There’s a single food that I’ve eaten every day since I was weaned. It’s different most days – there are countless ways to make it interesting – but that almost doesn’t matter, because, God help me, I love it every way it comes.
Some people think of it as a side dish. They think its presence on a separate little plate alongside the main meal means ‘posh’. Others believe eating it with every meal is an infallible indicator of social naffness. Like most things in my country, it’s laden with class significance, from its size to its shape.
But in spite of the fact that it’s the UK’s national staple, it rarely features on menus except as an extra. We still regard it as the defining ingredient of a ‘snack’ or something informal, grabbed and gobbled. It’s been demonised for being mass-produced and for lacking nutritional value at the same time as being so irresistible that it’s the root cause of our national obesity crisis. At any given time, you can open a newspaper or magazine and read articles about how this food clogs your insides and adds kilos to your outside. There are popular diets that exclude its consumption entirely, yet it’s so powerful a symbol of who we are and aspire to be that just the smell of it can, apparently, affect our decision on which house we buy.1 At times it’s been bad, at times it’s been good, but never, for a single second, have we fallen out of love with bread.
One of the first meals I can remember, when I was very small and Mum had trouble stretching her budget to feed us, was a slice of supermarket white, fried in carefully saved bacon fat, cut into squares and topped with leftover mash and a blob of ketchup. I have eaten toast in damp flats, caravans, up mountains, in the galleys of boats, in front of roaring fires in impossibly romantic hotels and in thin slices under both foie gras and dripping. At primary school, small, twitchy and neurotic, I had exactly the same sandwich in my lunchbox for nearly two years. It was a talisman of home that could defend me from the nameless terrors of a horrible institution. They thought I was unadventurous; I knew you didn’t mess with the only thing that makes you feel loved. As a teenager, as my mother tells it, I’d come home from school, start toasting a fresh loaf and not stop till it was gone. Later, George Orwell’s evocation of the power of ‘tea-and-two-slices’ as the constant driving fuel of the British working class formed my politics and my food writing.
Bread was the subject of great family tension when I was growing up. My dad was one of three sons in a working-class family, my mum one of the two daughters of a headmaster. For Dad, bread was part of laying the table. A couple of slices of white on the plate, whatever was served, for mopping up any gravy, sauce, juice or other valuable morsel of nourishment. For my grandfather, dad and uncles, eating was a muscular exercise in refuelling with an added layer of competition, and bread was a vital tool and ingredient. If the texture of the meal was right, the sliced bread saw more action than the fork, and if there was ever an occasion when the loaf wasn’t there… well, I’m not sure I can recall it.
Mum’s family ate bread, too, probably the same brand, but the loaf stayed in the bread bin and never graced the table. You would receive a slice with your dinner if you asked – they were kind and indulgent to portly little grandsons – and there was no stinting on toast or parsimony when Nan ‘cut a few rounds of sandwiches’, but the loaf stayed in the kitchen.
We are class-obsessed as a nation, but usually not so in personal relationships. My parents, starting a family in the thrillingly democratic 1960s, would never have clashed over money, accent, dress or any of the thousand other signifiers by which the Brits define themselves, but bread was different. For Dad, not having bread on the table was a diminution of the generosity – even the love – demonstrated by his mother. For Mum, it was inappropriate – as much of a dishonour to her new family’s table as a lump of coal or an oily spanner.
I should probably reiterate here that this is ‘sliced white’ we’re talking about. Packaged bread, made with the Chorleywood Process and wrapped in gorgeous wax paper (that was later smoothed out, saved and reused for wrapping up school packed lunches). There were two types: medium or thick sliced. There may have been a thin version as well, but I’m sure there’s another important class-based reason that I never saw it. Regardless, the key point is that we’re discussing the significant differences within a class of bread that today we’d completely reject. There was no ‘brown’ bread to be had outside of the rare health-food shops, the ‘French stick’ was an impossibly exotic speciality that nobody quite understood or trusted and a ‘crusty’ or ‘farmhouse’ loaf, from a baker, was a treat. Cutting it yourself meant fewer slices per loaf, so it was explicitly, self-evidently, an indulgent luxury.
For a while, Mum bought ‘Nimble’. Somebody, somewhere had worked out that bread was ‘fattening’ and that bread pumped with even more air would be lighter and therefore ‘slimming’. There were TV ads showing thin, glamorous young women drifting above wheat fields in hot-air balloons, just to hammer home the notion that this stuff would make you weightless. This was either the high or the low point of British advertising, depending on your point of view, as the main benefit being sold was the voids in the bread created under a vacuum during processing – the most literal case ever of persuading consumers to pay more for absolutely nothing. We all tried it and it was awful… but the idea that bread was somehow both ‘bad’ in its simplest form, and that it might be offered as a remedy, too, was firmly implanted.
Supermarkets began to stock brown bread, wholemeal and ‘granary’ entered the family repertoire – not without resistance – and after a while the baguette was revealed to us like a plaster saint to which we could raise our eyes. This was ‘proper’ bread… and, for a brief flash of time, was devoid of any negative connotation.
A while back I found myself in conversation with a brilliant baker. She’s famous in her own country and abroad and has written books on the subject. I admit, drink had been taken and we were comparing notes on the state of baking globally. ‘Do you know what?’ she said, quite suddenly and with some passion, ‘I’m sick of ‘‘bro’’ bread.’
I think I got what she meant the second she said it, but I’d never heard it articulated in that way. Half the world has been baking bread and developing their own ways with it since the very beginnings of civilisation, but for food lovers everywhere, and particularly for a new generation of ‘craft bakers’, the sine qua non is the ‘bro loaf ’. Coming out of San Francisco, originating perhaps in the sourdough traditions of Europe, it’s a big miche with a lacerated dark-baked crust, made from ‘interesting’ flours and raised with carefully curated, naturally occurring yeasts. It’s a truly beautiful thing that, in the imagination at least, would have been at home on any farm table from the Arctic Circle to the southern tip of Spain at any time since the Dark Ages. The problem is that although, compared with mass-produced bread, bro bread is ‘full of character’, it has no local cultural relevance and, as my friend insisted with increasing frustration, it distracts bakers from the local breads that do.
I’ve no animus against a brilliant craft sourdough. It’s delicious. It also has as much connection to my own food culture as sashimi or an excellent Côtes du Rhône – and God knows, I’d never turn either of those down – but I’m intrigued by the myths we’ve built around the bro loaf.
It is most often presented as the antithesis to the mass-produced or machine-made loaf, which is to some degree true, and yet, bread is of its very nature an exercise in mass production, no matter how primitive. Except in a few very distant cultures, a single family unit will not grow enough grain to make their own bread. If they do, they are very unlikely to be able to hand grind it successfully enough to make anything beyond porridge. Wheat for flour was one of the first crops we grew collectively. Once an individual in a community managed to get set up for efficient grinding, it was one of the first activities in which labour became specialised. Mills were the first machines to be driven by power sources like wind and water and later by steam.
Fuel has always been expensive, either in terms of money or labour, and it would never have been wasted. For risen loaves, as opposed to flatbreads, you need an oven, which takes a lot of fuel to heat – fuel that is largely wasted in baking a single loaf. Even if loaves were made at home, they would be baked in a community oven, for fuel efficiency. Bread stales within a day, so either the oven ran every day or, as still happens in a few parts of rural Italy, farms formed little collectives where each would bake for the others on one particular day each week. Bread production and the elements of the process that must be undertaken collectively are at the roots of our communities, our nationalities, our cultures and even our politics… but what bread has never been is a solitary art.
It is doubtless good for the soul to form a loaf by hand and to fire your own oven. But if you bake for others, at what point does it become ‘commercial’? If you employ a horse-drawn harvester or a windmill, at what point is your bread production ‘mechanised’? Did our loaf become ‘industrial’ the day the town baker could afford an electrically powered dough mixer and an oil-powered oven, no longer working men to an early death through the brutally physical job of doing it by hand?
At a time when we’re being told the dangers of ‘processed foods’, it’s worth remembering that bread is the first and most basic of all of them.
There are many bakeries where the work cycle is still based on the size of the ‘batch’ that the oven can handle, but it is perhaps unsurprising that, when the Industrial Revolution was sparked, the machine-driven mass production of bread (the worker’s staple) was the first process to be ‘industrialised’.
A white bread loaf that can be shot from a peel onto the hot base of the oven requires skilled hands to make, but dumping a measured lump of dough into a metal mould (a loaf tin) can be done cheaply and quickly by a machine. The shape of our standard national loaf is defined by the industrialisation and deskilling of the baking process.
While the UK was first to standardise the ‘tin loaf ’, France, with full support from the state, developed a national network of small bakeries, which is why, to this day, the defining French loaf is a hand-shaped stick. And while for generations French bakers have concentrated on preserving the traditional art of bakery, their British counterparts have innovated.
Mechanical mixers could be made as big as an engineer could imagine and build, moulding machines could turn out loaves as fast as the dough could be mixed and huge ovens could bake continuously. Baking became faster, cheaper and more efficient, but there was a limiting factor. Rising was the one element of the baking process that remained slow, and the action of live yeast on poorly refined flour was unpredictable. A truly mechanised process of bread manufacture demanded both speed and accurate repeatability. If rising could be properly controlled, there would be no limits on mechanised production.
The earliest attempt to solve the problem of ‘proving’ came from a Scottish medic, Dr John Dauglish, who founded the Aerated Bread Company in 1862. Like many in his profession at the time, Dauglish saw huge possibilities for the betterment of society through diet and nutrition. He thought that the process of hand kneading2 was profoundly unhygienic as well as dangerously hard on the bodies of the workers, and that fermentation, involving live bacteria, was a ‘destructive influence’. He sought to abolish both processes by aerating the dough with pressurised carbon dioxide – the same process used to put the fizz in sparkling water.
This is not, on the face of it, quite as crazy an idea as it sounds. Yeasts make bread rise by consuming the sugars in the flour and excreting CO2 into the dough. Mechanical aeration created the same effect without the farting bugs.
Dauglish’s company was successful. His patented process spread to the US and Australia. The bread was seen as ‘healthy’ and clean, the process worked with the increasingly popular wholemeal and Graham flours, and hospitals and institutions bought it in large quantities. Though his motives in creating the process seem to have been entirely altruistic, his method meant bread could be made faster, in more mechanised processes and thus more cheaply, and so it drove many more traditional bakers to the wall. Eventually the company opened a popular chain of tearooms.
Mention Chorleywood to most serious bread bakers and you’ll see a flash of anger cross their faces. It’s one of those ‘don’t mention the war’ subjects, and it was, in many ways, a battle that bread lovers lost. Chorleywood was a bucolic little village in Hertfordshire with few claims to distinction save the presence of the British Baking Industries Research Association. It was at their research station that, in 1961, the Chorleywood Bread Process was born and bread changed forever for at least half the consumers in the world.
For many years the UK had imported ‘strong’ wheat with a high protein content from other parts of the world. Strong flour, loaded with gluten, makes an elastic dough that allows lots of strong bubbles to form as the bread rises. Stronger bubbles mean a lighter crumb and greater volume – in short, a better loaf. Dauglish’s aeration process required very strong flour. British wheat, though, tended to be ‘soft’ – i.e. containing less gluten protein. Local flour made great cakes and pastries, good buns and lovely pie crusts, but the expanding market for high-quality white bread made the UK dependent on the prairies of Canada, the American Midwest and even Russia.
The Chorleywood Process made light, airy bread from softer, cheaper, local flour by ‘mechanical development’. First, fat, vitamin C and yeast are added to the dough, and then it is beaten forcibly by high-powered processors that incorporate CO2 (or other gases) into the dough. The dough is stored, for short periods of time, in sealed vessels in which the air pressure in the headspace can be controlled. When the pressure is lowered, the bubbles in the dough expand, meaning that the operator can effectively ‘dial in’ the airiness of the dough and it is no longer dependent on the yeast for anything more than taste.
There is no reason that Chorleywood bread can’t be delicious – 80 per cent of the bread consumed in the UK is made this way with few complaints – but it also gave manufacturers a lot of tools that could be horribly misused. An early development of the process was a clutch of highly aerated ‘slimmers’ breads’, including the Nimble my mum tried. Industrial bakers were also able to pander to the lowest tastes of mass consumers. Given the choice, consumers wanted whiter bread – with fewer nutrients. They favoured softer crusts that were easier to eat and a moister, sweeter crumb. They demanded a longer shelf life, which meant the addition of fats and moisture-trapping additives, and the longer life, often in plastic wrapping, meant preservatives were necessary to prevent mould.
During two world wars, with bread production a strategic imperative, government had supported and relied on the biggest industrial bakeries. In peacetime these huge companies were able to write their own rules. The bakeries managed to lobby for a partial exemption from labelling laws so that ‘flour enhancers’ did not have to be specified by individual name or quantity. By the end of the twentieth century, mass-produced bread in Britain was in a pretty scandalous state. A standard family ‘white sliced’ had evolved into a block of barely cooked, mechanically aerated dough, with a sweet, soft crust and embalmed with a truckload of additives. It was ‘easy to eat’ and in many ways enjoyable, but was it even bread any more?
It’s argued, convincingly, by craft bakers that much of our almost epidemic ‘intolerance’ to bread products is as attributable to unseen additives and mechanised production as it is to gluten.
This all makes it sound like a sliced white loaf might be the most appalling thing you could put in your body, and yet it has some amazing qualities. It was the most popular bread over a couple of centuries when some of the best sandwiches came into being. Its consistency, blandness and sweetness, its shape and its structural integrity made it a vital, irreplaceable element of some of the most genuinely iconic sandwich recipes.
For all its shonkiness, its flavour and texture are unique – perhaps not ‘real bread’, yet something without parallel that cannot help but tap deep into our sense memories – pappy, plasticky and preservative-laden, but perfectly Proustian.3
Really, though, the point at which your bro bread can lose its claim to be artisanal is all a matter of degree. God knows, I’ve no desire to blow up the whole trend and return to extruded Chorleywood pap, whatever its status as a symbol of our past, but perhaps it’s time to pause. Vanishingly few of our food traditions are pre-industrial, and most of our best come from a time when agriculture and food production were mechanised and the majority of the population were urban dwellers, distanced from food production. We have grown up loving non-bro bread. For me, to deny that is not just foolishly romantic… it’s dangerously false.
A few years ago I bought a bakery and now my life is filled with bread. I didn’t plan it that way, but looking back, it seems weirdly inevitable. So now I want to write about bread. Not making it – others do that far better than me – but appreciating all the ways we enjoy it. And not just posh bread or artisanal bread, but all the different loaves we eat every day of our lives. I want to explore the quirks and lore of our daily bread and share the strange recipes I’ve collected and loved.
In a way it’s a Life Story. It’s certainly a Love Letter. In fact, it’s a Loaf Story.
I freely admit that I’m not a recipe person. I read them, with almost indecent avidity. I’m looking right now at about twenty running metres of bookshelf laden with thousands of the damned things, but when I go into the kitchen I don’t take them with me. I suppose part of the pleasure of reading them, for me, is trying to understand the principles behind the measurements and instructions so that when I stand in the kitchen slinging food about, it’s a natural process. I know. It’s incredibly irritating and immature. I suppose the main thing, though, is that once I get started, I cook on a wave of enthusiasm… chopping, tasting, seasoning… sometimes it feels like seat-of-the-pants stuff, like driving a fast car or how a musician must feel when improvising. Oh God, I should probably be beaten up for the metaphor but, it’s a bit like jazz. I’ve obsessively studied the standards, I understand the structure and bones of what I’m doing and where I want to be and, yes, at least half the time the result is self-indulgent, noodling crap. But sometimes it might just make fellow nerds nod their heads in appreciation.
When we started planning how this book would look, I finally had to admit that I just don’t have the literary chops to sustain joy and enthusiasm at the same time as trying to capture every single weight, measure, time and technique in a way that can be clearly conveyed, so my genius of a publisher suggested I split it. In the body of the text I’ve been encouraged to write how I cook, then, with infinite care, we’ve written terse, concise and forensically accurate kitchen instructions in a separate section. For me, this is an entirely liberating change… I hope I can communicate it to you.
1 Empirical evidence that the smell of freshly baked bread can improve your chances of selling your house is, predictably, scant, but what is remarkable is how many presumably intelligent people seem to believe it – how many other foods have an associated culture-wide collective delusion?
2 He also mentions kneading with the feet, an idea that, if true, must have thoroughly appalled consumers.
3 My own most Proustian memory of sliced white comes from travelling on Southern Region trains from Bournemouth to London as a starving art student. The only thing I could afford in the dining car was toast. Two pieces of medium-sliced white Mother’s Pride, toasted in a gas salamander and then dressed with hot, salty Anchor butter, kept liquid in a can above the range and applied with a four-inch paintbrush.