My corner shop sells wrapped, sliced white loaves that, at a pinch, could poultice a wound. It also, sometimes, stocks twisted, unsliced bread with sesame seeds on top emanating from a Cypriot concern on the other side of London which can fool the unwary into thinking it is somehow a more authentic product than the Mother’s Pride stuff, though authentic in what way I can’t say. The corner shop also sells plastic bags of pitta, which is fine, though it looks a bit odd filled with butter and marmalade at breakfast. (Kebabs a l’anglaise.)
Five minutes walk away is one of those hot-bread outlets that sell poultices fresh from the oven. Seven minutes’ walk away, virtually side by side, two shops stocking different varieties of those wholemeal breads that look hand-thrown, like studio pottery, and are fine if you have all your teeth. But, if not, then not. Perhaps the rise and rise of the poultice or factory-made loaf, which may easily be mumbled to a pap between gums, reflects the sorry state of the nation’s dental health.
It is usually interpreted, however, as the result of a lack of moral fibre, as if moral fibre is somehow related to roughage in the diet. The British, the real bread lobby implies, are rapidly going, if they have not already gone, all soft, bland, and flabby, just like their staple food. The iron grip of the multinationals has squeezed all the goodness out of British bread, via the machinations of the giant miller-bakers, Allied Bakeries, Rank Hovis McDougall et al., and the only way to fight back is to lob a homemade stone-ground wholemeal cob at them. (Which, in some cases, would indeed be a lethal missile.)
The real bread lobby has, of course, right, virtue, and healthy bowel movements on its side. On the whole, it is free from that paranoid nostalgia that afflicted Anthony Burgess, when he – I think it was he – laid squarely at the feet of the Welfare State the blame for the fact that Heinz baked beans no longer taste as tangy as they did when he was a boy.
The Welfare State it is, according to the formula of reactionary food fetishism, that has made us all soft and bland and flabby and that is why we dig into Mother’s Pride and Wonderloaf and Sunblest with such enthusiasm. Behind this, is an ill-concealed and ugly plot – not so much to swell the coffers of the hippy wholefood entrepreneurs who concoct those loaves that either go straight through you or else stay with you, heavily on the chest, for days, nay, weeks, as to get women back where they belong. Up to their elbows in bread dough, engaged in that most arduous and everlasting of domestic chores, giving the family good, hearty, home-baked bread.
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)