Here at the Potwell Inn I bake sourdough bread about three times a week during the winter when the timetable of starting the sponge first thing in the morning fits best of all with our timetable, although we might have to slow the final rise down a bit (24 hours later) if we need to be at the allotment early. That’s more of a problem in the summer when it’s warm all night, and so I bake a little less often. Regularly baking bread soaks into the warp and weft of kitchen life and becomes much more than the sum of its parts.
Although dough thrives on a bit of neglect, it also demands attention to detail. My recipe has evolved over the years since I first tried it, but it’s unforgiving of mistakes. On Christmas Eve I was in a rush and added a bit too much salt, for instance. Salt really inhibits the dough, and although the loaf was OK there was an undertone in the flavour that diminished its appeal. Getting the right hydration can cause problems too if you don’t pay attention. Different flours take up different amounts of water and so you can only know if it’s right by the texture of the dough. All the books say the dough should be as soft as you can manage but if you try to make bread with a dough that’s just that bit too soft, when it comes out of the banneton it will flatten out like a cowpat. I try to adjust it so it’s just – but only just – sticking to the table but pulls off easily with the aid of a scraper. If it’s too easy to knead – ie too stiff – it will be easier to handle but it won’t be able to rise to its full glory. There are other tricks I play but that’s not really what I want to write about today.
Because there’s always something else going on. Ten minutes kneading can become a meditation, with the everyday mind quietened by the purposeful movements of the arms, hands and body. I remember reading once that religiously inclined French people would make the sign of the cross over the new loaf before cutting it. For all the visits we’ve made to France – which is a determinedly atheist country for the most part – I’ve never once seen that action, but it stuck in my mind because it suggested that, religious or not, the new loaf should be treated with special respect because it provides so much of what we need. It feeds us in the process of baking and it feeds all equally in the eating. Flour, water, salt, and a little oil along with the ferment which is a kind of gift because you can’t make it, only accept it as a gift. If I can shamelessly steal a religious concept, baking bread is a sacramental activity because the loaf becomes:
The ‘outward and visible sign of the inward and invisible grace”.
Which, if you think about it could equally apply to any number of activities like growing an allotment, cooking, brewing beer, writing to a friend or even darning a torn sweater! Did you know that the familiar phrase “daily bread” is the best that all the scholars have managed in 2000 years when they attempted to translate the little Greek word ‘epiousios’? I like to drag it out of retirement in our weary culture and translate it as relating to the things we really need in order to flourish, bread being among them but also the almost spiritual practice of making it and sharing it with friends and loved ones. It’s being fully human, there on a plate in front of you.
For the most part Madame and me rub along pretty well – we wouldn’t have stayed together for all these decades if we didn’t – but on some matters we do not agree. When we first married there were the garlic wars, I remember. Madame liked garlic whereas I had been nurtured on the bitter doctrine that garlic was “foreign muck” by my mother. The convergence has taken more than five decades and now we eat and grow garlic in four or five varieties and provided I don’t think about it too much and screw up my face, I’ll even eat and enoy it raw. Isn’t it interesting how different things taste once you’ve screwed your face up and decided in advance of actually tasting it that you’re not going to like it?
I just bought a copy of the Noma book on fermentation and for a brief moment I thought my turnip trials might be over but the word does not appear in the index, and so I’m on my own except for this: I Googled the question and came across a fellow obsessive on the Minitab website under the title “How Statistics Got to the Root of My Turnip Problem” . Do look it up if your relationship is beseiged with turnip haters. As for me, I’ll try lacto-fermenting the little monsters.
It’s frosty and there’s a lingering mist over the city that suggests it’s going to be one of those bone-chilling days out there, so we’re not racing to get up to the allotment. As ever the post-Christmas fridge is stuffed with leftovers demanding attention and bits of overbuying are ticking away dangerously like timebombs. And that’s not all, because there are things – nameless things – in the storecupboard that should be thrown away. Old and failed lactofermenting experiments like two of the three ways of preserving cucumbers should probably be given a respectful burial. Experiment number three, which was the least – shall we say – purist, is the most successful by far and even gained the approval of our son’s Polish girlfriend, and so we’ll mark that recipe in Diana Hendry’s book on preserving. Sadly – much as I love Sandor Katz – the first version failed mainly on texture. Cucumbers are prone to get rather slimy and soft in pickles, and when you add tough skin to the list of properties you can see that the poor unloved jar was going to linge
r in the cupboard to the end of time! The second version was so salty you’d probably have to tell your doctor if you ate more than two. But then the upside of the clearout is that there are more 2 litre Kilner jars for sauerkraut and other experiments, and we’re trialing a new variety of pickling cucumber next season. We’ve yet to try the salted beans which were inspired by a remark in her biography by by Patience Gray’s son who said he actually preferred them to the fresh ones. I can hardly believe that’s possible but we’ve done a small batch anyway.
The other thing that comes in January may not appear at all this year because cod stocks are always a bit fragile and the only kind to get is certified sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council. But since I was a child I’ve always loved fresh cod roe. Most of it goes for smoking to make taramasalata As you see, the fresh stuff’s a bit in your face and it’s a faff to prepare because it needs poaching before you can do anything with it. But I love it – possibly all the more because it only appears for a brief season and often not at all so there’s no prospect of ever getting bored with it. But I’m probably among a dwindling number of people who will buy it. It’s almost certainly one of those dishes like feijoada that can only be fully loved by those who’ve eaten it from childhood. But next Saturday I shall go to the farmers’ market where I know there’s a fishmonger who will have it if there’s any about. Poached and then sliced, dipped in egg and flour and fried, it’s really lovely with the cheapest white bread you can get and some tomato ketchup. It’s like being six again.
On Christmas Eve I dropped into Christmas mode again and by sheer force of habit by early evening I started to wonder what I wanted to say to my non-existent congregation. I’d ended up cooking all day – sourdough bread, morning rolls, gammon, lentil soup, sherry trifle (well it is Christmas), and a game terrine – the pheasants were a gift from an old friend. Madame timed shopping to the last minute and came home with a piece of beef at less than half price with some fish at 1/3 usual price. It’s a high risk strategy but it works as long as you’re prepared to countenance a thin time for a couple of days. I love this time of year, when everyone makes an effort. Then Afelia for supper with two of the boys home with partners. In fact it turned into a multi-cultural celebration of Christmas Eve because after eating our family favourite Cypriot dish, our son’s Polish girlfriend brought a traditional Polish Christmas dish – pork, sausage, dried mushrooms and sauerkraut. It was delicious. On Christmas Day we all gathered at son number two’s house with grandchildren and assorted friends for lunch.
At last the email from Mike arrived today inviting me to take part in the Wassail in early January. He’s not often as late as this and I was beginning to worry that something had gone wrong – or perhaps the Cider Club was blaming me for the poor season this year. I’m perfectly prepared to accept that my official blessings may not have the same efficiency now I’m no longer on the payroll as it were, but in truth I think it was ‘the Beast from the East’ that did the damage. Wassailing, if you didn’t know, is an ancient (well – medieval) tradition of blessing the apple trees and driving out the demons to ensure a good crop in the following season. I was the parish priest of Littleton on Severn for a decade and so it fell to me to bless both cider apple trees and ploughs in my parishes as part of the old New Year traditions. But our connection to the orchard goes back far beyond that because Madame worked as assistant to the trials Officer at Long Ashton Research Station in the early 70’s and she was responsible for producing the budwood for the orchard that subsequently became the home of the Littleton Cider Club. Who could resist the lore and language of cider with varieties like “Slack ma girdle” and ‘Goose arse’ Here’s my journal entry for last year:
So that invitation to one of my favourite places and events cast a cheerful air on the rest of the day and later we grabbed the dry weather with both hands and went up to the allotment to carry on building the raised beds. My earlier (and gloomy) ruminations on the quantity of topsoil we’d need to find have been mitigated by the way we’re constructing the beds. 
I’ve written earlier about the problem of waterlogging, so we’ve been constructing the paths between the bed as dual purpose soakaways and paths. In practice that means a good deal of hauling up and back to the woodchip pile. We’ve seen it suggested that woodchip robs the soil of nitrogen, and that would certainly be true if we just dug it into the beds, but used as a path material it supresses weeds, makes a comfortable all-weather path and also seems to rot down quite quickly, needing replenishing from time to time. We’ve not found any depletion of the soil in the beds at all, and we hope that these large reservoirs of composted material will add to the general condition of the plot in the long term. I fix the bed edging boards in place first, and when they’re secure I dig out the path to about 18″ deep by just over a foot wide and throw that soil up on to the bed. It doesn’t do the job entirely, but it adds around 20 cubic feet of soil to each bed. With compost added as well, the beds are raised by another four inches – all adding to the depth. The photo is of two beds we constructed on the same principles earlier in the year.
Almost all my experience of eating haricot type beans has been from tins, and I’d grown into the lazy assumption that they were all much of a muchness – worthy, protein rich and both floury and tastless; the kind of food you eat to become a better person. When I’m in Potwell Inn mode it’s true that I sometimes dig into my deep wells of idleness and the lively sceptical mind silts up a bit. It certainly silted up on the subject of growing pulses. We tried Borlotti beans about 10 years ago and although they grew well, when we’d shelled them and put them in a Kilner jar looking awfully pretty, we had no real idea what to do with them, and so they languished in their role as kitchen eye-candy until one day I was blind baking some pastry and thought I’d do something useful with them as baking beans in a quiche tin. Later, in France, we spotted a pile of them in a market. “At last,” I thought, “I’ll ask how you’re supposed to use them”. The response was a Gallic shrug and “je ne sais pas” – end of culinary research.