Just like the other three bowls on the top shelf, the wooden salad bowl is full. However, unlike the other bowls, with their pick’n’mix of clothes pegs, coins, aspirin, Ikea pencils, cables, wet wipes, sunglasses, business cards, Kinder Surprise figures and Sellotape chewed by the dog, the salad bowl is a holding (or dumping) place for just one thing: bread crusts. In Italian, the crust of a loaf of bread is sometimes referred to as il culo or culetto, meaning bottom or little bottom, making this a bowl of bottoms.
Its position on the highest shelf, plus the depth of the bowl, means I can’t be reminded of what’s inside until there are enough crusts that they start rising, like brown icebergs, above the rim. Then follows a period of days (or weeks) during which I keep seeing those tips, and reminding myself to do something with them, but don’t, so they continue to rise, and when the morning sun hits the shelves, I can see the dust drifting and settling. Eventually, I take the bowl down from the shelf and examine the contents; it then sits on the table for a day or two before I make breadcrumbs, ideally drying the already-dry bread in a low oven, which makes it brittle and reduces to crumbs more easily. (Less than ideal is putting them straight into a food processor, which has a rattle worse than a set of keys in the washing machine, and produces uneven crumbs.)
