Guardian and Observer Editorial

guardian.co.uk/guides Welcome | 3 Dan Lepard 12 • Before you start 8 Yes, it’s true, baking is back. And • Meet the baker 12 whether you’re a novice pastry • Bread recipes 13 • Cake 41 roller or an expert icer, our • Pastry 69 scrumptious 100-page guide will • Baking supplies 96 take your enjoyment of this relaxing and (mostly) healthy pursuit to a whole new level. We’ve included the most mouthwatering bread, cake and pastry recipes, courtesy of our Tom Jaine 14 baking maestro Dan Lepard and a supporting cast of passionate home bakers and chefs from Rick Stein and Marguerite Patten to Ronnie Corbett and Neneh Cherry. And if Andi and Neneh 42 you’re hungry for more, don’t miss tomorrow’s Observer supplement on baking with kids, and G2’s exclusive series of gourmet cake recipes all next week. Now get Ian Jack 70 KATINKA HERBERT, TALKBACK TV, NOEL MURPHY your pinny on! Editor Emily Mann Executive editor Becky Gardiner All recipes by Dan Lepard © 2007 Additional editing David Whitehouse Recipe testing Carol Brough Art director Gavin Brammall Designer Keith Baker Photography Jill Mead Picture editor Marissa Keating Production editor Pas Paschali Subeditor Patrick Keneally Staff writer Carlene Thomas-Bailey Production Steve Coady Series editor Mike Herd Project manager Darren Gavigan Imaging GNM Imaging Printer Quebecor World Testers Kate Abbott, Keith Baker, Diana Brown, Nell Card, Jill Chisholm, Charlotte Clark, Margaret Gardner, Sarah Gardner, Barbara Griggs, Liz Johns, Marissa Keating, Patrick Keneally, Adam Newey, Helen Ochyra, Joanna Rodell, John Timmins, Ian Whiteley Cover photograph Alexander Kent Woodcut illustration janeillustration.co.uk If you have any comments about this guide, please email [email protected] To order additional copies of this Guardian Guide To... for £3.50 each including UK mainland p&p, call 0870 836 0924 or visit guardian.co.uk/buyguides 4 | Baking Introduction | 5 Clockwise from far left: illustration from Beeton’s Everyday Cookery and Housekeeping Book, 1888; engraving of A Fraudulent Baker, 1293 (on the left he puts a small loaf into the oven; on the right he is drawn through the streets with that lightweight loaf hung around his neck); advert for Birmingham-based kitchen fitters Lomas & Co; a depiction of the guild of bakers of York, 1595 to health-giving wholemeal was to from the local pastry chef, she was kitchen knowhow seeped away Just one more slice … be a thorn in the side of an army of allowed on the grounds that baking from the bottom layers of society, a social commentators who, down (as opposed to general cooking) loss that many historians see as the the centuries, have tried to boss was still just about regarded as a beginning of the end for Britain’s the working classes into adding ladylike accomplishment. indigenous cooking traditions. fibre to their diet. Even now, in the But if the gentry flourished as By the close of the 18th century, Baking is back in a big and the crumbliest pastry. products designed to be finished poorest districts of Britain, brown domestic bakers in the Stuart and the newly prosperous middle-class At the moment we’re in a off in a home oven in a cloud of self- bread remains a hard sell. Hanoverian period, the peasantry housewife, anxious to show her way — and this time it’s state of equilibrium. Many of satisfaction and delicious smells. By the 17th century, the began to languish. Deprived of gentility by her lilywhite, labour- us bake to Pro-Am standards at Britain’s earliest baking was descendants of Paston and de farming land by the enclosure free hands, was increasingly likely a pleasure not a chore. the weekend because we enjoy a strictly domestic business, Bryene had made fancy cakes and movement, and turned into to buy her fancy cakes ready-made. Kathryn Hughes on turning out cupcakes, malt loaf the province of the individual puddings their speciality. Later on, a proto-industrial proletariat The enterprising Mrs Raffald of and tarts of all kinds. Nigella, in housewife. In the mid-15th century, advancements in iron-smelting through the system of home- Manchester ran a thriving shop that the origins of our taste particular, has added glamour to Margaret Paston might have been in meant that tin could now be working, they lost their inclination, dispensed cakes for every occasion, for oven delights the patty pans (the subtitle to her charge of a handsome East Anglian twisted and turned into patty pans not to mention the time and including weddings, christenings breakthrough book, How to Be a manor, but she considered the and paste cutters, baking hoops means, to bake for themselves. The and the more ordinary “At Homes”. Domestic Goddess, was Baking bakehouse to be the hub of her little and pasty moulds. The result was best many could do was to take This delightful convenience The history of baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking). kingdom. Her near-contemporary an avalanche of biscuits, puffs, their semi-prepared offerings to trickled down the social pyramid in England could But if we don’t have the time , then Dame Alice de Bryene thought macaroons, whigs and seed cakes the communal bakehouse ( George so that, writing 70 years later for ≥ be described as one we’re happy to use the services of nothing of supervising the produced from the gentry kitchen. Eliot’s Silas Marner is urged to avail the lower middle classes, Mrs long conversation the growing number of artisanal production of 220 white and 30 Of the 20 cookery books published himself of the village baker’s oven Beeton admitted to her readers between commercial and domestic bakers who supply the kind of black loaves each week. in the first 50 years of the 17th as a way of integrating himself that, instead of making macaroons modes of production. At certain goods that used to be available in The peasants who lived on the Y century, almost all are collections with the community). As a result, yourself, it might be quicker and R A R moments over the past 400 years the days before mass production estates run by the likes of Paston B from titled ladies telling of their cheaper to buy them from a shop. I L S it is the commercial oven, with wiped out real baking and replaced and de Bryene increasingly baked N kitchen secrets, with no thought Elsewhere on the pages of The A V E If the gentry its economies of scale and searing it with a cellophane-wrapped for themselves. From the start that it was beneath their dignity to Book of Household Management Y R heat, which has been responsible approximation. they displayed a problematic A know how to delight with sugar- you will find more evidence that M , Y flourished as for producing Britain’s best baked Meanwhile, supermarkets, attachment to white bread. Wheat R spun fancies or bottled preserves. domestic and artisanal baking A R B goods. At other times it is the quick to pick up on profitable loaves were prized for their I This connection between good was in terminal decline by the L home bakers, the T kitchen stove, with its smaller middle-class desire, have added aristocratic-seeming fineness, with R birth and good pastry was so middle of Victoria’s reign. The A N ambitions and more temperate “in-house bakeries” to their oat, rye and barley loaves rejected A enduring that when, in the 1850s, modern-minded Mrs Beeton M peasantry began E climate, which has given us the services, and are careful to stock as coarse and common, fit more G the teenage Isabella Beeton asked speaks with innocent approval of D I R ≥ tastiest cobs, the stickiest parkin their shelves with part-baked for pigs than men. This aversion B her parents if she could take lessons to languish a new technology that produces 6 | Baking A brief history of an ancient craft 8,000 years ago Bread was made with no raising agent. Doughs were mixed from roughly milled seeds, often contain ing grit and sand, which destroyed people’s teeth. 3,000 years ago The Egyptians began to brew beer and by chance discovered that yeast left over from the brewing process made dough rise and improved the bread. But it was milling and sieving that really made the difference. AD100 The Egyptians taught the Greeks, who se renowned skills in turn spread to Rome. The first written records of bread recipes and bakers ’ goods date from the time of the Greek writer Athenaeus and Roman writer Cato the Censor. Medieval period After the fall of Rome, bakers were both travelling craftsm en who offered their skills as needed and a feature of feasts and fairs — the first fast food. ← “aerated bread”. Under the Domestic goddesses: Isabella Beeton Baking was also seen as part of auspices of the Aerated Bread and Nigella Lawson being a good housekeeper or wife. Company (later ABC), this process was to become responsible for longer felt a burning shame if their Modern period The high standing whisking up a hundred tasteless sponges failed to rise. There was, of baking compared to other white loaves in the time it used after all, always Birds Eye arctic roll kitchen craft was set down in to take to make a solid home cob. from the freezer to fill the gap. Eliza Acton’s English Bread Book A century on, the Chorleywood These days we prefer to delve (1857) , yet mass production and Bread Process, with its chemical further back into our culinary standardisation became defining improvers and vigorous mechanical heritage to salvage those baking features of commercial baking .

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