Buttered Roll Redux: A Lowly Breakfast Food Begets High Drama.
'My first reaction, of course, was denial. “Your piece is trending!” a well-intentioned friend texted me. Even as my heart sank — I’ve lived with the internet long enough to know those are never words one wants to hear — I assumed he must be mistaken; with the amount of breaking news stories in the world, who could possibly be that interested in a little essay about buttered rolls?
I’d written the piece — an ode to the hard roll with butter that’s so popular as a to-go breakfast — really for my own pleasure. I’ve always liked exploring things we tend to take for granted, and I have a soft spot for underdogs. I’d been thrilled, while researching the piece, to find out how many others had fond memories of the buttered roll, and had liked the idea of it giving some people a smile on their morning commutes. I was also very excited to show it to my local coffee vendor, Peter, whom I’d quoted.
The buttered roll isn’t fancy or expensive or even especially good. But, at least in the metro area, it’s reliable and ubiquitous. In New York, they’re on every corner — plus the coffee cart mid-block — pre-buttered and prepackaged, fast and cheap and extremely in control. And while the component parts of butter and rolls are universally available, the Buttered Kaiser Roll is not a breakfast staple in most of the country — especially not as an official menu option. (I can see why; it’s pretty crummy.) Could I walk into a diner elsewhere in the U.S. and ask for a Kaiser roll with butter at 8 a.m.? Yes, I could, and I have. But why would I, when I can get so many other, better, buttered breadstuffs — say, a behemoth cinnamon bun in Oregon, or a buttermilk biscuit in Nashville, or a fresh muffin in New England? And yet, I love the buttered roll, and I was happy to see it get its due.
A brief and horrifying foray into the jungle of internet comments, and my happiness turned to ash. Sure, plenty of readers had fond memories of the buttered rolls I described, but others were angry: They felt condescended to and insulted. How dare I claim the buttered roll for New York, like some sort of cosmopolitan conquistador? I was called an elitist, a bubble-dweller who (apparently) spent my days snickering at rubes in flyover country. “Let them eat cake!” screeched this imagined version of me (whom I envisioned as a sort of female Monopoly Man with a Margaret DuMont voice) — except I was so out of touch that I probably thought no one outside New York had access to cake, let alone cheap bread and margarine. “Listen!” I wanted to shout. “Yes, New Yorkers are self-absorbed solipsists ... who just happen to eat this specific kind of not very good roll!”'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/10/insider/buttered-roll-redux-a-lowly-breakfast-food-achieves-high-drama.html?
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