Petits Propos Culinaires 82

Petits Propos Culinaires 82
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A ﬁsh and chip shop in Victorian Nottingham. See the article on page 33 by Dr
Denise Amos. Photograph courtesy of Dr Denise Amos.
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Petits Propos Culinaires 82
Essays and notes on food, cookery and cookery books
Prospect Books January 2007
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THE COVER ILLUSTRATION is a watercolour of an
aubergine painted by Giles MacDonogh. You can visit his
website at www.macdonogh.co.uk and discover many other
paintings which you can purchase.
Copyright © 2007 Prospect Books and the named authors.
In case it was not self-evident, any unsigned contribution to
this journal is written by Tom Jaine.
ISSN 0142-4857
Published in Great Britain in 2007 by Tom Jaine, Prospect
Books, Allaleigh House, Blackawton, Totnes TQ9 7DL.
(01803 712269)
http://www.prospectbooks.co.uk
e-mail <tom.jaine@prospectbooks.co.uk>
Typeset in Hoeﬂer Text by Tom Jaine.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the Cromwell Press,
Trowbridge.
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CONTENTS
10 The Cookery Medium: Cooks, Christopher Driver
11 Kafka’s Soup, Mark Crick
16 French News, Peter Crosskey
22 Lunns and Bunns, Michael Raﬀael
30 A Letter from Elizabeth David
33 Working-clas Diet in Victorian and Edwardian Nottingham,
Denise Amos
79 Tante Stella’s Quince Sweetmeat, Audrey Levy
90 Smollett’s Agriculture, David Potter
104 A Cook’s Inventory of 1576, Julanne Arnold
109 Book Reviews
125 Notes & Queries
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
DR DENISE AMOS is a tutor in history at University of
Nottingham.
JULANNE ARNOLD is studying local history and paleography
in Suﬀolk.
MARK CRICK is a photographer living in London. Kafka’s Soup
is his ﬁrst book.
ANDREW DALBY lives in France and has published extensively
on ancient Greek and Roman food.
PETER CROSSKEY is a freelance journalist, primarily on topics
related to France.
The late CHRISTOPHER DRIVER worked for many years on The
Guardian and was editor of The Good Food Guide.
AUDREY LEVY learnt about cooking in five kitchens and was
a British army wife and a teacher of English to foreigners.
JAMES MACGUIRE lives in Montreal and is often credited for
the re-establishment of good bread in that city.
DAVID POTTER teaches business studies and catering in Kent
while working on culinary manuscripts of the early modern
period in his spare time.
MICHAEL RAFFAEL is a freelance food-writer. His most recent
book is West Country Cheesemakers (Birlinn) which will be
reviewed in the next issue.
WILLIAM WOYS WEAVER lives in Pensylvannia and knows
everything about the history of cookery in Cyprus, Poland
and his native state.
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ALIMENTUM
This is a new journal subtitled The Literature of Food. I came across it when
visiting for the ﬁrst time the second-hand cookery-bookshop of Bonnie
Slotnick at 163 West Tenth Street, New York, NY 10014 (212-989-8962,
bonnieslotnickbooks@earthlink.net). This is a most excel ent shop and Ms
Slotnick a sympathetic and expert guide. The subscription to Alimentum
is $18 for one year or two issues (a single issue has a cover price of $10).
There is a website, www.alimentumjournal.com. The postal address is PO
Box 776, New York, NY 10163. The format is that of PPC, the page count
128. When it says ‘Literature of Food’, that is what it means: recipes and
historical discussion yield priority to poetry, short stories and creative
writing. The named editors are Paulette Licitria, Peter Selgin and Cortney
Davis (poetry).
CHRISTOPHER DRIVER
The poem that is printed as the amuse bouche of this issue was sent me by
Tessa McKirdy of Cooks Books in Rottingdean. I am grateful to Tessa and
to Christopher’s widow Margaret for permission to publish. It was written
after the Oxford Symposium of 1986, the chosen topic of which was the
cooking medium. ‘Alan’ and ‘Mike’ refer to the late Alan Davidson and the
late Mike McKirdy. Christopher was an inveterate versiﬁer: sometimes
allusive and learned, sometimes playful.
CALVEL’S TASTE OF BREAD
A reprint of the English translation of this essential work (by James
MacGuire whose review of Andrew Whitley’s book is found below) is, I am
informed by the bookseller Steven Simpson, available at £54 plus postage.
Email <info@stevensimpsonbooks.com>.
PPC SUBSCRIPTION
From 2007 I am introducing a variant subscription rate for institutional
subscribers dealing through subscription agents. Henceforth, their annual
subscription will be £40. Libraries and other bodies who subscribe direct
through me, and of course private subscribers, will still be charged the
standard rate.
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CHARCOAL
Simon Levy, the son of Audrey Levy whose piece about quinces is printed
below, is a charcoal burner in Richmond. From the Daily Telegraph I learned
that most charcoal in Britain today is airfreighted, often from unsuitable
and fragile eco-systems. I can only remark that importing charcoal seems
close to bonkers and that all of us should read the labels of origin before
ﬁring up our next barbecue.
ELIZABETH DAVID
‘May, 2007 will mark the ﬁfteenth anniversary of the death of Elizabeth
David. In his article on Mrs David in the Guardian, Richard Boston wrote,
“It is no exaggeration to say that for middle-class British people of the
second half of the century, she did more to change their way of life than
any poet, novelist or dramatist of our time.” Terence Conran, the founder
of Habitat, has said, “Elizabeth David opened British eyes and tempted
British palates to the tastes and ﬂavours of France, Italy and Spain and
the traditional food of Great Britain. … Her inﬂuence has revolutionized
what we eat at home and in restaurants, and what we buy in supermarkets
up and down the land.”
‘In the light of those comments, the Portico Library in Manchester is
planning an exhibition to be held in May 2007, an exhibition which will
celebrate Elizabeth David’s life, her books and her inﬂuence. The exhibition
will include material on loan from the Elizabeth David Bequest at the
Warburg Institute, London, the National Portrait Gallery, the Elizabeth
David archive at Harvard University and Jill Norman, Elizabeth David’s
editor and literary executor. We would like to compile a record of individual
recollections of how or why people were inﬂuenced by Mrs David. These
will be added to other such recollections and will be available to be read
during the exhibition. If you have such a recollection, or a favourite recipe
from one of her books, we would be delighted to hear from you.
‘If you do not wish to contribute a recollection, we hope that you will
visit the exhibition which will be open to the public from 2 May to 31 May
2007.’
Dr Eddie Cass
548 Wilbraham Road, Manchester, M21 9LB
Tel: 44 (0)161 881 8640
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AUSTRALIAN GASTRONOMY
The 15th Symposium on Australian Gastronomy has been announced.
Its subject is ‘Beyond the Supermarket – Learning to Overcome
Gastronomic Poverty’. The dates are 29 April to 2 May 2007. the locale
is Dover in Tasmania (a relocation, it was going to be in the Far South
Wilderness Lodge). Accommodation wil be in B&Bs throughout the
small town and the price of Au $550 per person includes wine, food and
all that, but not the price of the bed. Anne Ripper is the Registrar <anne.
ripper@peopleplanners.com.au>.
BULLETIN OF THE FOOD ETHICS
COUNCIL
The Food Ethics Council, 39-41 Surrey Street, Brighton BN1 3PB issues
this quarterly journal at £25 per annum. The articles chew over those hoary
questions of right and wrong on the plate and good or bad in the mode
of production. The contents list of the issue I have before me touches
on matters such as ﬁsh farming, ‘industrial’ organics, social marketing,
supermarkets and corporate reporting: Grist to the mil for the left-leaning
diner.
THE FOOD MAGAZINE
In something of the same vein, the Food Commission’s quarterly, which
has reached its 75th issue, should also be mentioned, as it appoints a new
editor in Jessica Mitchell. Its subscription of £24.50 can be obtained from
Freepost KE7564, London N1 9BR. The remarks made above might apply
to this, though the tone is more populist.
BLACKAWTON PRIMARY SCHOOL
It is gratifying to report that our village primary school has scooped the
national award for school dinners made by the Soil Association. The policy
of school-produced meals, cooked from fresh, organic and local (for the
most part) ingredients was brought to fruition while my wife Sally was
chairman of the governors. Jolly good, I say.
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THE COOKERY MEDIUM: COOKS
Some perform best as thinners and others as thickeners,
Some are best at hot dinners, some at sweets trol ey sickeners,
But on annual trips al are under compulsion
To add their own drips to the social emulsion.
They sharpen their knives for the veg. and each other,
Practise as wives what they gathered from Mother,
Cater on wheels in their greasy Fiestas,
And in between meals just col apse for siestas,
But keep on the boil in unsuitable ﬂats
Vegetable oils or animal fats,
With Claudia, Jane or Elizabeth handy,
Plus a glass of champagne or some il -advised candy.
A souﬄé’s no hurdle, their bread always rises,
Their sauces don’t curdle, each surprise surprises.
For want of ambition or back-up a lot’l
Oﬀer tuition or take to the bottle,
But would pawn their old mouli or mess with a hippy
For sight of a truly original recipe
That Alan can’t ﬁnd in his print-out of oldies
Or Mike cal to mind in his Rottingdean mouldies.
And just for two days, on Symposium fare,
They contrive to liaise, even let down their hair:
Escaped from the tedium of children and spouse,
They are stuﬀed with the medium by Al aleigh House.
CHRISTOPHER DRIVER
Oxford, June 1986
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KAFKA’S SOUP
Mark Crick
Probably the most entertaining English cookery book of 2005, which
to my chagrin I did not discover until 2006 (via Barbara Santich),
was Kafka’s Soup. A complete history of world literature in
14 recipes by the London artist and photographer Mark Crick
(Libri Publications, £9.99). Each recipe is written in the voice of
a giant of global culture (Jane Austen, Raymond Chandler, Borges,
Chaucer, Homer, Woolf, de Sade, etc.); the il ustrations, too, are
amusing and intel igent parodies. An American edition is out this
winter (Harcourt) and a French translation is in the pipeline. Mark
Crick has kindly given us permission to print his variations on a
theme of Proust.
Tiramisu à la Marcel Proust
12–15 Savoiardi sponge ﬁngers
4 eggs
100g caster sugar
Amaretto di Saronno
500g mascarpone
2 cups cold coﬀee
Cocoa powder
Although the fashionableness of any café and its degree
of comfort usual y stand in inverse relation to each other,
on a cold day in March I found myself on the Boulevard
Beaumarchais, in a café, whose owners, from their head-
quarters no doubt far from the district in which I now
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FRENCH NEWS
Peter Crosskey
There is always a ﬂurry of autumnal activity when the
French are back in harness, keen to apply themselves
heart and soul to al the things that have been hanging
ﬁre during the oﬃcial holiday season. Welcome back to the
rentrée, a moment at the beginning of September which sets
the tone for what is left of the calendar year. The government
is no diﬀerent in this respect, indeed a lot of projects have
been lying dormant over the holiday season for the purpose.
So on September 1, prime minister Dominique de Vil epin
bestowed an oﬃcial blessing on the fresh-produce industry
association INTERFEL in the form of a label.
The ful title, which was awarded to INTERFEL’s generic
promotional campaign for fresh fruit and vegetables, is le label
campagne d’intérêt général. This coveted designation is in the
prime minister’s gift alone and reserved for a handful of the
most deserving of causes. (The convention is that he selects
two campaigns or causes each year.) The real signiﬁcance of
the label status is that it confers preferential advertising rates
on state broadcast media. And the fresh-produce industry
needs all the promotional help it can get.
It is wel nigh impossible to be visible in a media-driven
environment when competing with strongly branded pro-
ducts for consumers’ attention. Branding is easy to apply to
manufactured goods like toilet paper, but does not function
wel in the diversity and profusion of a fruit and vegetable
display. That is inherent in the nature of fresh produce and
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LUNNS AND BUNNS
Michael Raﬀael
This piece come from Michael Raﬀael’s new book Bath Curiosities
(Birlinn, £9.99), es ays about the history of Bath. It is not invariably
food-centred – indeed there is a chapter both on my great-uncle Sidney
Horstmann and the location of my first paying work, Harbutt’s
Plasticine – however, on the food front there are chapters on ﬁzzy
pop and soda water, the Bath bun, Bath markets and Bath Olivers.
It’s full of fun and proper curiosities. I am grateful to both publisher
and author for permission to print this piece.
Order a Bath Bun in the Pump Room for your
‘elevenses’ and you’l receive a glazed, sugary, slightly
ﬂattened English tea bread. Slip round the corner
to a tearooms in Lil iput Al ey, ‘the oldest house in Bath’
(except that it isn’t quite as old as it’s often claimed to be)
and you can sample its rival, the Sal y Lunn, softer, paler,
more like an outsize bap, possibly an adjusted brioche – or
another kind of tea bread. Partisans of each wil claim that
theirs is an authentic recipe, adjusted to suit modern taste,
but going back in a direct line into the mists and fumes of
a distant past.
The Sal y Lunn walks the walk. It can supply no less than
four possible sources as to its origins, one with the conviction
of an urban myth, another based on hearsay, a third founded
on gastronomic assertions and a fourth, well, an outlandish
possibility.
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WORKING-CLASS DIET IN
VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN
NOTTINGHAM
Denise Amos
The growth of towns from the early nineteenth century
created unprecedented problems for the Victorians
in terms of public health. By the 1840s death-rates
were spiral ing upwards, a tendency they explained by the
theory of miasma, the transmission of disease by poor quality
air. The solution was apparently simple: improvements in
infrastructure. By contrast they paid little attention to
improvements in medicine and changes in diet. This view
was accepted by historians until about thirty years ago. In
1976 Thomas McKeown pioneered an alternative perspective
when he argued that the rise in population growth – based on
European, particularly British, experience since about 1700
– was explained by the ‘decline of mortality due essential y
to a reduction of deaths from infectious disease’,1 and
that ‘the large reduction of mortality and the growth in
population which preceded advances in hygiene was due to
an improvement in nutrition.’2
McKeown created a stir because in his view the growth
of early human population was restricted by high levels of
mortality, determined by a lack of food. However, as more
abundant supplies of food became available populations
increased3 and when they began to congregate in groups of
a substantial size, the relationship between man and micro-
organisms evolved. During the early period of adaptation
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TANTE STELLA’S QUINCE SWEETMEAT
Audrey Levy
The name quince is intriguing. Perhaps Shakespeare
thought so when he named his character in
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Peter Quince. Neither
Peter Apple nor Peter Pear would have had the impact.
although the three fruits belong to the same family. However,
it was in Shakespeare’s Garden, near Hampstead Heath in
north-west London that I encountered my ﬁrst quince. My
father, who took me, pointed out a quince tree, and I believe
he also mentioned that there was a quince tree in the garden
of his home in up-country South Africa. This could be very
likely since Waverley Root declares, ‘the popularity of the
quince has been heightened because apples, which grow so
wel in the Cape, do badly in the interior; the quince there
replaces the apple’. My second encounter with the quince
was in a Jerusalem hotel. Claudia Roden was demonstrating a
lamb stew with quince. Apparently, the Persians are very fond
of meat stews with fruit, and the quince is a ﬁrm favourite.
My third encounter with the quince was in Istanbul. An in-
law relation, Tante Stella, then 92, welcomed us into her ﬂat
with delicious savoury and sweet biscuits, but there was also
on a dish a very stiﬀ jel y of mysterious deep rose-brown
hue. The sweetmeat was cut into lozenges. The taste was
delicious. Tante Stella said she made it from quince. Among
the Sephardi Jews it is known as bimbriyo. Sephardi Jews
are especial y descendants of those Jews expel ed from the
Iberian Peninsula in 1492 and after. They speak a type of
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SMOLLETT’S AGRICULTURE
David Potter
Accused of being plain rude about France, readers
might dismiss Smollett’s travel book as at best
perverse, at worst a crude travesty. Nevertheless,
his Travels Through France and Italy, ﬁrst published in 1766,
has much to oﬀer on al subjects, not least agricultural and
horticultural matters. His splenetic outbursts in respect of
Continental cooking, hospitality and the like are perhaps
better known than these mundane, yet often revealing, notes.
His journey was undertaken in 1763, fol owing the death of
his only daughter – undertaken, he said, to distract his wife
with new horizons, as wel as to improve his own health.
Traversing a route from Boulogne through Paris, Lyons,
Montpel ier and Provence, his party tarried a season at Nice
before crossing into Italy.
Smollett described the countryside from Paris to Lyons.
‘From the forest of Fontainbleau to the Lyonnais, through
which we passed,’ he writes, ‘is rather agreeable than fertile,
being part of Champagne and the dutchy of Burgundy,
watered by three pleasant pastoral rivers, the Seine, the
Yonne, and the Saone. The ﬂat country is laid out chieﬂy
for corn; but produces more rye than wheat. Almost all the
ground seems to be ploughed up, so that there is little or
nothing lying fal ow. There are very few inclosures, scarce
any meadow ground, and, so far as I could observe, a great
scarcity of cattle. We sometimes found it very diﬃcult to
procure half a pint of milk for our tea. In Burgundy I saw a
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A COOK’S INVENTORY OF 1576
Julanne Arnold
Inventories tantalize with the information they give and with the
questions they raise. I transcribe below parts of the probated
inventory post mortem of the goods of John Saulter of Bury St. Edmunds
in Suﬀolk (IC500/3/1(73) in the Bury St. Edmunds branch of the Suﬀolk
Record Oﬃce). This was prepared on 10 August 1576. The quantities of
utensils and implements for cooking, serving and eating food are far greater
than required for an ordinary household, and in his will of 6 August 1576
he is identiﬁed as a cook.
According to the Essex historian F.G. Emmison, a cook at this time
was the keeper of a cookshop, which the OED describes on the one hand
as a place where cooked food is sold and on the other an eating house (the
earliest quotation is 1552). The cooking was done in Saulter’s kitchen which
was amazingly wel equipped, so its output must have been substantial. But
where was the food served or sold? The contents of the shop show that it
was not used for such a purpose or for much more than a bread or drink
preparation area. The buttery had a great deal of tableware, but butteries
were not usually very large rooms. So could Saulter have done outside
catering? Could he have used the 16 elm tables in the chamber for serving
meals to the public in the guildhall or the church? Is it signiﬁcant that
Roger Potter, the landlord of the Angel (still open for business opposite
the abbey gatehouse), was both an appraiser for the inventory and a witness
to the will? Could he have cooked for the pub? Saulter’s apparel included
two blue livery coats. Could he have gotten these while working for the
local gentry?
The total value of Saulter’s goods is £33 15s 5d, not a large sum. But
Saulter was obviously a man of some means, as in his will he leaves his wife
their rather large house, on which she is to pay the lord’s rent, and his sister
his copyhold house in Northgate Street, a respectable part of town.
I have included only the sections of the inventory having to do with Saulter’s
trade. Spel ing and punctuation are as in the original. The fol owing markings
have been used: < > = deletion made by scribe; ( ) = letters omitted
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BOOK REVIEWS
The pile of food and cookery books I assembled to prepare a Christmas
round-up for the Guardian must have topped four feet six inches. So great
the press of titles that I can but give a summary appraisal here; so tight
the space in the Guardian, that I could mention no more than a tithe of
them.
Books that are more than recipe col ections, either adding understanding
and context to their culinary instructions, or being entirely concerned with
understanding, with not a recipe in sight, are considered ﬁrst.
For a dizzy voyage through the marginal thickets of Western speculative
thought, there can be no better than Tristram Stuart’s The Bloodless
Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India (Harper Press, £25).
If you guzzle beef today, you may not tomorrow after exposure to this
account of vegetarianism since the English Civil War. The shocking (to
them) Renaissance discovery that Indians didn’t eat meat yet were as strong
and considerably longer-lived than the slavering carnivores of Europe is
lent a certain symmetry by the reconversion of Mahatma Gandhi to eating
greens after reading Thoreau and others. During the centuries covered by
this philosophical full circle, Stuart touches on a multitude of radical and
left-leaning eccentrics, whose extreme opinions nonetheless had surprising
and signiﬁcant eﬀects on mainstream opinion. This is brilliant stuﬀ.
A learned work just appearing is Robert Appelbaum’s Aguecheek’s Beef,
Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections. Literature, Culture and Food
among the Early Moderns (University of Chicago Press, £19). It deals here and
there in the same coin as Tristram Stuart (Thomas Tryon, Francis Bacon,
J.-J. Rousseau) but is an assessment of the meaning of food and feeding, of
their relation to civility and human behaviour and the way this is expressed
in contemporary literature – that written at the moment, and as Classics
translated. Appelbaum’s wide scholarship aﬀords a ﬁne vade mecum to the
writing of the time (English, French, Italian and Spanish) and to modern
glosses thereon. His curiosity impels him towards a deeper understanding
of the smallest interjections in Shakespeare – hence Belch’s hiccup and
its connection to pickled herrings (and what Yarmouth’s red herrings
might signify to a Lévi-Strauss view of things as well as to a Papal table)
– indication that the book yields many perspectives on familiar prose
and poetry. A chapter to be treasured is that dealing with cookbooks as
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literature; another winner discusses Cockaigne and other Utopias.
Equal y academic, and important for serious students, is Food in Medieval
England: Diet and Nutrition, edited by C.M. Woolgar, D. Serjeantson, and
T. Waldron (Oxford University Press, £55). As the acknowledgements
state, ‘many of the papers in this volume had their genesis in meetings of
the Diet Group at Somerville College, Oxford.’ Seventeen papers survey
categories of foodstuﬀs on the one hand, and discuss diet and nutrition
on the other, without ever mentioning a culinary source. We do get some
pretty impressive accounts of things like gardens and garden produce; the
naming of meats; pig husbandry and pork consumption; ﬁsh consumption;
the consumption and supply of birds; hunting practices; seasonal patterns
of food consumption; and diet and demography. Evidence from domestic
and accounting records, as wel as archaeological material, are in high relief.
The bibliography is of great utility.
A book has come out of America on the Atlantic ﬁsh business and
its relation both to the food we eat and the discovery of the New World.
It is Fish on Friday by Brian Fagan (Basic Books, £15.99). It certainly has
its points as a useful summary of most Atlantic activity up until the 18th
century, although one was struck when reading the text at the number of
literal errors in the spel ing of proper names. There is a digression into carp,
and there is much on the medieval Atlantic trade, as well as something on
the Romans; there is a peppering of recipes.
A ﬁsh book that I have never mentioned, that came out earlier in
the year, is Lindsey Bareham’s Fish Store (Michael Joseph, £20). As she
observes at the start, ‘When my sons inherited their father’s childhood
home, a converted pilchard factory [at Mousehole], I thought it would be
a good idea to record some of the recipes and memories associated with
this unusual place.’ Lindsey’s recipes are reliable and useful, what better
qualities? The book is not so much a ﬁsh cookery manual, but more a
gathering of recipes (many of which are for ﬁsh) that have been cooked in
this house, so you get sherry triﬂe with plums to round out your roast cod
with watercress-crushed potatoes. You also get a feel for Mousehole and
the prose is reinforced by excellent photographs old and new. (Students
of book design may take note of the decision to contain the photographs
within eight-page sections, leaving the text a typographical unity.)
An old-fashioned book which reminds one of the days of André Simon
is Simon Courtauld’s Food for Thought: Fish and Feather: a Culinary Tour of
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Britain’s Seas and Skies (Think Books, £9.99). This is a collection of little
pieces, ﬁrst printed in The Spectator. As that magazine has declined in spark
and intel igence over the last decade, perhaps this book should be ignored.
Some would say charming, others nugatory.
Elisabeth Luard’s Truﬄes (Frances Lincoln, £20) is altogether more
enticing. Without abandoning the proprieties of grammar and style, it
does a bit of work on the subject and oﬀers plenty of information for the
curious. Meeting Elisabeth at breakfast one morning, when she regaled
us with quite worrying samples of super-truﬄe pong (I am not sure it
mixes with toast and marmalade and a delicate stomach), one recognized
immediately an enthusiast, a thorough one at that. Highly recommended,
as are, for once, the photographs.
Those concerned with more pressing matters wil ﬁnd much to instruct
in Warren Belasco’s Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food (University
of California, £13.95). Here is a succinct account of views on the shrinking
planet over the past century, gathered from theorists and think-tanks, and
from science ﬁction too. We have made a sorry mess of futurology, missing
population trends by a factor of three, dishing up the utterest codswallop
and propaganda as guaranteed fact. I found his opening chapters, where
he summarizes the broad avenues of approach of Malthusians, ecologists
and others concerned with diet and future trends, most enlightening.
His discussion of Utopian and science-ﬁction literature was particularly
revealing to one who does not usually have much truck with it.
Heston Blumenthal may not be worried by the ecological footprint of
the odyssey he undertook In Search of Perfection (Bloomsbury, £20), the book
of the television series, pil aging ﬁve continents for the secrets of classics
like spaghetti, pizza, treacle tart and Black Forest gateau. Although there are
recipes, the fun is in the hunting. While science is Blumenthal’s forte – his
number-one haircut makes physical the term egghead – it is a background
theme to his preoccupation with ﬂavour and texture and the best means to
capture these. The style is matter-of-fact, the narrative dynamic. Whether
anyone wil attempt to replicate his experiments at home is immaterial.
Along the way he gives so many deathless facts that a reading can’t fail to
improve the quality of life: hence my gal ons of Golden Syrup ageing in the
oven, pounds of forerib hanging from the cel ar roof and microscope on
order to better inspect the surface indentations of spaghetti.
Context and recipes coexist in Giorgio Locatelli’s Made in Italy Food
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& Stories (Fourth Estate, £27.99): large, handsome – more concrete block
than brick – and embel ished by Dan Lepard’s ﬁne photographs. The
context embraces Giorgio, his family and professional life while guiding us
eﬀortlessly through some of the riches of Italian foodways. The information
he imparts is suﬃcient for the generality of reader, though sometimes
not precise enough for an encyclopaedia article. His comments, however,
on his culinary preferences and reasons for choosing one material over
another are always interesting and seem founded on good practice. Most
of the recipes are painstaking and lucid. However, the ‘foolproof’ recipe
for focaccia was not proof against this fool, thanks to sloppy expression
of critical factors. I might embark here on a riﬀ about recipes and their
accuracy. For example, I might ask why the River Café Pocket Book series
(published by Ebury Press with titles Pasta and Ravioli; Salads and Vegetables;
Puddings, Cakes and Ice Creams; Fish and Shellﬁsh, at £8.99 each) contains a
recipe for Penne alla carbonara which uses 350g of penne with a sauce
containing 200g pancetta, 6 egg yolks, 120 ml double cream and 100g of
parmesan to serve four people. However, in River Café Book 1, a recipe to
serve six people has only 250g of penne to exactly the same quantities of
sauce ingredients. One might also at that point question yet again the River
Café ladies’ inclusion of their recipe for crab. It seems as if I am the only
person to take issue with their instruction to take a lively two-pound crab,
tip it up on your kitchen table, and cut it merrily in half, presumably with
the usual domestic kitchen knife. Not only, in my experience, would the
crab object strenuously to this treatment, but also most people’s kitchen
knives would not be up to the task. I would ask the ladies next time they
put this recipe in to include instruction on humane means to kill the crab
before attempting its bisection. I am also struck by the immense diﬃculty
that recipe writers have of describing satisfactorily the processes involved
in making pastry.
The same publishers that did Locatelli are responsible, in an identical
spirit of spacious design, for Andrew Whitley’s Bread Matters (Fourth
Estate, £20) which puts ﬂesh on the bare bones of a recipe in an extensive
discussion of our daily loaf. Whitley favours back-to-basics, whole grains,
no additives, proper methods, and delivers an unsettling indictment
of industrial baking. Do it yourself. A ful er, more measured review is
below.
Here might come a riﬀ on cookery-book design. Fourth Estate’s
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embrace of serif type, very broad margins and generous leading adds
immeasurably to the legibility of these two books. Too many designers seem
straining for novelty and modernity. They appear addicted to sans serif; to
jiggering about with the density and colour of ink; to modish counterpoint
of page and text colour. Not one of which assists our understanding or our
reading. In most cases, this doesn’t matter too much, but there is one book
in particular I found so aggressively designed as to be unusable: Cooking
by Tom Aikens (Ebury Press £25). Chefs, of course, will be rushing for this
book. In English terms, even possibly European, he is a good and modish
practitioner (even though his restaurant is so stuﬀy it refuses entrance to
people insuﬃciently, in its view, dressed up). But the book is completely
illegible, the type as faint as the delirious squiggles of a dying spider, the
layout not at all clear.
Students of British food are well served this season by Harper Press’s
reissue of our very own Traditional Foods of Britain in the new guise of The
Taste of Britain (£25). There is no need to extol the quality of the information
but merely to compliment the new publishers and the authors, Laura
Mason and Catherine Brown, on the revised format. It is now hardbound,
generously ornamented with Victorian engravings, and larded with
comments from contemporary chefs. The matter is arranged according
to region rather than commodity. Although I have not seen it, there has
been warm reception for Mark Hix’s British Regional Food (Quadrille, £25)
with recipes and much information about present-day suppliers. Postscript:
eventually the publishers did deliver the book, though too late for their
commercial beneﬁt, and what one had heard is conﬁrmed on inspection.
The text and background material is of equal importance to the recipes
and is nicely written and eminently readable. A recommended buy.
Recipe books can be usefully grouped into those that take you beyond
your usual culinary rut and those which merely serve to sharpen current
practice. In the ﬁrst would fal Fuschia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Chinese
Cookbook (Ebury, £25) which contains repertoire-stretching things like
Junshan Chicken with Silver-Needle Tea appended to a portrait of the little-
known province of Hunan that was Chairman Mao’s favourite cuisine (see
also Chairman Mao’s Red-Braised Pork, as well as General Tso’s Chicken,
the Taiwanese history of which she ﬁrst revealed at the Oxford Symposium
and reprints in brief here). She obviously had a tremendous time when
staying in Hunan: a constant round of banquets and merry-making, as well
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as revealing encounters with aged and much decorated chefs.
Further travel in the Far East wil be encouraged by an American
import from Ten Speed Press, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen by Andrea Nguyen
(imported into England by Publishers Group Worldwide, $35). We eat much
less Vietnamese food than either the French, Americans or Australians,
but I need not dwell on its innate qualities. This book oﬀers both a wide
range of recipes, well buttressed by contextual material. It’s a pity that the
photographs are of the food alone and not of life in Vietnam itself.
Meanwhile, in The Calcutta Kitchen (Mitchel Beazley, £20) Simon Parkes
and Udit Sarkhel (aided not a little by photographer Jason Lowe) evoke
the hurry of Calcutta streets and their satisfying foods, not least their
sweetmeats and desserts, with Bhapa doi (a steamed sweetened yoghurt)
rivalling crème caramel in the comfort-pudding stakes. Bengalis are big
on ﬁsh but the recipes are spread evenly across our standard ingredients.
Once you’ve done your shopping, they are very clear to follow. In much
the same manner as Fuschia Dunlop, it becomes clear from Simon Parkes’s
linking narrative that he had an awful y good time living in Calcutta. Here I
should also mention the nuanced evocation of the same cuisine by Chitrita
Banerji, Bengali Cooking (reissued in paperback by Serif, £9.99).
Those keen on the East who wish to travel further than Bengal, but
have not yet bought their ticket, might be advised to study the book
Curry put together by Dorling Kindersley (£16.99). An impressive list of
contributors including Sri Owen, David Thompson, Vivek Singh of The
Cinnamon Club, and Das Sreedharan of Rasa restaurants, have gathered
curries and a few associated dishes from most south Asian countries, as
well as Africa, the Caribbean, Britain and Japan. Very enlightening and
very doable. Question: what is a curry? When is a curry not a curry? Is the
sauce the deﬁning element?
Travel of another sort may be encouraged by The Hairy Biker’s Cookbook
by Dave Myers and Si King (Michael Joseph, £20). Their television series
is loved by some; they rush oﬀ on their bikes to unlikely locations cooking
up al fresco dishes. Cheerful cooking for the bigger man; neither of them
is a cook by profession. Perhaps a cultural, rather than culinary, artefact.
Whole-world cookery is also treated in Classic One Pot Cooking (Apple
Press, £14.99). A sort of bed-sitter’s guide.
Mage Publishers of Washington DC have once more produced a book
from Najmieh Batmanglij, with contributions on wine and Persian poetry
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by Dick Davis, and on pairing wine with Persian food by Burke Owens.
It is called From Persia to Napa: Wine at the Persian Table ($50, available in
England from Gazel e Books Ltd, White Cross Mil s, Hightown, Lancaster,
LA1 4XS at £43.50). There is a full palette of Persian dishes, all thoroughly
appetizing, opening with seven soups, and closing with a score of pretty
sweet desserts and drinks. But the chief point of the book is perhaps
to reacquaint Persian food with its natural accompaniment, wine – not
terribly in favour with the present regime, though liberal libations were
once the order of the day. In the Napa Valley some reconnection of the
two mediums is being achieved at the Darioush Winery. A lavish book of
great interest.
Nearer to home, Silvena Rowe has written Feasts: Food for Sharing from
Central and Eastern Europe (Mitchell Beazley, £20). Ms Rowe is a Bulgarian
and once cooked at Books for Cooks in Notting Hill. This is a very useful
repertoire of big-ﬂavoured dishes that might help one through the winter.
They are also not impossible – always a recommendation. A chapter to be
treasured is that on dumplings and pierogi: very instructive.
Another cook who has practised her art at Books for Cooks is Ursula
Ferrigno. Her Complete Italian Cookery Course (Mitchel Beazley, £20) is
often recommended as a useful repository of satisfying recipes. That we
came to blows in this house over her instructions for calzone is probably
nothing to do with her, but I will quote her instructions in the hope that
someone can explain what she actually means. She is talking of making up
the ‘trouser leg’ which she has already rather gnomically remarked is ‘not
quite the shape you might imagine’: ‘Roll out [the dough] into a rectangle
38 x 20 cm. Spread the onion mixture over the dough, leaving a 1 cm margin
all round. Fold the dough lengthways into three, bringing the ends over
to enclose the ﬁlling, and place on a greased tray.’ Even as I have written
these sentences in the company of my colleague Wendy Baker, we have
had a violent diﬀerence on their real meaning.
Jennifer McLagan’s Cooking on the Bone has already been mentioned
when it came out as Bones in the USA (HarperCollins). Grub Street has
issued it for the English market (£20). A book that has a recipe for ﬁsh
head curry must deserve a prize.
If you would rather travel in the mind, of all the chefs’ books this
season, David Everitt-Matthias’s Es ence, Recipes from Le Champignon Sauvage
(Absolute Press, £25), his restaurant in Cheltenham, is the one: great
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recipes, great descriptions of larder essentials – his store cupboard consists
of duck conﬁt, duck gizzard conﬁt, tomato conﬁt with lemon, salted grapes,
salted lemons, salted sardines, salted sardine tapenade, soured cabbage (a
quick form of sauerkraut), Maury syrup (a reduction of Maury sweet red
wine from the Roussillon), white port and verjus syrup, pickled apples,
spiced bread, and marinated prunes in Armagnac. His style is disarming
and the recipes will extend your repertoire without being too thoroughly
stupid, for example: braised blade of beef with nettle risotto and spring
onions, chump of lamp with pea purée, wilted lettuce and eucalyptus foam,
brown trout with wild garlic quinoa and roasted garlic cream and prune
and burdock iced mousse with toasted almond ice-cream – and how about
crème brûlée of chervil tubers with brioche ice-cream and mandarin jelly?
Dinner parties will never be the same.
I have already mentioned Tom Aikens, who is certainly worth
investigation, and who provokes memory of the two chefs’ autobiographies
I’ve read this season: White Slave by Marco Pierre White (Orion, £20) and
Humble Pie by Gordon Ramsay (HarperCollins, £18.99). Strange how two
such arrogant individuals can highjack falsely modest titles. On the disgust
stakes, Marco Pierre White wins hands down. A more repellent character
is diﬃcult to conjure, though he eﬀortlessly manages it himself through
the medium of his ghosted memoirs. A chapter in Gordon Ramsay on
the same subject (MPW) adds several nails to the coﬃn. Surprisingly, the
Ramsay eﬀort (which does seem to be his own writing – explanation perhaps
for the constant reiteration of the epithet ‘fucking’ which seems the only
adjective in his quiver) makes the memoirist a less oﬀensive character,
or less of a bully, than I had expected; though still not sympathetic. The
presumption underlying all these chefs’ memories (and I include Anthony
Bourdain’s here) is that bad behaviour and machismo are an inevitable
concomitant of good cooking. This attitude has entered the collective
perception of kitchen life and must be disputed. There are brilliant chefs
(as well as brilliant cooks, to make the reasonable distinction between
the two) who are balanced, polite and normal. The misapprehension that
kitchens are brutal is as wrong-headed as the old-style approach to military
discipline that had recruits enduring needless cruelty and humiliation in
order to better maim the enemy. Sociologists are going to have fun with
our current crop of loquacious kitchen boys. Both come from inauspicious
backgrounds, though MPW was part of a cheﬃng family. Both left school as
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soon as they could and have yet been able to rise magniﬁcently above their
troubled youths, adopting without eﬀort the camouﬂage and trappings
of the social groups to which they pander (and in both there is a joyful
and explicit embrace of plutocratic display). For detail and local colour of
kitchen craft, MPW is, surprisingly, more informative than Ramsay. Both
are bril iant chefs and some inkling of the skil required is imparted by White
Slave. Neither oﬀers much assistance in understanding the transition that
both authors underwent from kitchen technician to capitalist entrepreneur.
The acquisition of this whole new skill-set is shrouded in mystery and one
would like to know far more of the mechanics involved: for example, are
they both puppets of some evil moneymaker, or were they both in exactly
the right place at the right time to take advantage of the opportunities
oﬀered on the one hand by the Forte organization, and on the other by
Blackstone? MPW, of course, is exceptional for never having (eﬀectively
at least) gone to France, or worked there. He rose entirely on the backs of
English-based chefs and restaurants, never sipping at the fount of haute
cuisine. There is almost no humour in either book, too much perhaps to
expect, but MPW’s anecdote of cooking for the Prince of Wales, when
HRH, confused by the chef’s christian names, addressed him entirely
in French, is a classic. Should one buy these books for little Johnny who
wants to take up cooking? Certainly the apple of one’s eye needs to have
a balanced personality so as not to be thrown emotionally oﬀ-course by
them, but severally they do give some impression, both of the great skills
of the authors – matters to celebrate and to acknowledge – and of the
diﬃculties of kitchen life.
For a refresher course of new ideas, Jamie Oliver’s Cook with Jamie
(Penguin, £26) will help you cheerfully along the Mediterranean route,
though Thomasina Miers’s Cook (Collins, £16.99) or Allegra McEvedy’s
Colour Cookbook (Kyle Cathie, £19.99) wil deal in the same robust and
colourful ﬂavours while oﬀering a change of tone to the ever-present
Oliver. Apprehensive hostesses (and hosts indeed) may ﬁnd comfort in
the precise instructions for thoroughly modern (which of course means
slightly traditional) cooking in Something for the Weekend, with eight around the
table, by Ruth Watson (Quadril e, £25). The USP is that al the recipes serve
eight. I must admit that almost every suggestion attracts, and although
Ms Watson has adopted a public persona of thorough unpleasantness (see
her TV show, The Hotel Inspector) she comes over in this book as exquisitely
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helpful. Those seeking comforting and doable would be well advised to
turn also to Trish Hilfrety’s Gastropub Classics (Absolute, £20). Her Lobster
and Chips of last year was really good and this is more of the same sort
of cooking: toothsome, unsophisticated ﬂavours and minimal technical
diﬃculty solving problems for hungry families.
Vegetables have a fair run for their money with Peter Gordon’s Vegetables
The New Food Heroes (Quadrille, £18.99) – modern recipes from a master
of fusion; and Sophie Grigson’s Vegetables (Collins, £25) – recipes for more
than seventy plants. Ms Grigson must have worried about the shadow or
lustre of her mother’s book on the same subject and I guess you might say
that the recipes are somewhat more up-to-date. My wife Sally, a loyal fan
of JG, would never claim better. And then we have Gregg Wallace’s Veg
The Greengrocer’s Cookbook (Mitchell Beazley, £20). Not just a greengrocer
but also a cook; with information on dealing with each type (seasonality,
storage, purchase, basic cooking), and eclectic recipes.
Turning painlessly from vegetables to pies and pastry, three should be
noted. Many have recommended Angela Boggiano’s Pie (Cassel , £20). The
combination of photography and pretty straight recipes is comforting for
the apprehensive beginner: there’s something about doing pies for dinner
that makes you a consummate home-maker. A big dish topped by golden
pastry seems a step up from the brown stew that is its essential ingredient.
Alternatively Philippa Vanstone’s Tarts and Pies (Grub Street, £20) is entirely
sweet food, not a stew in sight. I have to admit to always wanting the ﬁl ing
and never the pie; which leads me gently on to the most characterful book
this season, as well as unput-downable, which is Rose Carrarini’s Breakfast,
Lunch, Tea (Phaidon, £19.95). I think the most enjoyable shop, during a stint
in London in the early ’90s, was the ﬁrst Villandry in Marylebone High
Street which was opened by Jean-Charles and Rose Carrarini to sell an
extremely small and über-expensive range of fresh and processed French
foods to eager customers such as myself, whose weekly return home with
overladen baskets was invariably greeted by ecstatic ululations from wife
and daughters. Later, they opened a larger and less satisfactory version and
then disappeared to Paris where, at The Rose Bakery, they have brought
oﬀ the same trick in reverse, beating back slavering queues of Parisians
from the wonders of English food producers. At the same time they have a
restaurant where baked goods and fairly simple cooking can be sampled and
this book is a record of their recipes and their venture. I recommend the
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recipes and I recommend the book for its idiosyncratic design, and above
all I recommend the surreal portraits of executants and customers – Juliet
Greco is not yet dead, talk about monotones. Highly recommended.
For my part, the familiar and irreplaceable qualities of Janet Ross’s
Leaves from our Tuscan Kitchen (reissued by Grub Street, £12.99) or the
remarkable description of bourgeois cooking as it should be from the
1950s by Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd, Plats du Jour (reissued by
Persephone, £10), leave our current authors standing open-mouthed by
their over-photographed blocks. Subscribers wil quite possibly have
Prospect Books’ version of Plats du Jour, which went out-of-print some
years ago. It seemed to me that the cause of Patience Gray was better
served in this new guise than reprinting the old, for Persephone reaches a
reading public currently innocent of the blandishments of PG. Although
Patience herself would say that she didn’t want to be read by the masses,
I am sure the masses will be better for having read Patience. Another
reprint this season is Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham’s The Prawn
Cocktail Years (Michael Joseph, £25). Same words (good), new photos and
new design (not so good). It now looks, in fact, exactly like one of those
recipe books adverted to a few lines ago.
For something completely diﬀerent, I recommend Cindy Pawlcyn’s
Big Small Plates (Ten Speed Press/PG UK, £25). Pawlcyn is the founder of
Mustard’s Grill in California where you eat tapas-sized portions of relaxed
West Coast fusion foods. The recipes are clear, the ﬂavours arresting, the
food wildly up-to-date. A must-read for fashion-victims.
Katherine M. D. Dunbabin: The Roman Banquet: Images of Conviviality:
Cambridge University Press, 2003: ISBN 0521822521: £59.
Matthew Roller: Dining Posture in Ancient Rome: Bodies, Values, and Status:
Princeton University Press, 2006: ISBN 0691124574: £26.95
I don’t say these two books duplicate one another: their aims are quite
diﬀerent. I will say that when you’ve read both, you’ll know enough about
Roman tomb reliefs that depict the subject enjoying a meal. There are many
such; in fact it was already a typical theme for relief sculpture in ancient
Babylonia, Assyria, Persia and Greece.
Dunbabin starts from the imagery (wall paintings as well as sculpture)
and traces it chronologically, from the late Roman Republic to the end
of the Empire. She puzzles over the variations, but she doesn’t know
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why the dining theme was so enduringly popular, unless, perhaps, being
‘fundamentally multivalent’, it ‘owed much of its popularity precisely to
its ability to convey a range of signiﬁcance’. On the same page 7 on which
she hazards this opinion, she issues a warning for anyone tempted to read
true lives out of tomb reliefs: ‘Any approach to the visual material that
looks on it primarily as a source of information about actual practice in
real life is both limited and potentially misleading. The images are in no
way intended to act as mirrors of reality.’ They are fascinating images, and
Dunbabin explores them more searchingly and more successful y than
anyone before her.
She’s right, though, I’m afraid. You can’t take pictures, or texts, or
anything at all, as a reliable source for ancient social history. The safe way
for a young academic is therefore not to do social history. Do bodies and
status instead.
Matthew Roller saw this and has succeeded in publishing a study of
ancient dining customs which will be really useful whenever any social
historians put their heads above the parapet. I think he, too, started with
the tomb reliefs, but he also read the texts very carefully, and in doing so
he noticed that the ‘handbook’ views about the way people behaved at
Roman dinners didn’t correspond with the evidence. (These handbooks,
I must explain, are in German and classicists are therefore in the habit of
taking them very seriously.) Roller shows that a Roman woman reclined at
dinner, just as a Roman man did. We who didn’t bother with the handbooks
already knew this from watching I, Claudius on television. But where,
exactly, did she recline, and at what stage did she and her partner slip oﬀ
to bed? Roller knows, and he cites the evidence to prove it. He also knows
(better than anyone else, and much better than the handbooks) at what
age Roman children began to dine among the adults, and at what age they
reclined. He even knows exactly what went on in a comissatio. Need I say
more?
ANDREW DALBY
Fragkiska Megaloudi: Plants and Diet in Greece from Neolithic to Clas ic Periods:
the archaeobotanical remains: Archaeopress: ISBN 1841719498: 95pp.: £28.
Not everyone has heard of Archaeopress and their series British
Archaeological Reports, but for this particular volume (which is number 1,516,
no less, in the subseries BAR International Series) all who are interested in
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prehistoric foods ought to be beating a path to their door. The pages? Large.
The text? Meaty. The tables? Compendious. The price? A snip.
Frangkiska Megaloudi has worked on the archaeobotanical material
collected in excavations at Mykonos, Ftelia, Messene, Limenaria Thasou
and the Sarakenos Cave and, what’s more, she has published the results.
But this book isn’t that. It’s a synthesis, and an extremely useful one. She
has gathered the reports from 43 sites in Greece where archaeobotanical
studies have been published ful y, and from 21 more where publication was
more partial or anecdotal. In other words, all useful sites: she admits in
the introduction that her study is ‘not exhaustive’, but in truth it is. She
has set out the results very clearly, surveying the sites, surveying the food
plants found, and ﬁnally giving a modest but eﬃcient summary of the
results. This summary is in eﬀect a new history of the use of food plants
in Greece from 6,000 to 400 BC, and as such it easily supersedes what
Vickery said on the subject, in Food in Early Greece (1936), and what I said
in the relevant part of Siren Feasts (1996).
There are surprises. Emmer was not always the dominant wheat species:
einkorn remained unexpectedly popular, at least until classical times, and
even spelt put in a prehistoric appearance. Camelina sativa (gold-of-pleasure
or false ﬂax) and Lallemantia iberica (for which I can give no English name,
so obscure has it become) were both cultivated as sources of oil in northern
Greece in the Bronze Age. An okra seed, and a bit of peach stone, were
among the many exotic ﬁnds at the ancient sanctuary of Hera on Samos.
And I didn’t know till now that the fruit of the chaste-tree (Vitex agnus-
castus) ‘yields a spicy edible oil that is often used to spice up various foods
in modern Greek cuisine’.
Archaeologists aren’t always well read in ancient textual sources, but
Megaloudi is. They are quoted frequently. On the subject of barley and its
uses, we are even reminded of Aristotle’s handy rule: those drunk on ale
fall on their backs, while those drunk on wine fall on their faces.
ANDREW DALBY
Andrew Whitley: Bread Matters: The state of modern bread: Fourth Estate,
2006: ISBN 0007203748: 371 pp., £20.
Years ago, I taught the sourdough class at an artisan bread conference
at the American Institute Of Baking. To my surprise, the ﬂour I chose,
after testing those available, was organic. I doubt if the A.I.B. even knew
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of its presence – it is best known for its ties to the industrial sector – but
turned out to be ideal in ﬂavour and performance. Alas, it was a rare
coincidence. Many artisan bakers have shown interest in organic ﬂour,
which is, after al , a logical extension of their raison d’être, since they
practise traditional methods and shun additives, but price, availability,
and above all, performance are all barriers. Hopefully this will change as
more suitable wheat varieties are introduced and as increased production
allows millers to mix diﬀerent lots of wheat to maintain constant quality,
but for the present, bakers are too often forced to choose between good
intentions and great results.
‘The state of modern bread’ has an ominous ring to it, and in the ﬁrst
ﬁfty pages, Whitley delivers on his promise: he describes factory loaves and
the additives they contain, he provides statistics showing the increasing
cases of al ergies and intolerance to baked goods, and he points to solutions
to be found in growing grains organically, pursuing proper nutrition, and
allowing time for traditional long fermentations. The earnestness of his
convictions is compelling, but along with it a late 1960s sort of paranoia
feel is revealed in certain phrases – ‘the covert corruption of our daily
food’, ‘Much of what you get in shops should probably be avoided’ – beliefs
which can lead to uneasy silences among even good friends. Most people
I know favour transparent labelling, and would thus agree with Whitley’s
condemnation of a legal loophole which exempts industrial loaves from
listing added enzymes among the ingredients, many would be intrigued
by the possibility that long lactic fermentations might allow those with
coeliac disease to eat bread, but few bakers I know would agree that organic
stone-ground ﬂours are the only ones to use in every case. I lack both the
knowledge and the gall to enter the fray. But I do wonder whether this
negative approach will ﬁnd most readers running into the kitchen and
‘taking control’.
Whitley knows his way around the bakeshop, and his teaching
experience, too, is apparent. He bravely recommends the use of the metric
weights and measures, which once one takes the plunge are indeed more
exact and user-friendly and, since digital scales have simpliﬁed the process,
soundly proposes that readers weigh rather than measure the volume of
water. His ‘Eight illogical instructions’ are an entertaining discussion of
useless practices which have found their way into too many baking books
over the years (though I disagree that attempts to produce steam to form a
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baguette-type crust in home ovens are futile), and he provides a formula for
calculating the water temperature required to produce a dough at the ideal
fermentation temperature. (This is a good start, but it does not consider
room temperature and ﬂour temperature separately – a good idea for those
who store their ﬂour in a cool pantry – nor does it take into account the
heat created by friction when a machine is used to mix the dough.) I was
surprised to ﬁnd a section on gluten-free baking, but these days, it does
seem we all know someone who could beneﬁt.
Beyond its familiar format and recipes, Bread Matters is not the
general-interest bread book it ﬁrst appears. Perhaps Whitley’s leanings
are well-enough known that British readers assume this, but any one else
should bear in mind that like the added baggage that 8 or 12 inert grains
add to loaves (curiously, there are no recipes for these), his philosophy
adds unexpected weight to the book as a whole, as if having a good time,
making a great loaf, and devouring it were reasons too shallow to don an
apron. He conveys the mechanics of sourdoughs, not the joys. ‘Real taste
and integrity’ or ‘the beguiling smell of baking bread, the satisfying sound
of crackling crusts’ are as good as it gets. Though baking might not be a
chore for him, he seems to assume that it will be for his readers, whom
he feels bound to remind that the active work amounts to only 30 or 40
minutes, and that although hand kneading should be ‘fun, energetic, even
therapeutic’, it also ‘beats going to the gym, if only because it costs little,
can be done at home and has an edible end-product’.
The formulas are consistent with his beliefs. The amounts of salt in
the bread recipes are about half of what most bakers would consider a
moderate amount (8 grams per kilogram of ﬂour as opposed to 17 or 18,
and in commercial bakeries 22 grams is not uncommon), and although he
allows readers the option of substituting white ﬂours for wholemeal and
vice versa (and, more grudgingly, he allows non-organic ingredients), all
but three doughs – for Danish pastries, brioche, and croissants – contain
wholemeal ﬂours. Why those exceptions, I wondered, and not others for
Stollen, Tuscan Harvest Bread, ciabatta?
Whitley’s true passion is for the issues, and he supports his views with
5 pages of notes. Readers with a more middle-of-the-road set of priorities
will ﬁnd nothing on the more technical aspects of baking, nor mention of
other baking books. Instead, his focus is upon the evils of the Chorleywood
Bread Process, which in the 1960s led to the puﬀy industrial loaves which
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so many of us are justiﬁably proud to hate, and upon his own intransigent
solutions. Lost in al this is the notion that in the general scheme of things,
any long-fermented loaf made with unbleached ﬂour and no additives is a
huge step in the right direction. Whitley does mention artisan bakers – his
phrases ‘skil not scale, time not trickery’ have the ring of a picket-line chant
– and he says that the craft bakery sector accounts for only 6% of U.K.
bread. But neither in the text nor in the resource section on equipment
and ingredients does he mention individual bakers and bakeries, though
he does chide unnamed bakers on occasion for indulging in the wrong
obsessions: ‘the term [poolish, a liquid sponge] is much loved by a rather
earnest kind of American artisan baker’, ‘The sourdough grail is guarded
by zealots, who expatiate interminably on the size of the holes in their
miches’. Yet apart from the rhetoric, these are just the people that bread
lovers should seek out.
Looking towards the other end of the spectrum, the vehemence of
Whitley’s feelings towards the industrial sector has blinded him to an
important reality just emerging. New technology al ows factories to produce
‘artisanal’ loaves using the same soft, well-fermented doughs that have been
exclusive domain of smal bakeries. In addition, the ‘par bake’ method
permits baking loaves to a certain point and ﬂash-freezing them so they can
be delivered to points of sale and ﬁnished oﬀ as needed to produce ‘fresh’
bread al day. There might wel be a slight loss of ﬂavour, but these are clearly
a threat to all but the most skilled and committed artisans. Ignoring the
implications of this, Whitley uses his encounter with a less than successful
batch in what appeared to be a small bakery in France as a pretext to round
up the usual suspects: ‘I made a rapid exit and sought out some genuine
artisan bread in the nearby town. My children were not as po-faced as I and
ripped into “fresh” baguettes with glee. Within two days, they couldn’t eat
another morsel. The roofs of their mouths were red and bleeding, lacerated
by the razor-sharp crusts twice-baked into those industrial baguettes.… I’m
a bit of a no-pain, no-gain person myself, but I draw the line at a technology
that turns daily bread into an instrument of torture.’
JAMES MACGUIRE
I have many other books to review but no space in which to review them so
they wil be held over to the next issue. The spate of books concerning food
runs so lustily that one could devote an entire journal to the subject.
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