Expletives Deleted (15 page)

Oddly enough, in all of Europe, the British housewife is, historically, the only one of all who found herself burdened with this back-breaking and infinitely boring task, for watching bread dough rise is the next best thing to watching paint dry, activity reminiscent of some of those recorded in early Warhol movies. The average black-clad Italian, French, or Greek mama, if asked to make bread, has always tossed her head with a haughty sneer. What else are baker's for? For herself, she's got better things to do – the meat sauce, the
coq au vin
, the dolmas, and so on. Of course, it's always been more difficult, given British cuisine, for our housewives to get away with that excuse. Since we've got to have something to shine at, it turned out to be baked goods, didn't it?

And, oh God, in my misspent youth as a housewife, I, too, used to bake bread, in those hectic and desolating days just prior to the woman's movement, when middle-class women were supposed to be wonderful wives and mothers, gracious hostesses
à la
Miriam Stoppard, and do it all
beautifully
. I used to feel so womanly when I was baking my filthy bread. A positive ecstasy of false consciousness. I probably dealt the death blow to some local baker with a wood-fired brick-oven when I took away my custom, for in those days, there were old-fashioned bakers aplenty, no doubt then closing down on all sides under the twin
onslaughts of the newly fashionable anorexia nervosa and all that compulsive home breadmaking.

However, even here, twenty years later, in south London, there are a couple of perfectly decent old-fashioned bakers within easy walking distance (both stocking that indescribable speciality, bread pudding). Even if southern England
is
heavily saturated with chain bakeries, good bakers are thick on the ground from Lincolnshire on to the north and Scottish bakers are wonderful. Obviously, lots of people just pick up a Wonderloaf at the corner shop or supermarket, perhaps even habitually: but I wonder whether they don't make a distinction between bread for sandwiches and bread for, as it were, eating. Certainly, sliced white comes into its own for the former use – basically, a wrapping for a sweet or savoury filling, akin to edible greaseproof paper.

Along with the notion that British factory-made bread is bad bread comes the one that all artisan-made bread is
good
bread. Although the recipe books of Tuscany are suspiciously full of handy hints for dealing with large quantities of stale bread, it is still impossible to resist a sigh of satisfaction when the waiter weighs down the paper tablecloth with the basket of rough-hewn bread chunks in the somnolent, shadowless heat of some Florentine lunch time . . . though, since the saltless, fatless bread of the region will, by then, have been out of the oven for some hours, it is now only good for carving into putti. Or dipping into the squat tumbler you have just filled with red wine from a straw-wrapped (or possibly, plastic-coated) bottle. And that's it! Pow! It hits you. The atavistic glamour of the continental holiday; the timeless, mythic resonance of the bread and the wine . . . for what good is a continental holiday unless it is jam-packed with resonances?

It always puzzles me that Christianity got off the ground, even to the limited extent that it did, in those parts of the globe where its central metaphor – the bread and the wine – were incomprehensible. A sacramental meal of shared rice and saké, the nearest Chinese equivalents to the Mediterranean staples, suggests a very anaemic Christ indeed.

Wheat bread, in fact, is not only a specifically European staff of life, but even a specifically Mediterranean one. Northern Europe tends towards black, rye bread and wheat bread took a long time to penetrate to the northernmost parts of even our
own island, where all bakers still stock the traditional crisp, flat, unleavened oat cake in large quantities. (When the Scots first clapped eyes on grain, they knew immediately what to do with it; they distilled it. No wonder the Scots proved averse to the doctrine of transubstantiation. A deity with flesh of oat cakes and blood composed of volatile spirit makes the mind reel.)

Nevertheless, part of the fuss we make when we think our bread – our
BREAD
– has been tampered with must, surely, relate to the sacramental quality inherent in bread in our culture. Our bread, our daily bread, has been profaned with noxious additives. Although that bread is certainly no longer our ‘daily bread' within the strict meaning of the prayer. In the sixteenth century, ‘bread' meant ‘food' just as ‘rice' (
gohan
) in Japanese still means dinner. For most of us, in those days, food
was
bread – bread with, perhaps, a condiment of cheese, onion, or bacon grease to go with it, and maybe a chickweed salad on high days and holidays.

The menus of the Lambeth poor researched before the First World War by Maud Pember Reeves for her book,
Round About a Pound a Week
, feature bread heavily at all three daily meals. Two of those meals, breakfast and supper, are composed exclusively of bread plus a smear of margarine, jam, or sweetened condensed milk. The stunted, sickly, patently under-nourished, and often dying children described by Pember Reeves do not appear to have thrived particularly well on such a diet.

One should not, of course, ascribe to magic doses of Wonder-loaf and Mother's Pride the almost intolerable health, strength, and vitality of the children of Lambeth at this present time. How these kids keep it up on salt 'n' vinegar flavoured crisps, orange crush, and fish fingers indeed perplexes me. One can only conclude that a varied diet of junk food is, in the final analysis, considerably more nutritious than a diet of not very much food at all and most of it starch.

In a culinary sense, though not, I suspect, in an emotional one, bread has been secularised in postwar Britain. It has become a food, like any other, no longer to be taken in large quantities. There are other things to eat, even other carbohydrate foods – rice, pasta. Yams. One of the things Pember Reeves' housewives liked about bread was its portability – a child did not have to sit down to eat a hunch of bread and marge and that was convenient if you did not have sufficient chairs, or even a table, on or at
which to sit. Most families, nowadays, do manage occasional communal sit-down meals. Most homes, today, boast knives and forks. We no longer live by bread alone.

When one does not live by bread alone on a varied and interesting diet, bread changes its function while retaining its symbolism. Ceasing to be the staff of life but ever redolent with its odour of sanctity – an odour the hot bread-poultice shops have exploited commercially to the hilt – bread turns into a mere accessory, the decorative margin to a meal, or else into the material for a small but inessential meal, that very ‘afternoon tea' beloved of the English upper classes, with which they used to stuff their faces in that desert of oral gratification between their vast lunches and their gargantuan dinners.

It is no surprise, therefore, to find that Elizabeth David's vast and highly lauded tome,
English Bread and Yeast Cookery
, is jammed full of tea-time recipes – buns, tea cakes, fruit breads, and so on. For David, the high priestess of postwar English cookery, she who single-handed put an olive-wood chopping block into every aspiring home, to turn her attention to currant buns means that something is up.

English Bread and Yeast Cookery
is a vademecum to the art of home baking. And I use the word, ‘art', rather than ‘craft', advisedly, since her recipes are intended for the artist baker in her studio kitchen rather than the artisan in the common workshop.

David, ever apt with the up-market quotation, certainly knows how to add that final touch of arty glamour to the business! She whisks away the last surviving touch of dirndl skirt and Fabian Society from the concept of the home-baked loaf when she quotes a description of Virginia Woolf kneading away like nobody's business.

Virginia Woolf? Yes. Although otherwise an indifferent cook, Virginia could certainly knock you up a lovely cottage loaf. You bet. This strikes me as just the sort of pretentiously frivolous and dilettantish thing a Bloomsbury
would
be good at – knowing how to do one, just one, fatuously complicated kitchen thing and doing that one thing well enough to put the cook's nose out of joint. ‘I will come into the kitchen, Louie,' she said to this young employee of hers, ‘and show you how to do it.'

This attitude of the dedicated hobbyist reveals the essential marginality of the activity. David manages to turn the honourable
craft of the baker into a nice accomplishment for refined ladies. Bread is put in its place; it is a special kind of art-object.

Hers is, furthermore, the bitter-sweet bread of nostalgia, summoning up a bygone golden age of golden loaves, before Garfield Weston, of Allied Bakeries, the demon king in the real-bread scenario started buying up British bakeries in the Fifties and smirching with his filthy profane Canadian hands the grand old English loaf.

Although her book is full of quotations – Thomas Traherne, Keats, Chaucer – she does, however, let the heavy freight of symbolic significance borne by bread in our culture severely alone except, oddly enough, for a seventeenth-century French recipe for consecrated bread. This, she claims, sounds like brioche, which suggests it might have been used for a rather Firbankian mass. What
can
they have put in the chalice?

It is appropriate she leaves religion alone since
English Bread and Yeast Cookery
is already proving to be something like the holy book of the cult of the True Loaf, in which the metaphoric halo surrounding bread is turned back on itself, the loaf becomes not foodstuff nor symbol but fetish.

(1987)

I bought my first cookery book in 1960, as part of my trousseau. It was called
Plats du Jour, or Foreign Food
by Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd, a Penguin paperback with a seductive pink jacket depicting a large family at table – evidently not a British family, for its members, shirt-sleeved, aproned, some of them children, were uncorking bottles, slicing bread, eagerly tucking their napkins under their chins, faces aglow with the certain knowledge their dinners would not disappoint, which was, in those days, extremely rare in this country.

My copy of
Plats du Jour
now gives forth a mellow smell of old paper; the pages are crisp, brown, and dry as Melba toast. But it has outlasted the husband for whose pleasure I bought it by some eighteen years, proof positive of the old saw, ‘Kissin' don't last, cookin' do'. And now it is a historic object, a prototype of the late twentieth-century British cookery book, a book to browse in as much as to cook from, its prose as elegant as its plentiful line-drawings. And, oh, that easy, graceful cosmopolitanism! Tor anyone who has eaten a well-prepared Gulyas in one of the little restaurants on the Buda side of the Danube, overlooking the lantern-threaded bridges and the electric glitter of Pesth on a warm summer night before the war . . .' The nascent genre infected an entire generation with wanderlust.

Patience Gray helped to instigate the concept of the cookery book as literary form – part recipes, part travel book, part self-revelation, part art-object. Now, some thirty years on, she has assembled what may be its culmination.
Honey from a Weed
is less a cookery book than a summing-up of the genre of the late
modern British cookery book. It is a book like very few others, although it has some of the style of the seventeenth-century commonplace book, replete with recondite erudition and assembled on the principle of free association, as when Mrs Gray lists uses for goose fat. In a cassoulet. In soups. On bread. On toast. ‘On your chest, rubbed in in winter. On leather boots, if they squeak. On your hands if they are chapped.'

Above all, it is a book about a particular sensibility – a unique and pungent one – that manifests itself most characteristically in the kitchen. That is what the genre is all about. M. F. K. Fisher had pioneered the culinary autobiographical novel in the US years before the Penguin school of cookery writers found its greatest star in Elizabeth David in the late Fifties and early Sixties. For these writers, and for Patience Gray, cookery is what the open road was to Cobbett or the natural history of Selbourne to Gilbert White. There is, however, a difference: these are women to whom food is not an end in itself but a way of opening up the world. And, indeed, they are all women: this is, at the highest level, a female form.

It is unique to Saxon culture, to my knowledge, that the ability to cook well is a sign of a woman of the world. Traditional plump home-bodies may deliver the goods in France and Spain and Italy, but in Britain and the US the classic cooks are awesomely sophisticated, aristocratically beautiful and often connected with the arts. Elizabeth David, friend of Norman Douglas, is eternalised in the lovely icon of John Ward's drawing, the epitome of chic in her companionable kitchen. M. F. K. Fisher is just as beautiful. Her most beloved husband was a painter, and her books are so instinct with upmarket bohemianism that it is no surprise to find her in a cameo role in the autobiography of the painter and photographer, Man Ray, in which a starring part is allotted to Lee Miller, the universal muse of the surrealists, who herself became a famous practitioner of gourmet cookery.

Patience Gray belongs to this nexus of cookery and the arts, although she has an earthy, hands-on approach to the real lives of the predominantly peasant communities in Southern Europe where she has chosen to live, and to the arts: she works in silver and gold, making jewellery, and lives with a stone-carver whom she calls the Sculptor (she is refreshingly free from irony). Her book recounts their wanderings during a shared life dominated
by the Sculptor's quest for suitable stone. Glamorous as this way of life may seem, it is no easy option. Patience Gray's kitchens have been exceedingly sparsely equipped. The hand-pump over the marble sink of one particular Etruscan kitchen did not work: ‘I got the water in a bucket and lowering it into the outdoor cistern had a marvellous view of the glittering Monte Sagra and the Apulian Alps on one side and on the other a view to the Tyrrhenian.'