I’ll get to the dog later, meanwhile the fruits of a morning in the kitchen; some bread proving on the stove , some Tayberry Jam, some Dutch apple cake and a delightful but very hungry Bordeaux Mastiff.
Being a modern peasant
Like all the best thoughts, this one popped into my mind after a couple of days on the stove. Beaten back into the kitchen by 90 mph winds and repeated floods, we’ve moved into one of my favourite times of the year – the pre-Christmas cookathon. In the last couple of weeks I’ve made the Christmas puds, the Christmas cake and a Dundee cake plus a lot of experimental bread baking of which more later. There’s method in the madness because it involves emptying the freezer as much as possible to make room for the Christmas onslaught, as well as emptying the cupboards of all the dried fruit that’s been lurking in the larder since last year. I appreciate that the real focus should be on buying the new seasonal dried fruit that’s just coming on to the market but I’ve never been that organised. I’ve often mentioned here that I get the feeling I’m channeling my Mum when I cook the Christmas food. It was she who taught my sister and me to bake bread and make the cakes and puddings. She taught me to make Yorkshire puddings with an unforgettable demonstration of the specific gloppy sound of a batter at just the right thickness. I admit that I dropped the added bicarb in greens as soon as I could, but the basics were all there.
This mindfulness of the past is an essential peasant quality. Peasant consciousness is filled with connections – with seasonality; with location; with nature; and all of them forged into instinctive knowledge. My Mum could judge the approaching weather by looking into the sky and seeing what was going on over Granny Perrin’s Nest which I could never see! She’d never used anything other than an outside earth closet until she’d lived her first decade in the Chilterns. She knew the flowers by their local folk names which makes it difficult to know what she was actually describing when she talked about her favourite flower – Ladies Slipper – which is used for seven flowers in Somerset alone.
I hate the way we use the word “peasant” to denigrate people whose knowledge is so profoundly integrated and I much prefer the French paysan which embodies the sense of rootedness and place; of flora and fauna and of the knowledge of how to grow things well and how to heal them; how to cook and eat and how to move in a landscape without damaging it. Peasant speech is full of earthy, hard won wisdom – not from the latest scientific paper but from generations of experience. My Grandfather Tommy Cox whose family had lived in Stoke Row since the eighteenth century; so long that the village had both Cox’s Cottages and Cox’s Lane within its boundaries, would say of cow manure – “There’s more heart in a sheep’s fart!”. He was a self-taught carpenter who gave me my first slide rule; taught me how to use logarithms and helped me build my first radio sets. He was as far from stupid as you could get; the prototype of all modern peasants.
Peasant knowledge lives in the hands and fingers, in the senses of touch and vision, taste and smell; in the ability to mend and repair; to ride the waves when the going gets tough, in the collaborative community of mutual aid and barter. All this came back to me as I was writing my talk on AI and plant phone apps. Yes we can use the correct name – in Latin too – but do we even begin to see what my Mum saw? do we know if Ladies Slipper was an almost extinct orchid, or perhaps a more common Kidney Vetch whose specific name “vulneraria” suggests healing properties. Was she laughing because she knew the name, on that walk back from the Crown at Parkfield when the old man passing us described the Dandelions my sister had picked as “piss the beds”. She was the most larcenous mother in history. Any walk around a garden would see her dropping snaffled plant material into her pre-prepared handbag. My sister is still growing one of Mum’s liberated Speedwell plants on the steps outside her flat. Both of us inherited her love of gardening and both of us have had city allotments. We two seem to have inherited that peasant blood; of growing and eating our own produce and in my passion for hand crafts.
Meanwhile it’s been radio silence on the Potwell Inn blog, largely because it’s been a pretty chaotic time, with hospital and GP appointments (we are now both officially alive!); failed hot water boiler; four named storms; dentist appointments – we like to squeeze them all in while we’re not off camping; family birthdays; physiotherapy appointments; winter repairs to the camper van, a field trip to the Mendip Hills; writing a talk on artificial intelligence and wildlife phone apps which I gave last Tuesday to the Bath Natural History Society; and a four day trip to our friends in the Bannau Brycheiniog aka the Brecon Beacons – which is where the dog comes in. Last weekend we drove up to the Bannau to our friends’ smallholding. As ever it was a full four days which included loading a couple of pigs to take to the local slaughterhouse, and trips to Brecon and Talgarth where we watched a dozen or more Red Kites milling around in search of scraps from the local butcher who feeds them. Red Kite were a rarity a few years ago and now they’re fanning out across the country. They don’t kill their prey but are mainly carrion eaters – tidying up and reaping where others have sown. Recently we saw approaching fifty milling around a rubbish tip north of Rhayader and it can only be a matter of time before we fickle humans start to regard them as a bit of a nuisance and accuse them of stealing babies from their prams.
Much of the weekend was occupied by fun cooking, and we worked together to produce a lavish Sunday lunch from their own produce. Star of the show was a largish lamb joint which was placed on the side while we ate. Almost unnoticed the dog’s enormous head appeared silently above the counter and he took the whole joint in his jaws – slinking silently off followed by the irate owner and our friends who had nurtured the sheep. As Sam Weller might have said whilst describing a human kerfuffle in Pickwick Papers- “collapse of stout party!”
A revelation in the breadmaking department
I’ve had a breakthrough on the hunt for the perfect sourdough loaf. I’ve always gone with the prevailing wisdom (i.e. fashion) which insists that loaves should be bursting through their crusts with what’s known in the trade as spring, and with crusts as hard as hell that lacerate your mouth, and crumb that’s full of holes through which butter runs and greases your armpits. If it’s also got a pH around 2 and keeps you up all night with acid re-flux that just proves how hard you are. Of course some of these aims are mutually contradictory, for instance it’s virtually impossible to get anything other than a brick out of 100% wholemeal grains, and your four year old sack of flour bought during lockdown wouldn’t rise even with the addition of plastic explosive. As ever, ruthless orthodoxy is a blind alley with a big argumentative crowd of evangelical artisan bakers at the end.
What we’ve always wanted was rich sourdough flavour from a tin loaf with a regular cross section for slicing and toasting and a flavoursome crust with good colour which is soft enough to eat but adds to the whole taste – like the breakdown on good cheese; the bit between the rind and the main body which, by the way, I love. In search of this goal I just bought three black iron bread tins which are just fantastic – heavy and needing regular care but never washed. I bought a similar French crêpe pan twenty years ago which never ever sticks. But the real change was of mindset. I’ve always been the kind of cook who would slavishly follow the recipe or instructions in search of so-called perfection. But over recent years, and as my experience deepens, I’ve become more thoughtful; more creative and more willing to branch out. The arbiters of sourdough orthodoxy have always tended towards a ruthless rejection of yeast. Purity is everything – even though sourdough starters must naturally vary greatly. I’ve got two; both rescued from my own neglect; one (called Tigger) was grown from some dried flakes on a dead starter tub and the other (Eeyore) came from the impoverished and terminally sick original. Tigger took off like a rocket – hence the name, and Eeyore was always slower but after months of comparison bakings much nicer and better adapted to the Potwell Inn timetable.
The breakthrough came when I came across Ken Forkish’s book “Evolutions in Bread” and skimmed into a page that described adding conventional dried yeast to the initial sourdough batter after maturing it overnight. You’ve no idea how I resisted the very idea of polluting my sourdough, but I tried it with some leftover supermarket flour and to my great surprise the combination of black iron tin and a sprinkle of yeast halfway through gave just the kind of softer, moister texture with all of the genuine flavour that we were looking for. The photo shows the third batch using Eeyore starter, the heavyweight tin and my favourite organic traditional flour.
The talk
So finally, the talk to the Bath Natural History Society was last Tuesday and as luck would have it, I was speaking in the next door room to A C Grayling the philosopher. He popped his head around the door and I was able to offer my condolences for having to share the evening with me, even if we were in different rooms. He seemed to bear it bravely. As it was I had an audience of around 35 (I didn’t count) – including 3 Vice County Recorders and two national authorities – so anyone with more brains than me would have been intimidated but I was well prepared for a degree of hostility; AI raises very strong feelings so in full diplomatic mode I kicked off with a faked photo of a ghost orchid made (by our son) using Google Gemini. Things could only get better after that, I thought.
As it was the talk went pretty well – I wasn’t aiming at the experts but at the newer members who are quite intimidated by conspicuous upstaging in Latin. I treated it as a kind of seminar where it was acceptable to lob questions at the participants – only one of whom appeared to have nodded off. He paid rapt attention for the rest of the talk. Given that I’d had to teach myself an entirely new programme and use a bunch of software on equipment I’d never seen before, my feared wipeout didn’t happen and the presentation ended just at the moment I caught sight of Madame tapping her watch. What a coincidence!
