The first one, adapted from a savoury short crust pastry, is my personal best for mince pie making. I suspect that the original version circa 1900 would not have had the addition of sugar, but I do like a hint of sweetness in the pastry.

NB Don’t be tempted to replace the lard with butter, you won’t get nearly such a deliciously short melt in the mouth end result (veggies, I recommend using veggie suet, but it needs a bit of working in). You can use caster sugar if you don’t have icing sugar, but again, not such a smooth end result and I think the icing sugar gives the cooked pastry a stability you don’t get with caster sugar, (I don’t have the science to back that up, it’s purely an observation / gut feeling).

This recipe makes approximately 18 mince pies (they will keep very well in an airtight container and reheat perfectly too).

1. Sieve the flour and icing sugar together with the salt.
2. Chop the butter and lard up (I do this in the bowl as it makes the fat less sticky to cut when it’s coated with flour) and rub in to the flour.
3. Add the water and use a knife to cut the water through the flour before bringing the whole together with your hands, kneading as lightly and briefly as possible until you have a smooth ball. If you feel it’s not coming together well, add a further tbsp of water, but try not to add more as it will make the pastry tougher. However, that said, this is a very forgiving pastry mix!
4. Let it rest for half an hour (I don’t bother putting it in the fridge unless it’s the height of summer).

Rich Short Pastry (from `Popular Home Cookery’)

Assembling Your Mince Pies

Remember, size is everything! Mince pies are undeniably rich with their butter-lard-suet-sugar combo packing a calorific punch. And when you’ve got your beautifully light short crust pastry cradling your fresh and fragrant mincemeat, the best way to set it all off is to keep your mince pies small enough to leave room for a second (or even a third)! To this end I use a fluted base cutter of approximately 8cm and a fluted top cutter of approx 6.5cm.

Having rolled out your pastry and cut it, I find 2 slightly heaped teaspoons of mincemeat per pie is ample and, for the record, better to under-than-over fill, mincemeat that bubbles out inevitably takes on a burnt and bitter flavour which, however good the rest of the elements are, will ruin the end result.

Bake them at 160 degrees (gas mark 5) for approximately 15 minutes. Many recipes recommend higher, faster baking but through trial and error I have found this to be the most burn-proof method (and the pastry doesn’t suffer for it either)!

When they come out of the oven brush the tops over with egg white, three at a time and sprinkle with caster sugar, repeating in batches of the three until you have done them all. If you do all the tops with egg white wash at once you will find that the wash has instantly dried and the sugar won’t stick.

Alternatively (which I prefer with the second, fancier pastry) simply dust with icing sugar.

Perfect accompaniments in another post, but, for my money, a few carols are perenially just the job. Meanwhile all that’s left to do is get some folk round for a few pies and a little Christmas spirit. Enjoy!

The other key yet subtle difference between the old style Mince Meat and the modern mincemeat is the amount of sugar, candied peel and apple. I checked BBC Good Food’s and Delia Online’s mincemeat recipes and they both contained more sugar and less apple as a percentage of the total ingredients. The British Baker recipe has a total of 16% sugar versus BBC Good Food’s 22% and 28% apple versus Delia’s 21%. The difference in the peel is more marginal with the original recipe sporting the highest amount at 14% and Delia’s recipe just 10%.

The variations between apple, sugar and home made versus shop bought mixed spice are merely a sideshow though compared to the main event: the home produced candied peel versus the shop bought. This is the defining difference. The contrast between their flavours is incomparable and the contrast in the finished product of both the raw and cooked mincemeat is similarly stark too.

Overall, the balance of ingredients gives the British Baker’s recipe the edge with a fresher and lighter flavour, enhanced by a lighter spice mix and probably a less sugary pastry too. Curiously, to me at least, the 100 year old recipe feels more contemporary than the heavier flavours of Delia and BBC Good Food’s versions.

This recipe makes approximately 6 jars of mincemeat (but for commercial batch making, the original recipe is also included) and will keep very well in the fridge for months on end.

Since the British Baker assumes its audience has no need of a method, none is included, so I’ll tell you what I do and hope that it’s near enough the original to be worthy of it. The first thing to point out is that if you are a lucky enough to be able to buy fresh shredded suet from your butcher you will be able to store your mincemeat in a cupboard, but if you use packet bought suet it must be stored in the fridge. Packet suet is dusted with flour to stop it clumping and this will cause your mincemeat to start fermenting 2 to 3 weeks after it’s made if you don’t keep it chilled.

The second assumption I have made is that the sugar is caster sugar, but you could, as I often do, use half caster and half soft brown sugar to give a better colour and slightly more treacly flavour. You can let this stand for 1 to 3 months before using and you will find the flavours meld and mellow, but equally, I think it’s great freshly made too; it’s simply a matter of personal preference versus time available. Here’s the original recipe:

1. Wash fruit thoroughly and scrub if waxed.
2. Peel fruit and slice in to narrow strips (I find it easiest to peel in quarters).
3. With grapefruit, you will then need to cut off the pith as well, it’s a bit time consuming but inedible without this extra effort (the first two photos above show just how much pith there was from three grapefruit!).
4. Put peel in a saucepan and just cover with water. Bring to the boil and lower the heat. In the case of grapefruit, which is more bitter than orange or lemon, you will need to change the water once it has boiled and repeat this twice more before covering and simmering for between 1 and 2 hours until very tender.
5. Drain thoroughly, reserving 275ml of liquor, adding extra water if necessary.
6. Pour liquor in to a pan and add 225g caster sugar. Melt over a low heat, stirring and bring to the boil. Stir in the peel them remove from the heat.
7. Leave the peel to stand in the syrup for 48 hours.
8. Drain off the syrup and pour in to a clean heavy bottom pan, add 125g caster sugar and dissolve slowly, add peel and gently simmer until the peel becomes translucent. During this phase you should nurse your peel like a risotto, giving it plenty of stirring to make sure it doesn’t catch on the bottom. Cover when cold and leave peel to stand in the syrup for 2 to 3 weeks (or however long you’ve got).
9. To dry, take peel out of pan and spread on to a baking sheet lined with non-stick parchment paper. Place in a cool oven set to 50 degrees C (gas 1/2) and leave to dry until the surfaces of the peel are no longer sticky to the touch. Turn pieces from time to time, the whole process may take from 2 to 4 hours. You can also, as I did last year, leave it in an airing cupboard (as long as it also houses your boiler) for 3 to four days and that’s just as good. This year, it’s going under the wood burner, which will probably dry it out faster than the oven.
10. Toss in granulated sugar and, when cold, store in air tight containers where it will happily keep for up to 12 months or longer. (I like to chop it up in to smaller bits as and when I need it, I think it retains a better flavour this way, but you can chop it up at the beginning, before cooking, or at any stage inbetween).

It is my most passionately held belief that our love affair with traditional regional sweet specialities could be rekindled to levels of seasonal mince pie ubiquity if we understood that quality is everything and took heed of the infamous refrain that size matters. I don’t know about you, but confronted by a counter of outsize mince pies, corpulent gingerbread men, giant `cookies’ and pudgy iced buns, my appetite shrivels and dies at the prospect of so much stodge.

Small is beautiful.

What generally passes for a (shop bought) mince pie is infact a cheap and nasty concoction of dark brown spiced gloop in an overly large and cumbersome pastry case that all to frequently sticks uncomfortably to the roof of your mouth.

At the risk of labouring the point, I don’t want to eat one mince pie at peckish-O’clock and feel like I’ve had half my supper already. No, a mince pie should be at most two or three bites of a fragrant, delicately spiced simple filling encased by the shortest of short melt in the mouth pastry. (And for the bakers this should work at a commercial level too: more volume within each batch and the price premium on smaller items rewards with an improved profit margin to boot).

Like chemical attraction, the real mince-pie-McCoy should appeal to your basest instincts and have you clamouring for more, it’s memory lingering with you long after the moment has passed… As you can probably tell by now, I love-love-love mince pies and having sampled many and made many, I have concluded that there are three elements that elevate a mince pie from instantly forgettable to utterly memorable:

• home made mixed spice
• home made candied peel
• the shortest, slightly sweetened pastry

In my view poor quality alcohol in the mincemeat contributes little and it’s frankly a waste of good rum or brandy, which is better added, hot from the oven, in the form of a  flavoured butter. Save  your spirits for feeding that more worthy of recipients, the Christmas Cake. You can of course make a good mince pie without these three hand made elements, but if you’ve the time and the inclination, and, if, like me, you delight in the ritual, I promise you will be richly rewarded.

Mixed Spice

From The British Baker’s Selected Recipes circa 1905, this recipe can be used for any recipe that calls for mixed spice. I know making your own seems like a tremendous extravagance when you can easily buy it, but the relatively small investment made in a spice grinder (or coffee bean grinder) will more than pay for  itself in terms of the pure joy of a freshly ground flavour, whether that’s mixed spice, tandoori paste or home made jerk seasoning, to a name a few.

In the case of this mixed spice, you are grinding different ingredients to those used by commercial blends and although the off the shelf product is fine, once you’ve made your own you might draw an unfavourable comparison such as this: a wet flannel will wake you up in the morning, but how much nicer to awake to a gentle word and a freshly brewed pot of tea (I know, I am very spoilt to live with a fella who brings me tea when time allows).

For the epi-curious, the commercial brand’s mixed spice includes: cinnamon (40 percent), coriander seed, caraway, nutmeg, ginger and cloves, which is a much punchier combination than the recipe below. Interestingly the commercial brand has more in common with The British Baker’s “cheaper quality” recipe which includes: fenugreek, allspice, caraway, coriander and cassia.

In conclusion you can expect your hand made mixed spice to reward you with a lighter, fresher and an all together more delicate result and, like a good scent, this blend offers an unexpected level of complexity in the first, middle and base notes that will do the sharp cooking apple in your mincemeat very proud indeed. You can add more or less spice to the mincemeat to suit your own tastes.

March is more than 6 months ago now and Spring a distant memory, but this post is still fresh in my mind. Not least because March is when it was written and because I haven’t written anything since.

To date this post has so far proved to be the fullest stop I have ever written. A piece of punctuation I have found myself unable to move beyond. Stuck in limbo; caught between a desire to publish this very personal post and an equally strong will to keep something so intensely personal private, the resulting lack of motivation to write has been all pervasive.

Yet something has gradually and imperceptibly shifted. Fear does not inspire a full heart and holding on to what I have written no longer feels like the way forwards. I am lighter for the thought, if still reticent about the deed! Over and above this hiatus, I also want to acknowledge that this blog may well be a lifetime’s work. It will evolve slowly, the ebb and flow of energy channelled through it may come and go as naturally as the seasons themselves. There is no hurry – and this is a revelation to me at least!

Going forwards I’d like to share more than just my love of bread and embrace craft baking in the fullest sense of the word. I hope you will continue to enjoy what you find here.

The Time Was When

Listening to the radio as we were driving back from Dorset last Sunday, a classic old eighties pop anthem blared out, shortly followed by a groan of derision from my partner. It had altogtether different connotations for me since the happiest and saddest memories of the year of its release were all bound up in this one tune.

The track playing on the radio was in all likelihood the one that my cousin had last listened to before he died. I know because I still have the tape that was in his personal stereo, which was in a bag with all his other gear when he endured a fatal crash somewhere near Plymouth. He was returning home after a sailing holiday; it was American independence day and he’d celebrated his 21st birthday less than three months previously. During the last holiday we spent together that year, we’d played that one particular tune incessantly, irritating not only the adults but our other siblings to boot.

The passage of time has blunted the acuteness of grief, but the odd unexpected something here and there still has the power to make a buried pain raw. Today I prefer not to dwell on how losing him irrevocably changed all of our lives. Suffice to say that although my loss is as nothing compared to his immediate family; I miss him still.

It’s easier, happier and altogether more pleasurable to keep him close through the many, many happy memories we shared as children, teenagers and young adults – as a family all together. Along with my older brother and his older sister, the four of us, well matched in age, were inseparable on the long holidays we shared most Summers, Easters and some Christmases. The edited highlights of these memories are almost always bound up with food: midnight feasts of tangerines and chocolate featured highly in the early years. With both families boat-mad regular sailing trips were the order of the day and the annual Sailfish BBQ, organised by my parents, often with help from my Uncle and Auntie, was a fine finale to follow the sandcastle competition and a race around in the sand dunes of Easthead beach. The traditional burgers in little seeded baps, hot dog rolls and homemade coleslaw with a good dose of sand from our seasalt-sticky fingers made for perfect companions.

When visiting my cousins at the German RAF base near the town of Mönchengladbach, where my Uncle had been most recently posted, we were regularly sustained in the local cafes by large slices of torte, served after the German fashion `mit schlagsahne’ (thick, whipped cream, and lots of it!). Most meals were an event; not even breakfast was complete without dutch `Hagelslag’ (chocolate sprinkles for spreading on buttered toast). For my savoury tooth, I always preferred my Auntie’s spread of cold, local cured meats and the slightly sour taste of the accompanying pumpernickel brot. At de Efteling- a huge treat one Summer - we ate hot Frikadellen with chips and mayo. The smell and taste of this is all around me as I write.

One particularly memorable holiday, we four older cousins all slept on camp beds in the (barely) converted loft and, by then more frequently let off the leash en masse, we spent a whole day cycling through local German forests and countryside. Returning saddle sore and ravenous, that night we ventured over the border in to Holland and I had my first taste of Indonesian food: nasi goring, peanut satay and a cornucopia of other delights, I was in heaven. Back at home, visits from our beloved cousins were always honoured with a choice of at least three puddings – no mean feat when you consider that for every meal we shared together there were 10 mouths to feed!

When the family returned to the UK we made regular pilgrimages from our West Sussex home to Shropshire. After bracing winter walks up the Wrekin we fell upon my Auntie’s hearty lunches of goulash with sour cream, red cabbage and jacket potatoes and that last New Year all together we abandoned the adults in favour of one of Much Wenlock’s cosy taverns. Returning home at midnight and relatively sober, the smell of the fire and the brandy was all pervasive – and we were shocked to find “the adults” had done significant damage to the spirits – and were more inebriated than us. It made for an interesting game of sardines!

The most memorable meal, if not the most memorable occasion, was after a long walk in a forest. It could have been the Hardter Wald forest near Mönchengladbach, I’m not sure, I was pretty young. It was a simple repast: the most sensational paprika chicken, roasted, with a piece of toasted bread underneath that had been placed there somewhere near-ish the end of cooking to catch all the juices. Served with bratkartoffeln (german sautéed potatoes), it makes my tastebuds sing at the very thought of it.

I have never been able to replicate it to this day, although I have tried on numerous occasions. However, I have found a recipe that hits the right umami buttons at least and, although it’s not remotely of German origin, I’m including it here. I made it with The Winterborne Bakery’s excellent Country White sour dough loaf, which was just perfect for absorbing the juices and crisped up nicely round the edges for a satisfyingly oily, roasted paprika hit.

Caught up in the memory of that meal I sense happiness: good food, shared with great people at a happy time in a magical place.

The emotional succour in this moment is so palpable I can almost get hold of it. Food, like music, has the power to connect us with the lost, forgotten and buried memories that every day life conspires to conceal. This isn’t simply nostalgia, which admittedly can be a seductive liar, but an opportunity to connect with the past and, just for a moment, make it present.

The many happy `real food’ memories connected to those I love are the foundation on which I’ve been able to build a good life. I know I am lucky, I hope I do a reasonable job of sharing this good fortune around.

A moment later Jonathan’s body wavered in the air, shimmering, and began to go transparent. “Don’t let them spread silly rumors about me, or make me a god. O.K., Fletch? I’m a seagull. I like to fly, maybe…”.

Jonathon Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach. RIP Lewis Allen.

Mussakan (recipes from the Palestinian Al-Harrah)

My husband picked up this little pamphlet of a recipe book at Plymouth’s Respect Festival a good few years ago, it’s a staple in my kitchen. NB the original recipe does not include paprika, but it works for me!

1. Mix onion and sumac together (and add spices) and saute mixture in 2 tbsps olive oil until soft, but don’t allow it to colour.
2. Rub the paprika in to the chicken (if you prefer you can make a butter or olive oil mix with the paprika) and season generously before roasting at 180 deg C / 350F for 40 minutes to an hour.
3. Line a large deep sided roasting tray with bread, drizzle the 75ml of olive oil over the bread and season it before spreading the onion mix on top of the bread.
4. Sprinkle the pine nuts over before placing the chicken on top of the onions and roasting for a further 1o to 20 minutes at the same temperature.

I like eating this with a green salad and a large dollop of yoghurt (heavily seasoned, thickened with lemon juice and flecked through with plenty of finely chopped parsley).

The cynics amongst you may question the value of paying £150 for a day’s play with flour, water, salt and yeast, concluding this is simply a good wheeze for a canny baker to make a fast buck. The enlightened appreciate that learning to make bread under the tutelage of a skilled craft baker is money well spent, with a tangible return on investment manifest in the skills acquired and good bread henceforth made and enjoyed at home.

Talking from personal experience, although it’s a good few years ago now, the 7 hours I spent with Waitrose Small Producer of the Year winner, Linda Tonkin, was indeed worth every penny. Linda’s one day bread making course covered a range of techniques and breads, and although I could already make bread, Linda inspired me, gave me the opportunity to acquire new skills, which I’ve since been able to further develop, and gave me the confidence to branch out with my bread making. For many, something as everyday as learning the skill of making bread is an altogether empowering experience that goes well beyond simply combining flour, water, yeast and salt.

The growth in popularity of these courses has got me thinking about the latent desire in the generation of knowledge-based workers that can afford them – middle class professionals – to connect their heads with their hands. Frank Wilson, professor of neurology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, is an expert on the co-evolution of the hominid hand and brain; in The Hand, he contends that one could not have evolved to its current sophistication without the other. He says:

We’ve been sold a bill of goods… about how valuable computer based experience is. We are creatures identified by what we do with our hands. Much of our learning comes from doing, from making, from feeling with our hands; and though many would like to believe otherwise, the world is not entirely available from a keyboard”.

Richard Louv writes in “Last Child in The Woods” about the work of the late Edward Reed, an associate professor of psychology at Franklin & Marshall College. In The Necessity of Experience, Reed wrote about the “primary experience” – that which we can see, feel, taste, hear, or smell for ourselves. According to Reed, we are beginning

to lose the ability to experience our world directly. What we have come to mean by the term experience is impoverished; what we have of experience in daily life is impoverished as well”.

With all of the senses dynamically engaged: from the physical nature of kneading the dough, to its yeasty smell; the marvel that is the sight of rising dough to the toasty oven smell of a baking loaf and the sound of the cracking crust as it gently cools; bread making, from drawing together the raw ingredients to eating the finished loaf, is worthy of our awe and as a `primary experience’ with multi sensory appeal, I suspect it’s hard to beat.

As Nancy Dess, senior scientist with the American Psychological Association explains, in a world where “None of the new communication technologies involve human touch; they all tend to place us one step removed from direct experience”. Is it any wonder then that primary-experienced-starved, city-bound professionals are flocking to bread making classes in their droves and revelling in this tactile, tangible, very visceral simple, life sustaining pleasure which completely engages hand and brain simultaneously as one?

Might bread making also hold the key to holistically educating a generation of kids increasingly growing up, as Richard Louv says, “in a world of narrow yet over-whelming sensory input, many of them developing a wired, know-it-all state of mind…”, the results of which are evident in Frank Wilson’s revelation that “Instructors in medical schools find it increasingly difficult to teach how the heart works as a pump because these students have so little real-world experience; they’ve never siphoned anything, never fixed a car, never worked on a fuel pump, may not even have hooked up a garden hose. For a whole generation of kids, direct experiences in the backyard, in the tool shed, in the fields and woods, has been replaced by indirect learning, through machines. These young people are smart, they grew up with computers, they were supposed to be superior – but now we know that something’s missing”.

Whilst it may be clear that the intellectual establishment knows something’s missing, there’s little evidence that this has filtered down to our communities and with cooking likely to be taken off the national secondary school curriculum, what should we do? The Real Bread Campaign leads from the front here with its Lessons in Loaf campaign which aims to get bakers teaching children aged 7 – 11 bread making in school. Sister campaign, Bake Your Lawn, also provides the opportunity for children to `follow the trail from seed to sandwich’ by growing wheat with a view to milling it and making bread from the results.

These campaigns are inspirational, yet so far the potential for change in my own community feels less than positive; I’d hoped to generate interest in these projects at my son’s school, but have hit a wall of apathy and worse than that, judging by a throw away remark made by one teacher, there is a fear that teaching real bread making will patronise and alienate the schools’ dominant catchment of council estate children, who “only eat sliced white at home”.

And as sensitive as I am to the point the teacher was making and as enthusiastic as I am to see improved access to properly made, sustaining real bread, I feel a bit defeated by the enormity of the task ahead. Some days it is tempting to simply think it’s enough to do right by your own kith and kin and not worry about the rest. But then look back over the last 50 years and review where society is now, we’ve arrived at a point where government is so concerned it wants to reintroduce us to the concept of `society’ en masse. Taking the individualist approach to life won’t help us to reconnect and it won’t move us forwards – or back – to a time when the concept of being a `big society’ didn’t need explaining or promoting because it is / was interwoven in the tapestry of community life.

So I applaud the resilience and commitment of the Real Bread Campaign, the passionate and infectious enthusiasm of the bakers offering these courses, and, as tough as these times are to be in business, I wonder whether there might be more we could collectively do to increase the chances of success. Drawing on the intellectual body of work around `primary experience’ may provide a more convincing intellectual analysis for proposing real bread making in schools, particularly if lobbying can persuade the political powers that be. And perhaps working with craft bakers, local businesses and eg Sure Start Centres (whilst they still exist) to find a way to offer parents in deprived areas access to the craft baking courses so enjoyed by the middle classes may also really sew the seeds of change.

In many ways reaching these disenfranchised parents is as important as teaching their kids to make real bread – since they are the ones who decide what their kids eat and it is them who will shape their kids’ eating habits for life. And as we know, learning to make bread with a group is a fun and bonding experience and it’s but a small leap from learning to make real bread, however hard pressed you are, to regularly buying the genuine article too.

Finding a way to make these parents ambassadors for change in their own communities offers the tantalising possibility of taking on Bad Bread Britain from the ground up - and winning. But this requires us all: craft and home bakers, food journalists and bloggers, campaigners and teachers alike, to look beyond our time-pressed schedules, business bottom lines, class and status anxieties or personal income stresses and become the change we seek. This is, as ever, the greatest challenge of all.

What an absolute pleasure to see Chris Young of the Real Bread Campaign giving it some welly about bad labelling and bad Chorleywood bread, wasn’t it inspiring to see a student at the School of Artisan Food investing in learning how to make real bread and don’t you want to phone John Letts immediately and find out how to get your hands on some of that genetically diverse heritage wheat flour?

Yes to all of the above for me; Michel Roux’s segment on this inaugural programme was full of flavour, so why have I woken up this morning with such an unpleasant aftertaste when the ingredients were simply so good?

I’m as keen to celebrate Real Bread rising above the parapet and making it on to the public radar as any fan. This is a genuinely important milestone and a major achievement for a country with just 3,000 craft bakers operating on the high street (and presumably 1,400 of these are Greggs outlets which can, in my book, be discounted, since they mostly ape what plant bakers do but on a smaller scale).

Trouble is the cacophony of Emily Shamma’s – (then) Head of Local Sourcing at Tesco – verbal assault is still ringing in my ears. Four years ago (or thereabouts) I listened to the suited-and-stilleto-clad Shamma take part in a debate in rural Devon about sustainable food supplies. Mostly attended by small food producers and farmers, Shamma lectured the audience about Tesco’s point of view on `green choices’

Food must be healthy, environmentally friendly, local and convenient. Not just for the enlightened or the affluent”

And she was equally firm about how Tesco, as a large retailer, see its role

… to commercialise green consumption, helping people to buy consumer products that are green and sustainable”.

In conclusion Shamma reminded us that, for Tesco, “it’s about providing customers with: information, opportunity, choice and incentive… for many consumers price is the key decider and they cannot be excluded”.

To paraphrase she told a room full of seriously hard grafters producing great quality food at a fair price and a small profit, that there is only a future for them if they can do it cheaper, brand it premium and agree to an exclusive supply deal with Tesco.

This debate took place around the time Tesco announced it was investing heavily in local sourcing, setting up 13 regional offices and providing a £1 million fund to `help’ small producers meet BRC accreditation standards so they could supply Tesco.

As far as I can see the reality of this initiative was to entice some of the larger small producers to invest in premium branding and upscale production to the point they could fit Tesco’s supply chain (and be prevented from building their businesses through independent outlets). In some cases this changed the nature of the product (particularly with cheese), compromising quality, but Tesco, who can charger a higher price for a product branded as premium AND local, are more than happy.

I question whether the producer, consumer or communities win in this equation, yet however disingenuous their stance, there’s no quick fix way to expose their claim that they want to sell “healthy, environmentally friendly, local and convenient” food to everybody “Not just [for] the enlightened or the affluent”.

Trotting out this line about exclusive food for the `enlightened and affluent’, Tesco’s marvellously adept message has proved enormously successful in sidelining the debate about the real costs of cheap food: health, social, economic and environmental. Politicians and pundits alike are scared stiff of appearing to criticise the diet of Britain’s poor and risk being branded high-handed and out of touch with their voters’ lives.

And this week Tesco have been upping the ante in a bid to convince the great British public that:

1. Cooking = mess
2. Cooking isn’t simple
3. Cooking isn’t British (anymore)
4. Tradition is pointless

Tesco spokesman Trevor Datson’s casual comments in the Retail Gazette made their strategy on these points clear:

For centuries Brits prided themselves with their pancake tossing abilities on Shrove Tuesday and in every town and village there would be a greatly heralded pancake race. However, the great tradition of pancake making and tossing soon looks like being consigned to history as nowadays society tries to make everything simpler. Judging by sales more and more people now would rather just heat up a ready made pancake than risk making a mess in the kitchen”

Tesco’s claim in the Retail Gazette that “as many as 15 million will cheat this year by buying ready-made mixture or completely pre-made pancakes” reveals the real motive behind Datson’s comments: there is much more cash to be made from `added value’ processed products than raw ingredients.

With powers of persuasion nothing short of masterful Tesco, seemingly able to consign hundreds of years of social tradition to the history dustbin with one comment on predictions for this year’s ready made pancake sales, is busy shaping consumer demand in a myriad of subtle and overt ways. Any criticism is deflected with the trite stock phrase `we only respond to consumer demand’.

The Great British Food Revival unwittingly and unthinkingly supported and promoted the stereotype Tesco would have us all believe: good food is the preserve of a middle class foodie elite.

Top heavy with aspirational cues, from the choice of presenter (Michelin starred French Chef) to the `Great British Food Revival’ country manor kitchen, from the smart urban London bread café where Chris Young was interviewed, right down to the cool leather-apron-clad E5 baker with his £3.50 sourdough and the pastiche of the working farm ploughman’s lunch enjoyed by John Letts and his thatcher friends, the programme was less Great British Food Revival and more Middle Class Foodie Celebration.

Taking it at face value all the individuals featured in the programme are worthy of praise and celebration, but the programme makers managed to make a sum that was, in my view, less than equal to the parts. The Great British Food Revival (on Bread) did nothing to bust the myth that being interested in eating well is the exclusive preserve of `the enlightened or the affluent’. And whilst it’s brilliant to raise awareness and support amongst BBC2’s core audience, it unfortunately didn’t take us anywhere down the road of broadening access to real bread, which seems something of a missed opportunity on the Beeb’s part.

This type of programme highlights a risk to real bread: London media’s appetite for food-as-lifestyle is huge and right now it looks like the craft of bread making is on the cusp. Craft baking and real bread lends itself really well to great pictures, great copy and great TV formats. Even better if there’s a cook-book tie in (ex Model Lorraine Pascale `Baking Made Easy’ and `The Delicious Miss Dahl’ spring to mind). It’s also apparent that food blogging is a rich new picking ground for the execs; there’s no shortage of bloggers clamouring `pick-me pick-me’ with gorgeous photography and sexed up foodie copy but whilst there is genuine talent in all areas, editors busy hunting bakeries and blogs for the next potential real bread media celeb mostly have a commercial outcome in mind; not positive social change.

The bitter pill I’m finding hard to swallow is that these trends are easy come, easy go – here today, gone tomorrow. The result? Our bread eating habits are the same in 10 years as they are now. Real Bread is stuck in the foodie elite rut and Tesco continues to rule.

The answer? In some ways the BBC have already proved they can do it with programmes like Turn Back Time: The High Street and similarly Channel 4 have shown the way with The People’s Supermarket. We need more programmes of this calibre. Somehow Top Chef in Country Manor Kitchen waxing lyrical about the aphrodisiac qualities of the aroma of freshly baked bread just felt too exclusive in these increasingly unequal times.

Out there in the regions, life is often different from the picture postcard London paints in its newspapers, magazines and TV programmes, we don’t need Real Bread and craft bakers to become the poster icons of the `Next Big Thing’ food trend. We need the real story of Real Bread around the UK brought to life, at a bakery near you, by the people keeping it real: the bakers. Is this the Real Bread Campaign on tour? I’d watch it and buy the cook book (as long as a meaningful percentage of profits were dedicated to broadening access to real bread).

The Ship’s Baker was published in 1923 by Glasgow based `nautical publishers’, James Munro & Co Ltd. Author Richard Bond tells us `At no time in the history of the British mercantile marine has a greater keenness for organised knowledge of the work required of the various members of this very important department been displayed, nor, it can truly be said, have greater incentives and opportunities for improvement, financial and otherwise, been offered to the steady, ambitious baker than the present’.

Post World War I it seems there were plenty of jobs available on board, but The Ship’s Baker has, it must be said, more challenges than most. Bond reveals the baker’s life at sea, challenged by limited space and conditions that “the shore baker would consider almost impossible for good practical work” and uncontrollable temperatures, particularly in the tropics! With great gusto Bond has a solution for every eventuality and endeavours to assist the ship’s baker with this incredibly detailed manual. A keen chemist, with a very precise eye for facts and figures, Bond’s ingenious solutions include dried yeast cakes (for when the yeast spoils), various recipes for home made barms, ideas about how to prevent the scourge of the day `rope bread’. His recipes, meticulously annotated and comprehensive in their breadth and depth, reveal a keen brain, attention to detail and creative flair. His obvious pride in `The British Bakers’, who he tells us are “acknowledged to be the best in the world”, is infectious. In short, Richard Bond was a skilled craft baker worthy of note.

Baking & Sailing

And as the daughter of a keen sailor, I am more than a little intrigued by what he manages to achieve within the confines of close quarters. My memory of cooking on board, markedly different from the scratch cooking we enjoyed at home, is imprinted with the smell of Fray Bentos steak & kidney pie, tinned potatoes and peas. Our onboard oven could swing in time to the crash of the waves if you wanted it to and the kettle could be bound to the hob with a vice like grip – holding on to a cup of tea without sloshing it everywhere was frequently a hard enough job, never mind the intricacies involved in making dough, shaping, moulding, rising and baking bread on board. Richard Bond, Sir, I take my hat off to you.

Versatility

The beautiful thing about these `Plain Cakes’ is their versatility. If you’ve become a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that I am inspired by traditional national and regional breads. I’m always on the look out for breads that might excite professional and home bakers enough to try them out with a view to getting forgotten favourites back in to circulation. I’m hoping this one fits the bill, it’s so multi purpose, its options for café bakeries and eating at home are virtually endless: warm from the oven it’s great with soup, the perfect size to make a sandwich, equally it can be sliced whole and used as a dipper for, say, hummous; it toasts really well, reheats really well and makes an absolutely cracking `panini’ (I made the mozzarella, tomato and pesto one featured in the photos using a pre-heated Le Creuset Griddle Pan and just weighed it down with a cast iron frying pan, with a heavy casserole nestled inside and it worked a treat).

These Plain Cakes really are perfect anytime, but come Summer they’ll also be taking pride of place in the picnic hamper – no soggy sandwiches for us. Just the right size for little hands too. And, if you’re planning on toasting or using for paninis I think they’re probably better the second day than the first. So ideal for mass catering events as well – everything from the school fundraiser to the hiker’s lunch and easy to bake small or large, round, square or rectangle. What more could you ask?

Fresh from the oven these `cakes’ smelled as sweet as any biscuit, just like Rich Tea infact and their milky blandness is actually a perfect foil for taking on other flavours. NB, the colour, smell and taste will be different if you only use water.

What’s In A Name?

There probably is one thing; Plain Cake – it’s not a very inspiring name. Not got quite the ring of the ubiquitous `panini’. Anyone got any better ideas? I wondered about `Pat-a-Cake’ or `Patty Cake’, since I’m sure this is an old bread, similar perhaps to the eponymous `cake’ featured in the nursery rhyme, which I suspect is infact a bread?

Whatever this bread is or isn’t, the image Richard Bond evokes for me, of the bakers working in the tiny galley kitchen and the hundreds of sailors on board a battleship, sitting down to a bowl of stew or broth, using their plain cakes a bit like a trencher, is a little piece of history worth remembering and worth sharing.

As usual, the domestic recipe is featured first, followed by the original commercial recipe.

Method 1 (Straight Dough Process)

1. Rub the lard into the flour and add the salt.
2. Mix the warm milk or water and yeast together and pour this into the flour, mix them together and then knead the mixture thoroughly to a dough (You may need to add up to 50ml more liquid, I did).
3. Prove for one hour in a warm place, knock back and prove for a further hour.
4. Give the dough a thorough kneading, cover and allow to recover for 10 minutes. Divide in to 7 pieces of approximately 120g per piece. Leave to rest, covered, for 5 minutes.
5. Roll each piece out in to a cake, prick all over with a fork and prove on lightly greased sheets for a further 45 minutes.
6. Bake in a very hot oven at 230 deg C for approximately 10 minutes.

Method 2 (Ferment)

Another method of making Plain Cakes is to first make a ferment of the yeast, warm milk / water, 30g flour (from the total amount of flour) and 6g sugar, all mixed together. Put this ferment in a warm place to rise and when it has risen and commences to fall, add it to the flour etc and proceed as instructed in the foregoing directions. This method ensures a bulkier and better eating cake.

Plain Cakes (Original Recipe)

• 10 lbs (4,540kg) strong flour
• 2 oz (25g) salt
• 1/4 lb (28g) yeast (1/4 tsp)
• 3/4 lb (340g) lard
• 2 quarts (2.27 L) 285ml milk, warmed through and tepid (you can use water or half and half)

The recipe says to divide this amount of dough in to sixty pieces, which would be approximately 115g per piece (I increased the weight slightly when I adjusted the quantities for the domestic recipe).

… that the small bakers’ salvation lies in small loaves, fancy breads, rolls and fermented morning goods. Here I believe is where he has a real advantage over his big brother, provided that he takes the trouble to please his customers”.

Lightly Malted Loaf (lost `Heavy' pix!)

Of course the `big brother’ he refers to is (1) the emerging retailers and (2) the plant bakers (the latter still had high street shops at this time). Personally I am fascinated by these `morning goods’ and would love to see a revival of these quintessentially British and regional breads and confectionery. So often the average bakery offering is an unsatisfactory mish mash of croissants and pan au choclat with a few currant buns and iced fingers thrown in. Made with the same good ingredients, skill and care that you might expect to find in a French artisan baker’s kitchen, I’m sure a discerning local public could be easily tempted to develop a penchant for our traditional equivalents.

So in a bid to offer up some inspiration, the blog will now include a regular `Something for the Weekend’ slot, exclusively showcasing the kind of breads Long Peel was talking about. Since I have a penchant for malt, I’m starting with a heavily malted brown bread recipe. Redolent of the teas of my childhood, I find malt a powerfully evocative flavour (which may in part be down to the fact that every winter we were regularly dosed with teaspoons of the stuff before heading off to school). I still can’t use malt in any recipe without first helping myself to a teaspoonful straight from the jar. Yum!

Fellow malt lovers will also be interested to know that in this week’s Food Programme on Radio 4, Sheila Dillon is investigating the role malt plays in our drinks and diet. For an up to date recipe and a professional finish Bakery Bits is also worth a look, their gorgeous wooden baking moulds and ingredients look just the job.

Heavily Malted Brown Bread aka `Food of the Gods’ (makes 3 small loaves)

The author of this (at least 60 year old) recipe, Albert Daniel, suggests using this loaf as a starting point to evolve a local speciality (he also suggests devising a special name and using special wrappers). Although it is a touch involved and a great deal of care is required, I love the fascinating processes involved, which are immensely satisfying once mastered. The gorgeous sweet, moist and sticky end result, with a generous helping of salted butter and a hot mug of tea is just the job. Expect some baking love too – the spare loaf from this batch went to work with my husband and his colleague described it as `Food of the Gods’.

I have provided my domestic quantities initially with the original recipe republished at the end of the blog:

1. Set the sponge  at 85 degrees and cover warmly. Leave it to rise and drop (should take about 35 minutes).
2. Whilst the sponge is doing its work, scald the flour with the just boiled water by pouring the latter intot he former whilst stirring rapidly to avoid lumpiness. Then add the cold water to reduce the scald’s temperature, then add the malt, stir thoroughly and cover warmly.
3. Prepare the dough ingredients by rubbing the fat into the sieved flour and salt.
4. When the sponge is ready, add the malt digest mix to it and mix well, then add the treacle (make sure it’s not too cold) and the fruit. Finally add the flour and mix thoroughly to a soft, sticky sort of dough.
5. Ferment for one hour, knead thoroughly and leave for a further 30 minutes.
6. Scale at 560g (or adjust the recipe to make 454g size loaves), placing the shaped dough into well warmed and greased tins (I use a pastry brush and brush with lard), then prove fully somewhere warm (leaving for up to 2 hours depending on how you are prooving the loaves).
7. Make the starch paste by mixing a tiny amount of the (cold) water to make a paste with the cornflour. Boil the remainder and pour over the whetted cornflour whilst stirring. Brush over the lightly proved loaves with the starch paste before baking for 1.5 hours in a moderate oven at 160 degrees C or 325 F.

Notes for Domestic Bakers

With the large amount of treacle, malt and fat enriching this recipe, the task the yeast has to perform is greatly increased, so the sponge and dough system used gives the yeast an opportunity to ferment some of the flour and becoming very active before the heavier ingredients are incorporated. However, don’t be tempted to reduce the yeast quantities, even if, like me, you find them a bit excessive.

The scalding of the starch in the flour causes the cells to expand, burst their cell walls and so release the starch proper. This is acted upon by the malt and changed into a mixture of two substances, one of which is sugar and the other of which is gum. The former (Maltose) would be present in far greater quantities than could be used by the yeast, and so remains in the bread to help sweeten it and improve its malt flavour.

The gummy action of the malt on the scaled starch is called dextrin. This makes the loaf sticky and rather difficult to bake out, but these characteristics have great flavour.

Owing to the high percentage of sugar in the dough at baking time, much lower oven temperatures are required. This prolonged baking results in the production of still more sugar and gum, so that the finished bread is sticky and sweet.

Most heavily malted brown breads are made with white flour of great initial gluten strength as great softening of the gluten occurs due to the nature of the ingredients.

So although this loaf doesn’t use malted flour, it’s useful to know that the colour of malt flour is an indication of its powers of changing soluble starch to sugar and gum: the pale colours are very active, the medium colours less so and dark or very dark brown malts are incapable of bringing about these changes. The dark coloured malt is then used to give the desired colour to the crumb.

Original Recipe – Heavily Malted Brown Bread

Sponge

• 568ml water (1 pt)
• 567g strong white flour (1.25 lbs)
• 87.5g yeast (3.5 oz)

Scald

• 340g plain flour (0.75 lbs)
• 1,136ml boiling water (2 pts)

Malt Digest

• 142ml cold water (0.25 pts)
• 504g diastatic malt extract (1lb 2 oz)

Dough

• 794g black treacle (1.75 lb)
• 75g lard (3 oz)
• 25g salt (1 oz)
• 567g sultanas or raisins (1.25 lbs)
• 2.156kg strong white flour (4.75lbs)

Starch Paste

• 25g cornflour (1 oz)
• 568ml water (1 pt)

Given that no claims are made for the skill used to make the bread, the taste, flavour, the overall quality of the bread or its authenticity, it’s almost hard to believe that between them, plant bakers and their clients, the supermarkets (along with their instore bakeries), account for 97% of the 12 million or so loaves consumed in Britain every day. And with such a large market share and so many commercial advantages to leverage, it’s logical to wonder whether craft bakers aren’t rather, well, pointless, inconsequential and generally surplus to requirements in 20th century Britain.

It is rather curious then that the 4 companies (Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury and Morrisons) who sell the majority of the bread we eat every day, constantly attempt to persuade consumers that this 97% of bread made by plant bakers and / or baked off in in-store bakeries is just the same, to all intents and purposes, as that 3% of bread made and sold by the craft baker.

Occasionally they get a bit too `persuasive’ and get in to trouble. Last year Tesco were caught out by the Real Bread Campaign and were forced to withdraw an advertisement about their in-store bakeries after the RBC’s complaint was upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).

The advertisement Tesco ran in national press read:

“Fresh bread. Baked from scratch in our in-store bakery. Using 100% British flour. So every single loaf is genuinely British… Born and bread”.

Sounds just like the craft baker’s genuine article, so what’s wrong with that? Nothing. If it’s true. The Real Bread Campaign suspected Tesco were making a false and misleading claim and, according to figures supplied by the supermarket in response to the complaint, it transpired that Tesco only bakes loaves from scratch in 504 of its 2,362 UK stores.

Tesco defended the advertisement, claiming the small print offered consumers sufficient clarity on the matter: “Subject to availability. Selected UK stores. British Flour used in all products that are baked from scratch in-store as stickered in pack. French Baguettes, Batons and products not baked from scratch excluded.”

However, the ASA upheld the RBC’s complaint that the advert was misleading as Tesco does not bake bread from scratch in all its in-store bakeries. The Real Bread Campaign Working Party Chair, Iain Loe, made clear the RBC’s understanding of Tesco’s intentions

“… if you plan to hide or distort the facts in an attempt to draw customers away from small, independent bakeries that make an honest living, baking honest loaves, the people of Britain won’t stand for it”.

But the fact is that over 90% of us are standing for it, retailers are getting away with masquerading factory bread as the real deal, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year.

There is a legal term for this kind of deception. It’s called `passing off’. The law of passing off prevents one person from misrepresenting his or her goods or services as being the goods and services of the claimant, and also prevents one person from holding out his or her goods or services as having some association or connection with the plaintiff when this is not true. In essence, the law of passing off is a form of intellectual property enforcement, designed to prevent misrepresentation in the course of trade to the public.

Last summer I bought a loaf from Bridport Waitrose – a packaged `White Sliced Bloomer’. It said – and you can see this clearly from the photographs (at the beginning of the post) – that it was `made by craft bakers’. I wrote to Waitrose to clarify this. I received one reply from them saying that someone would get back to me. I chased it. They never got back to me. I moved house and had lots of other things on my mind and gave up pursuing them.

I wonder if the loaf in these photos matches your expectations of a craft baked loaf? Personally I feel confident in claiming that this loaf was not made by craft bakers, but produced in a factory to an industrial process, by machine operatives. You will see on the label that although it claims `sourdough’ as an ingredient, it has all the usual additive suspects in it as well. (and I have never seen a bread made with a sourdough starter sporting such a clean white crumb). There is nothing about this loaf that looks like a traditional English bloomer either.

When I checked on Waitrose Delivers online earlier today, it appears Waitrose are still selling this loaf – although it’s hard to see what the label says, it looks just the same as the one I bought last year.

I believe that, in respect of the loaf I bought last Summer, Waitrose are guilty of passing off. In making an unsubstantiated claim that this loaf is `made by craft bakers’ they are suggesting that this article is just like any loaf you would buy from a high street craft baker. This suggestion is at best misleading.

Take Leakers of Bridport, which shares the high street with Waitrose. In the event Leakers objected to this Waitrose Bloomer and its allegedly false association with them, what could they do about it? The chances are, very little. They are a tiny business. And if consumers believe that the Waitrose loaf is made by craft bakers, as it said, then they have every right to believe that this White Bloomer is directly comparable with Leakers equivalent loaf. So Leakers are potentially losing customers to Waitrose who appear to be attempting to compete on the basis of like for like.

Supermarkets and plant bakers, constantly attempting to represent a factory made product with a convincing and enticing story that promotes a believable idea of hand crafted, flavoursome, authentic bread that is good for you; gives a clear indication of the position of influence Craft Bakers have. Remember, they only represent a tiny 3% of all the bread we consume every day, so this influence is completely disproportionate to their market share.

Over and above the important step of joining the Real Bread Campaign and promoting it to their customers, what can Craft Bakers do to collectively leverage that powerful commercial advantage and kick sharp supermarket practice in to touch?

Without an accepted definition of what a Craft Baker is, there is, in my opinion, little recourse for craft bakers to properly protect their trade and their bread. At best it is possible to do as the Real Bread Campaign have, and complain to the ASA, who give offending retailers or producers a meaningless rap on the knackles which knocks them back in to line until the next time they decide to see how far they can push the boundaries of the Food Standard’s Agency labelling guidelines.

That is not to suggest that this route isn’t important, it is and it’s a worthwhile activity to expose the fraud and have it labelled and disseminated by mainstream media as such, but ultimately it’s sticking plaster and the damage warrants more remedial treatment.

If all craft bakers acted together, what could they do? Bring a class action? Possibly. Set a standard for craft bakers and craft baked loaves loaf and label themselves and their products accordingly? Absolutely. Crucially, by organising themselves, craft bakers would communicate to the British public that hand crafted bread is made and sold by skilled Craft Bakers. In this, and in other areas like PR and lobbying, they would be supported by the Real Bread campaign, but, importantly, they would distinguish themselves from medium to large brands and large retailers by definition. This would be a stronger platform from which to lobby for regulatory change.

If you are a successful craft bakery that gets branding, gets new product development, gets diversification, delivers consistency and enjoys a customer base that can’t get enough of your bread, well done. That’s a huge achievement and I, for one, applaud your skill, dedication, creativity, talent, business savvy nous and attitude.

You could feel that all is well and there is no need for you to look beyond your own patch. Should that reflect your view I can understand and appreciate where you’re coming from. Lord knows craft bakers get precious little sleep as it is and, to boot, running a small business is demanding. But still, I entreat you to consider bonding with your fellow craft bakers in a more formal fashion to define what it is that you do and collectively brand it so that the public can unequivocally know it when they see it. Then it should become easier to prevent the public being duped by the factory processors’ and supermarket retailers’appropriation of the term `craft baker’.

With the associated support of the Real Bread campaign there will be collective benefits too: increased public understanding and appreciation leading to increase demand, which will in turn inspire greater supply and give rise to the potential for the kind of training and education that would make a craft baker proud. These kind of developments would also create a much stronger platform from which to lobby for regulatory and cultural change.

Or should we just give up and let the march of homogeneity in the name of the free market continue unabated? Hovis announced it was going further down the line of automating production this week. Maybe consumers should just settle for bread made by robots and start taking the soma pills. Ultimately it will craft bakers themselves who decide what form the real bread revolution takes. The public can support them, but until they decide to fight for their fledgling phoenix industry; to fight for better bread, there is a cap on how much progress can be made.

For my part, I am impatient. I hope they hear the Real Bread message loud and clear and get on with it quick and give those of who want better access to better bread a better chance of buying it locally.