Tried the local kiln yeast flatbreads (of the nan, pita ilk) yesterday after Mass. Went to the place famous for it, and took a couple back to Humble Quarters for the Sunday reading. There are relatively new blue laws here, so the malls and shops are mostly closed on Sunday. It's my understanding that it's a revival of an older practice, which would make sense, since the country to the south does it as well, though it's a much less metropolitan-based economy there, mostly the beaches and mountains, which tend to stay open non-stop, as the country to the west puts it. There's apparently a political angle on it, as the mostly Orthodox Christian suburb to the west (but called the eastern part) doesn't observe similar laws, and it sort of stalls the economic engine of the tourism-based city (mostly Muslim, as of this writing).
At any rate, although the fresh bread made the knap smell idyllic, I think I'll keep to the traditional loaves from the older bakeries. It's a bit oily, a bit like street food, something I've avoided for many years (realizing that neither the hot sauce nor the white sauce is a good bet). When I first realized that parsimonious travel abroad was a possibility (I was sitting in a Starbucks near my undergraduate in the mountains of the Shenandoah valley of Virginia at the time), I landed in a place in the newer part of Belgrade, across the river from the old (named, for some) houses of Belgrade. It was apparently the epicenter of Balkan street food, but I never partook, with the exception of the 24-hour bakery chain. Fresh bread is something I gravitate towards. When I'm based in a place for some time I usually get into a cycle of baking my own, though that rarely happens on these travels.
Panem quotidianum. But this isn't just an upper bound for the purposes of humility, as the Greek εχουσιαν underneath the vulgarization stands to witness. It also speaks of bread worthy of the day.
All relatively inexpensive, of course. Everything about a dollar, even at the centuries-old bakeries near the mosques. Between the first and the second Balkan peregrinations, I went back to the libraries of one of the Midwestern universities to build a few courses that I was under the impression that I was to teach in India, come the autumn. (This did not come to pass.) After being in cities where everything was walkable, suburban Illinois was a bit of a challenge. I would walk for over an hour to the Starbucks by the mall to read for a bit, and then walk back. On the (long) walk to the gym, I was excited to notice a building with the sign "Pekara" -- bakery. Imagining that I would find a bit of the old world, I made the slight detour from the long walk, and walked in -- to find that all of the loaves were wrapped in plastic, and and averaged about 8 or 9 dollars per loaf, while the majority of the business seemed to be at the deli counter. Musing about it as I walked on (bread-less), I realized that as soon as the commodity was outside the normal course of life, it became an object of desire, and the price crept upward, and the distance from the trade routes of life increased.
So, yes. Daily bread.