In the summer of 1955, following the publication of Summer Cooking, Leonard Russell, the then Literary Editor of the Sunday Times, offered me a weekly cookery column in the paper. In 1956, when I had been writing for the paper for about a year (it was in those far-off days before the Colour Supplement), Leonard asked me if I would review a little book called Home Baked, written by George and Cecilia Scurfield, published by Faber. I declined, on the grounds that I knew little about bread-making, even less of book-reviewing. Leonard proceeded to cajole, coax, persuade. Although it is difficult to describe an editor’s technique when he has made up his mind that a contributor will do something which that contributor would prefer not to do, every journalist will recognise it, and will appreciate that in the end I applied myself to studying the book and writing the review.
The book was a sympathetic one, and a little research into the history of English bread-making proved instructive.
On the Sunday fortnight following the appearance of my review, the paper’s Atticus column contained an item headed ‘Who sells books?’ from which it emerged that within the two weeks my notice had sold 1,000 copies, half the first print order of Home Baked. This news item, it turned out, was a retort to the rival Sunday paper, which had made, apparently, a claim that its reviewers sold more books than those of any other national newspaper.
Now the book in question was a cheap one – 6/6 at the time – my review, written in perfect innocence, was enthusiastic, it had been given space which in the ordinary way such a book would not have been accorded, and the subject was one which as my Literary Editor well knew – although at that time I did not – never fails to touch a sensitive spot in the minds of English newspaper readers. It would have been foolish to resent unduly the little confidence trick which had been played upon me. It was a good example of something right done for the wrong reason. The book’s success was deserved, it has gone into many editions since, is still in print as a paper-back, and must have helped thousands of readers to learn how to make their own bread. For me, the book eventually opened up a whole new field of study and of cookery.
Reproduced below is that Sunday Times review.
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Home Baked, by George and Cecilia Scurfield (Faber, 6s. 6d.).
For at least 250 years the bad quality of English bread has been notorious. Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, long before the invention of roller mills put white flour within the reach of all, the bakers and the millers were periodically accused of almost every possible fraud upon the community.
The adulteration of flour with alum to make it white was a common practice. One pamphleteer even went so far as to accuse the bakers of mixing their flour with ground-down human bones. According to Smollett the bread in London was ‘a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum, and bone-ashes; insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution’ (Humphry Clinker, 1771). ‘Que votre pain est mauvais, said a French friend to Eliza Acton, who observed in her English Bread Book (1857) that our bread was noted, ‘both at home and abroad, for its want of genuineness and the faulty mode of its preparation’. Some thirty years later we have Sir Henry Thompson, an eminent doctor and writer on diet, complaining that bakers’ bread was unpalatable and indigestible; he did not suppose any ‘thoughtful or prudent consumer would, unless compelled, eat it habitually’.
The authors of this new book on breadmaking at home are even more blunt. ‘We got fed up with shop bread.’ Who has not? But it is useless to rage against the bakers and the bread manufacturers. So long as our ancient obsession with ever-whiter and whiter bread persists, the bakers will be delighted to sell it to us steam-baked, sliced, and hygienically wrapped. The only remedy for those who want genuine wholesome bread, and surely the wish is not a cranky one, is the same as it has always been. It must be made at home. And why not? In one of the most reassuring sentences to be found in any cookery book Mr and Mrs Scurfield sweep away all misgivings. ‘The great thing about baking with yeast,’ they say, ‘is the difficulty of failure.’ Exact measurements are not important, a draughty kitchen is no deterrent. No mystery is attached to the kneading of dough.
It is elsewhere that the rub lies. To get the full benefit of home-made bread it should be made with stone-ground wholemeal flour. You may have to go to some trouble or to some distance to find it. Quite apart from the extra burden of heavy bags of flour in the shopping basket, it will be expensive unless bought in large quantities. City dwellers scarcely have the space to keep ‘a small dustbin’ (mouse-proof) in which to store five stone of flour. Yeast is not always easy to come by, either. But the difficulties are not insurmountable.
Even bread made at home with ordinary white flour from the grocer is superior to manufactured white bread. The brown scone meal sold under the name of Scofa doesn’t even need yeast to turn it into an excellent loaf. The Scurfields give recipes for a half white and half wholemeal loaf and for sourdough rye bread which should be useful, and I shall certainly try their method for French bread; but I wouldn’t myself care for a fresh-baked Swedish coffee twist for breakfast, a fresh-baked cinnamon ring with coffee after lunch, and fresh-baked fruit and nut buns for tea, all made from the same batch of dough.
We have become a very food-conscious people during the past few years. Ever more cookery books pour from the presses, millefeuille pastry and shark fin soup, crêpes suzette and bœuf Stroganoff, quiche lorraine and bouillabaisse and Linzertorte no longer hold any mysteries for us. How about putting the horse in front of the cart and having a crack at baking a decent loaf of bread?
The Sunday Times, 25 March 1956