread making or the sacred activity of baking may come as a surprise to some, but for those who understand that the true nature of a people and their legacy is rooted in how they have manipulated wheat, the history of these events is not only a potent reminder of all that our ancestors lived through, but an opportunity to reflect on the journey that humanity has taken, and the honest reverence for baked goods we have gathered along the way. It is within this context that each year, a wide and varied collection of visitors arrive at the door of the Gotham City Museum of Bread and Baking History. 

There is no simple way to define a typical GCBBH visitor, because there is no such thing as a typical GCBBH visitor. Suffice to say, over the sixteen years that I have been the Director and Curator of this museum, we have become a sanctuary for the romantic, the curious, the nostalgic. To my knowledge, there is no other bread or baking relevant site of cultural or historical interest, that offers even close to the comprehensive, enlightening and educational experience that the GCBBH provides, and all for the low admission price of fifteen dollars. Gotham City has always been a place of great darkness, back through the ages, when it was nothing but swampland, the earliest peoples who waded through its dark waters, making homes under its rotting canopy offered first a glow through the gloom, a warm flicker of hope, their fires burning beneath the night’s sky, and then, later, the modest pleasure of freshly baked bread. Of course, initially, the bread of the Gotham Swamp People was very different to that a modern day citizen of this great city would recognise as the staple foodstuff of our morning toast. The first inhabitants of these wetlands gathered a water weed which would be pounded on rocks, wrapped into balls, and left to dry in trees, before being cast into an open fire. Those were extreme times, and called for extreme methods; these little balls of hard fire bread would sustain families through the arduous downpours and freezing nights. We have a couple of extremely rare examples of these fire bread balls at the museum, unearthed in the foundations of the Gotham City Hospital when it was turned to rubble in an explosion a few years ago. The specimens of early Gotham don’t look like much, just two tar black balls, but they are the fundamental sustenance on which the city we all live in was built. 

Obviously, like all those who deal in the culture and incidences of the past, we have to work hard to make the key elements of bread making relevant and inspiring for each new generation of visitors. In this vein, we have recently completed the Gotham City Time Oven, an oversized mock up of an eighteenth century baker’s oven, constructed at considerable time and expense, by myself, allowing up to eight visitors to travel back in time to key moments in Gotham’s baking heritage. As the Time Oven moves on its rails from one end of the exhibit to the other, those inside are treated to vivid illustrations of some of Gotham’s most fascinating baking moments. There is the Battle of Duke’s Hill from the civil war era, where confederate troops, starving, outnumbered and trapped, utilised their discovery of a cartload of stale buns as projectiles to drive back their enemies and escape the city with their lives. There is the cupcake ban from the fifties, where, driven crazed and deviant by sugar during the city’s boom time, inhabitants rampaged through the streets in a decadent orgy of gluttony, lust and wanton destruction. The resulting restriction of the use of any cake or otherwise sweet baked goods sent a whole population into cold, hard withdrawal, and lead to some of the more dramatic tortured sculptures and architecture that can still be seen in the city to this day. It is said that the architect of Arkham was himself suffering deep sugar withdrawal when he drew up the plans. The Time Oven used to be our most popular attraction, even though I accept the criticisms from some of our visitors, and from our janitor Dave, that the illustrations conceived for the Time Oven are not the most accurate rendering of the historical events they portray. I also acknowledge that I’m not very good at faces, and that some of the horses in the pictures bear a closer resemblance to dogs, but I think anyone who looks at them gets the general idea. And I’m delighted with how the bread massacre of 1762 turned out, it really does look horrifying. 

Our visitor numbers have been on the wane recently, and at first I thought that things might turn around when I brought in our ‘Old Bread’ workshops, where along with the normal price of admission you could also spend eight hours with one of our museum staff learning to make traditional breads through the ages. But there were some fairly unpleasant bouts of vomiting followed by brief periods of hospitalisation, which they called food poisoning and I called gluten intolerance, and one child did catch fire, but that aside, I don’t know anywhere else where a visitor could have the chance to create and sample the same bread that the howling rabid plague victims of the past would have gnawed on while crawling through the mud to their doom. Greg, my assistant, suggested that we start giving away free pizza, but Gotham library did that on Tuesdays and all they ended up with was a gang of stoned teens sitting on beanbags flicking through superhero comics and munching down pepperoni feasts. The last thing we need is to be harassed by skateboarding youths with stupid hats and no respect for yeast. 

 The reality is that things have become financially difficult, I've had to let Marie go, she worked on the admission desk, giving out tickets and museum guides and letting people know when the ornamental loaf demonstration would be on. She sat at her desk and blogged life hacks for the newly divorced most of the time and occasionally told people that we weren't the Gotham Museum of Modern Art. My concern is that if things don't improve I’ll have to fire more staff, and we’ve been working together a long time, we're like family. Ruth, who does the baking demonstrations, has a great rapport with the visitors, mainly because she can do a whole load of funny voices, which Greg insists are racist, but no one else has ever mentioned it. Ruth can pretty much rustle up an authentic and accurate bread product from any period of Gotham’s history you can think of. She's a model employee, and intensely loyal. When she incinerated her hand in an oven valve malfunction she never sued me, and when she found out that I paid a girl called Tina to chain me to a radiator and slap me in my underwear she never told the rest of the team. 

 The only potential saving grace we have as a museum is highly contentious, and I’m not ashamed to say that I haven’t been happy about the Batman Waffle since the day Greg brought it to us. Firstly, it is not a historical artefact, it is a classic waffle, with a light coating of maple syrup, that is supposed to have been partially consumed by the celebrity crimefighter Batman, prior to taking on a mob of hoodlums who had been terrorising local businesses with loud jeering and explosives. Greg had managed to negotiate the acquisition of the waffle with the manager of Valentine’s Diner, and I had to put up two hundred bucks for the privilege. Greg convinced me to put it in a case in the centre of the museum, so now there’s a life size model of Batman’s head, next to the waffle with a bite taken out of it. It's by far the most popular thing in the museum, I’ve seen visitors literally run through the museum, take a selfie with Batman and his waffle, and run back out again. But I suppose if they're buying tickets, I shouldn't really complain, it’s just that people used to care about the history, they wanted to understand how we all rose out of this strange collage of the past . Our other more recent exhibit is a giant ceremonial plate donated to us by local billionaire Bruce Wayne. He’s always giving out stuff. I think he gave it to us because we were the only place in Gotham he hadn’t donated something to. He presented it to the museum about six months ago and had a look around, he’s actually a pretty nice guy, clearly and understandably fascinated by the nineteenth century rye loaves as examples of the gradual increase in dough density. The plate he gave us is a silver cornbread platter from the 1790s, regardless of Mr Wayne's erroneous claim that it was from 1750, as though I can’t identify my ceremonial cornbread platters. I still chuckle to myself about that, at night, as the rain comes down. 

 I wish that I knew how to reignite people’s passion for the breads of our forefathers, but if it takes a contemporary half-eaten waffle to keep the museum open, then I suppose that’s a price I’m willing to pay. All in all, Gotham needs its Museum of Bread and Baking History, now more than ever, and if that should have to close its doors, for the city to lose this celebration of its cultural heritage, I don’t think I can imagine a worse fate for Gotham than that.