There are two pieces of kitchen ware I’d dearly love to own but I’ve never found at a price I could contemplate. They were utterly commonplace until the end of the 19th century but fashions change and these days you’re more likely to see them adorning a high-end gastro pub, or in a museum. Both of them are associated with baking; they are the barm pot – used for keeping a (mostly) yeast starter alive, and a combined mixing/proving bowl. The bowl I have used forever is a very scratched Pyrex bowl – it’s been a familiar friend for over fifty years and the barm pot, sadly, is a cylindrical 500ml Lock and Lock plastic container which just happens to be the one I created the first sourdough starter in years ago. It’s the one in the picture.
Being a potter by (long neglected) trade, I could easily have made both objects in brown and cream slipware, but for all their artlessness they’re fiendishly difficult to make a good job of. The second reason is that many of the most delightful examples of traditional slipware are lead glazed – it’s what gives the glossy melted honey finish that’s not easily replicated, and so I’ve carried on baking with same pair of less glamorous but perfectly serviceable containers that I do own. Of course it doesn’t matter what you make bread in – it’ll still tastes the same. Lead glazes are no longer used because they were so dangerous both to the potters and to anyone who was silly enough to store acidic foods in them. Village baker Bryan English – a truly delightful man – still used wooden proving chests until he retired. His wife Jenny was always known to our boys as “Mrs Bun”.
Anyway, this long chain of associations came about because having neglected the sourdough starter for ages in favour of quicker yeast bread, it had grown sulky and sad; so much so that I was rather afraid I’d killed it. But long experience shows that these sourdough starters are far more resilient than the people who write books and sell bakery supplies would have you believe. After all, it only takes a few cells of the wild yeast to fall into your initial starter to get the whole thing going, and so I guessed that among the casualties there would be thousands of still alive cells that just needed a feed; and so it proved to be. After a week of intensive care and feeding up the result is a barmy, fizzing mass of eager starter and the first batter is sitting in its Pyrex bowl on the side. There’s no reason to be paralysed by the mysterious process, these wild yeasts are as tough as old boots. If you can dry them out and send them around the world by post then why would they expire so easily in the container?
Meanwhile, we’ve started harvesting ripe tomatoes from the polytunnel. Most of these early crops will be turned into sauces and different recipes of passata for storage. We’re completely self-sufficient in these base sauces, and along with drying them and eating them fresh they’re probably the most valuable crop we grow. What with the blackberries yesterday, and now the Mediterranean aromas of tomatoes shallots and fresh herbs, roasting in the oven, this marks a change of seasonal gear change on the allotment. High summer means more time in the kitchen, and more time spent in frantic searching for clean jars and lids.
It’s relentless work in the kitchen but that’s where the focus needs to be if we’re to make the most of our hard work on the allotment. We did manage to find an hour so go to an exhibition of Mary Fedden’s work in Bath and I felt utterly at home in her lovely paintings, any one of which I’d love to have – but hey! we did at least see them and they perfectly displayed – in two dimensions – the tricky business of being human; an unfashionably domestic kind of life.
Early this morning we went to the market and whilst I was standing in a queue for the farm milk dispenser a casually (but perfectly judged casually) dressed woman passed me to stand beside the man at the machine, who had his back to me. She immediately apologised and said “I’m with him”. I replied – hoping to make a joke of it “I wasn’t planning on hitting anyone!” She flinched a bit, which seemed odd and the man at the machine turned around and they went off together. I had the strange feeling that I knew him from somewhere and Madame (who’s brilliant with faces) said – “you know who that was?” “No” I said. ….. “it was X” – a well known minister in the Thatcher government. The flinch suddenly made sense. Ah well, welcome to the hostile and divided Malthusian world you helped to create my friend. What goes around comes around.
