You can reasonably expect most recipes to include directions on both the temperature that your oven should be at and the length of time it should take for the goods to be optimally baked. It wasn’t always so. The gas and electric oven-cookers we are familiar with today are a relatively recent innovation. Back when read more…
Last night I went to see musician and composer Richard Skelton perform with the Elysian Quartet at Snape Maltings, the concert hall founded by composer Benjamin Britten in 1967. Skelton’s music, which is inspired by the landscape, flora and fauna of the Pennine hills, is not often performed live, so this was a rare opportunity. read more…
I have a thing about books. I have lots of them, and I acquire new ones far more quickly than I can read them. Mostly I buy secondhand for reasons of economy. Sometimes, when the target is obscure and out of print, it’s the only option. After years of searching and procrastinating, I have finally read more…
I’ve not posted for a while, and the reason is that I’ve been in hospital, on a psychiatric ward. Not for the first time. This is a blog about making bread, and not about mental health. But it occurs to me that you can’t blog on any subject – not honestly – and leave yourself read more…
Over the summer I posted on the subject of the cronut, a croissant-doughnut hybrid making waves in New York. What I hadn’t realised at the time was that similar confection-combinations have become quite a trend, with the duffin (yes, a doughnut-muffin crossover) recently causing controversy when one of coffee-giant Starbucks’ suppliers decided to trademark the read more…
The black-market is associated with many different products and materials, but high-end yeasted goods are not normally one of them. Time Magazine , however, reports that an illicit trade in the hybrid pastry known as the ‘cronut’ is thriving in New York, where the French patissier Dominique Ansel creates this unlikely combination of croissant and read more…
A few years ago I was researching the availability of organically certified baker’s yeast for the book. If I remember rightly, the only evidence I could find for such a thing was on a German manufacturer’s website; I was unable to find a supplier to the domestic market at all. Since then, however, several organically read more…
Here’s a thought-provoking article in the Washington Post, via my Palestinian sister-in-law, about a cookbook with a difference: The Gaza Kitchen. Most of us know Gaza only as a place that regularly crops up in news reports about violence between the Palestinian population and the state of Israel, but as this book (and blog) shows, read more…
There’s an interesting post over on Spitalfields Life about the writer Jocasta Innes, who has died aged 78. I always thought of her as an author of books espousing a very particular approach to interior design – one that, as a hair-shirt modernist, I personally can’t stand. What I hadn’t realised was that she started read more…
A recent arson attack on Freedom Books – the Anglophone world’s oldest anarchist bookshop, tucked away in an alley next to London’s Whitechapel Gallery – reminded me of the political significance of bread. Stay with me. The bookshop was founded by a group including the Russian anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin in 1886. Amongst Kropotkin’s works read more…
