Tag: Sourdough

Beltane

A greenhouse interior showing rows of small tomato plants staked with bamboo canes, planted in rich brown soil with gardening tools and trays in the background.
Grafted, blight resistant tomatoes planted in the polytunnel today

I’m not a devoted follower of pagan festivals except for the neat way they divide the year into horticultural seasons that resonate with me. Checking back today increasing day length, frost free nights, warmth and sunshine which all shout summer’s coming – get the tomatoes in! and we’ve been doing just that for as long as I can check our records. Good Friday – the traditional day for potato planting is a lunar festival and varies by six dangerous weeks which means in some years we’d be coping with frosts and cold winds – so we compute the day from commonsense data. Today we also planted out ridge cucumbers, red peppers and aubergines in the warm soil of the tunnel – it was 22C this morning. The tomato plants and the others are all grafted onto vigorous rootstocks and although they’re expensive they repay the outlay with greatly enhanced crops. We harvest around 80 lbs of tomatoes every year and turn them into delicious sauces and passata which, like the home-made stock and home baked bread, are constant staples in the kitchen.

Sumer is icumen in,
Loude sing cuckou!
Groweth seed and bloweth meed,
And springth the wode now.
Sing cuckou!

This is the oldest secular song that we have; 13th century and still as vibrant as ever. I only dare quote it because this week we heard cuckoos calling in the Bannau Brycheiniog for the first time in years and they filled me with an inexplicable anxiety that we may never hear them again. Anyway I want to celebrate my mood of optimism and the return of my energy now that I’ve been given a new lease of life by our ultra observant GP who came up with the right diagnosis after all the consultants had tried and failed. Now I can prepare a 15 foot bed in one go, walk up hills without being breathless and carry bags of compost around the allotment. I sleep like a log, eat like a horse and read difficult books without losing my concentration. I go to sleep each night with a joyful idea of what needs doing on the allotment and still have the energy to write and cook when that’s done. So yes – Beltane’s a great festival this year even if green face paint would make me look a bit weird.

A close-up view of a raspberry plant featuring green and yellow leaves, set against a background of wood chips.

However, just to remind us that allotmenteering isn’t always a primrose path, the summer raspberries we planted last year are looking very chlorotic. We’ve seen it before and the cure is a foliar spray or a watering with Epsom Salt for the missing magnesium, and then just in case some chelated iron because the two deficiencies are strongly related. The long-term solution would include powdered dolomite rock but we’ll also give them a good feed with liquid seaweed stimulant and we should see an improvement within a week.

Bye By Brook – finding the well

By brook at Slaughterford

We’re not done with you yet sir

Last Friday I got yet another message from the hospital requiring an urgent phone consultation on Tuesday regarding a test I’d failed miserably. I imagined a large number of health professionals rushing to the red phone. to deal with my case. I’ve soaked up an incredible amount of NHS time in the last six months and I’m so grateful for it. It’s an odd privilege to be fast tracked twice in a month on suspicion of completely different cancers but I’ve noticed that the doctors are constantly changing and often poorly prepared for our encounters, and so there’s never time for them to sit back and observe, chat, prod – all the things that I know from long experience are essential to drill down to the heart of the problem. But, being retired, have got time to explore and read the NICE guidance about the drugs which I’ve been prescribed and I know that some of the problems I experience are actually caused by them. They’re called iatrogenic symptoms – caused – if you like – by the very medications that are supposed to keep me well.

Time is possibly the greatest unused skill in the caring profession. I’ve never forgotten a pastoral conversation with an oncologist who was being broken by his workload, and who told me that at its worst his first thought when a patient came into the room was how can I get rid of this person? He wasn’t bad or lazy, just exhausted, burnt out and lost. There was never enough time to listen deeply to the person in front of him When I was running writers’ groups I got very used to the back pocket poet syndrome. Someone would sit silently in the class for an hour, too shy often to make a contribution and then they would produce a crumpled sheet of paper just as they were leaving. Such contributions were often very good.

Smiling, or being smiled at by strangers is a rare treat in a paranoid world.

David Isitt, one of my finest teachers would sometimes gather a group of us, all mature students on retreat, and on a fine day we would sit under a tree and he would run one of his CAT sessions. CAT stands for close attention to text and we could sometimes spend an hour pondering the multiple meanings of a single phrase. Close attention is a powerful tool for psychotherapists, doctors, partners and – as I proved to myself on Monday – for home bakers. On this the fourth or maybe the fifth heatwave of the summer, I had a sourdough loaf overprove and almost collapse. That one was turned into breadcrumbs, but then I needed to make bread urgently and so I did what I should have done all along, and I paid close attention to the rising dough. In the 25C heat, my usual 36 hour timetable easily condensed into a single working day and I came out with a good sourdough loaf. On another occasion and another retreat, a group of us – all strangers to one another – were invited to join hands in couples and behold one another. It was uncomfortable, challenging and revelatory to lock my gaze with a stranger and allow some sort of understanding to pass between us. The absolute opposite of hurrying down the street wearing headphones and looking at a mobile; avoiding any eye contact. Smiling, or being smiled at by strangers is a rare treat in a paranoid world.

Anyway, enough of all that; because the real point is that all this unsettling news has let the black dog back into the room and I spent a night that combined 3 hours sleep with about five of restless pondering which rewarded me with something of a vision. My mind drifted back to my early twenties when I had a long spell of what was diagnosed as phobic anxiety. I became convinced that I was about to die, and this actually changed the physical appearance of everything around me. Even the leafless winter trees looked like the bronchioles and alveoli of dying lungs. Eventually, under threat of being thrown out of art school I saw our GP and he told me that although he could give me some medication, it would be better for me – that’s to say Madame and me – to take ourselves off to the pub for some human company. His advice worked perfectly and within a few weeks I had a visionary moment and thought to myself – of course I’m going to die, but not yet! Ironically, some months later I was at a party, standing at the top of a rather grand Georgian flight of stairs holding a glass of wine and he came up and said to me “I see you took my advice” and promptly toppled cartwheel style back down the stairs, as drunk as a skunk.

However, apart from reminding myself how much a state of mind can even change the appearance of the world, I remembered how I began tentatively drawing again sitting on the side of By Brook, the small river that rises in Gloucestershire, runs through the Castle Combe valley, and below the farm where we were living; eventually joining the river Avon outside Bath. I made a laborious drawing (using hard pencils) of the knotted roots of a tree on the opposite bank – a drawing that sadly I can’t find anywhere- so I had to settle for a photo I took in Slaughterford last year. It was the drawing that unblocked me. Back in the day there were wild trout in abundance but nowadays it’s a shadow of its former self – milky, polluted and desperately in need of recovery. Fortunately there’s a group of volunteers improving water quality by improving the flow with rills and riffles, but I imagine many of the problems are caused by excessive abstraction.

Old bull looking at the sunset – Llyn peninsula this July

So in my mind’s eye, during my sleepless night, I was back there on the bank, and the clearest notion came to me that whatever my state of health, my creative wellsprings are still intact. My body ages – as it must – but creatively I’m still young, still capable of being inspired and driven by the sight of an unknown plant, still able to write to the best of my ability and, to use a phrase I overheard on a bus many years ago, to tell shit from pudding. Of course it’s a bit harder to get back to that place than it once was but real creativity has always been the combination of inspiration with technical understanding. Without technical understanding, inspiration is a mess of unresolved thoughts. Without inspiration, technique is dull and dead. I think of myself as being profoundly fortunate to have (at last) both – and now I know where to find the well.

The road-bridge at Slaughterford

Sometimes we just long for the supermarket in Montaren

The little garden we’ve created on the pavement outside.

Back in the day, and usually at this time of year we would pack our camping gear and drive south about 900 miles to Provence. Of course it was often blisteringly hot there, with the temperature into the 30’s and when things got too much we would invent a reason to go to the supermarket in Montaren where the air conditioning was well worth a couple of bottles of local wine. Nobody seemed to mind a couple of overheated English tourists hanging about the place gazing through the windows at the car park where it seemed as if the surface of the earth might shrivel and peel off. Uzès is a charming town, but you need to get up early in the morning if you expect to go for a walk. And you have to watch out for scorpions which can give you a nasty bite.

So now we’re into the fourth heatwave of the summer in more generally temperate Bath why does it feel so terribly hot when we’ve previously driven hundreds of miles and camped in a tent where it was maybe 10C hotter? We were there during what came to be known as the “canicule” where the death notices of the elderly seemed to be pinned to every tree. In that part of France everything seemed to stop for a couple of months while ridiculously foolhardy young men engaged in bull running through the streets, trying to catch a young bull by the tail and pull it away from its companions. The most exciting thing I’ve ever disapproved of! I suppose it must be because we’re more than a decade older and our thermostats need renewing, but today our strategy is to close the windows and shutters and to think of things to do that don’t involve movement. The closest thing to any seriously energetic pursuit is watering the little garden we’ve created outside and down two flights of stairs or (normally) the lift.

However, yesterday – with the good news from the hospital; (no more BCC’s or anything worse) – I felt full of energy. As soon as I’d got back from the hospital I’d fed the sourdough starter which had been lurking unfed in the airing cupboard for months. Fearing the worst, I gave it a tentative sniff and it smelt wonderful; yeasty, fruity like apples, like autumn. I gave it two tablespoons of wholemeal rye flour for breakfast and 24 hours later it was roaring for more. So the day began with the stupidest plan ever for a heatwave – a day at the stove. My three point plan was to bake a Dundee cake, a sourdough loaf and a batch of plum chutney with the allotment plums that were in danger of going mouldy. Fortunately most of the makings were in the cupboard and starting at nine a.m. I was all but finished by ten p.m. after a thirteen hour bake off. The sourdough loaf takes 36 hours from batter to finished loaf, but the great joy of it is that there’s barely twenty minutes of actual work involved. Mostly it just sits there growing and growing until it goes into the oven with a burst of steam and energy. The chutney was all chopping and boiling and fills the flat with delicious smells and chilli vapours that make your eyes water. The Dundee cake is a favourite for our camping trips in the van and I usually chuck in a few extra glacé cherries for luck. And here they are on the big table:

The past six months have been a bit of a test, what with various ailments on both our parts and Madame’s knee replacement so it’s been something of a dark time what with my melancholic temperament – things like the sourdough got neglected along with this blog at times. My long march towards a million words slowed to a shuffle while I concentrated on cataloguing and recording plants. But progress, however slow, is still progress and with a great deal of encouragement from Madame, my rock, and our neighbour Charlie I’m back on track to accomplishing a million words, a thousand records and five hundred species by the end of this year.

Exactly a year ago today I was very much not looking forward to my routine endoscopy the following day – and in the manner of these things we resolved to go dry, free from alcohol – because we really were hitting it too hard and the booze is always at the top of every list of things to avoid. It was easier than either of us anticipated and the money we saved has all been spent on extravagances like keeping the campervan on the road and me buying second hand botany books. After a long intermission life feels pretty good again and the moment I post this I’m going back to the kitchen to cut a slice of the future.

So where is my existence inscribed?

It’s been a very strange few weeks. I remember vividly from back probably twenty years ago, sitting in a white painted consultant’s room and waiting for him to give me the results of my endoscopy, wondering is this how it always finishes up …… being given the bad news by someone half my age and who barely knows me ? and yet – as it almost always does- leaving with good news that might yet be bad news. Endlessly left processing the words of others for hints of what they know about me but choose not to say out loud. Ironically, it’s always harder to process good news than bad. I left the hospital yesterday after being seen by five doctors and two consultants over the last three months all of whom pored over my arms and my back with their cameras and magnifying glasses and – after I’d signed the consent forms and had the risks explained to me in kindly detail – pronounced the lesions benign and put their scalpels away for another day. I’d prepared myself for the worst and then suddenly I was back on the bus stop with a reprieve. Those youthful months, driving a tractor in full sun with not so much as a smear of sun cream and wearing nothing but a pair of shorts had written themselves on my skin. I am inscribed with the follies of my days of vigour.

So after a ridiculous lunch of favourite things we drove across to the lake at Newton Park and walked together in something approaching silence as I processed the good news; unpacking the bits of the future I’d stowed away in case I wasn’t going to need them. It’s not over yet, of course. I’m still waiting for the results of blood tests, poo tests, urine tests and other tests as yet not invented as the doctors figure out why I’m anaemic and exhausted. I want to throw the word iatrogenic in their faces. “You’re crushing my heart with your beta blockers and extract of foxglove and blood thinners and all the other speculative miracle cures and all I’m suffering from is the casual and unthinking cruelty of the powerful!” I’d like to get my hearing back but the NHS can’t afford the technicians to fit the hearing aids they’ve already prescribed. I’d like to get my glaucoma laser-fixed as promised and I’d like it if the NHS dentist it took ten years to find would use something less dangerous than mercury amalgam to fill my teeth when she wouldn’t dream of treating any private patients that way. But I can’t say any of that to them because any sense of grievance is so dangerous; so poisonous. I’ve seen peoples lives destroyed by the sense of grievance – it seeps through the bloodstream and damages every relationship; sucking the joy out of life and crushing any residue of the lyrical, any feeling of connectedness.

So we go to the lake and sit there quietly watching the swans and moorhens and soaking up the intense late summer light sparkling on the leaves, the grass and the water. The bleached trunks of the dead oaks lining the path never looked brighter or more lovely. And I’m taking photographs of the plants we find – another part of me inscribed with something better than the abbreviated AI notes on my NHS records. The trace of my life divides into two further streams. There’s this blog and then there’s the record of plants seen, loved, identified recorded and photographed. One stream of words and another of data.

Then this morning I went into the kitchen and to my great delight discovered that the sourdough starter I’d completely neglected during these last months has come back to life, greedily digesting the breakfast of dark rye flour that I gave it when I got back from hospital. The future begins with cooking, eating, and sharing. Every saucepan, casserole and bread tin beckons the way forward. I will bake bread, I think, taking a small step forward.

I like the west – if ever I think about going somewhere it’s always west of where I am, and I like water, although I struggle with the notion that nature is somehow beneficial. How does that work? But being in nature is an active process, never passive. Water is where we begin our lives; swimming in an ocean of amniotic fluid. Birth is hard and I wonder if our attachment to water, to waves is a kind of yearning for the way back to that primal, protective warmth. Being born is irreversible and so water and the earth, being closest are the next best thing. Could it be that our first memories are inscribed in water and earth? Could it be that the water and the earth remind us of the before and beyond of our existence and that – surprisingly – we find it comforting?

It’s late summer so there are berries. We passed (and I photographed) spindle berries, hawthorn berries, sloes, damsons falling across a garden wall, blackberries and of course elderberries, which I forgot to photograph because stupidly I neglect the things I know best. There’s no better investment in the future than making jams, preserves, pickles, sauces and ketchups. Somehow they throw a line of engagement into the unknown, an investment in the likelihood of our being around to eat them. Hiding amongst them all are the darker natural notes – deadly nightshade, enchanters’ nightshade, woundwort, bittersweet which all prefer the shade and which it pays to know well. Your liver will thank you for your diligence.

But above all, we are inscribed in the people we love and who have loved us, occasionally for almost a lifetime. Parents, grandparents and (sometimes) children too, our partners of course who carry the bad and good of us because they love us, and the multitude of people we encountered and paused to be close to – to take their load if only for a while; to share a life giving thought or to dare to challenge. Our teachers, mentors and friends are inscribed in us as we are in them and it’s good!

Modern peasant – part 2.

This photo was taken on the allotment back in 2018

Modern peasant – such a slick title, and I was really pleased with myself for dreaming it up and writing about it a couple of days ago. On the other hand I was a bit cautious about using it in case I was stealing the wind from someone else’s sails – so I Googled it and got back a string of academic references and a book title: “The Modern Peasant, Adventures in City Food” published in 2013 and written by Jojo Tulloh. I’m giving its full title for reasons which (I hope) will become clear and so you can get yourself a copy too.

As it happened neither author nor title meant anything to me but I was intrigued enough to order secondhand copies of two of her books which hadn’t arrived by the time I wrote my piece, and I wrote on, unaware of the resonances between her work and mine. When it arrived I started to read it and I’m now halfway through. It’s almost alarming to see the parallels and tremendously reassuring to think that a generation and 25+ years behind, our vision continues. I always look at the bibliography in every book I come across which has one, and anyone who can freely quote from Patience Gray, Jane and Geoffrey Grigson, John Berger, William Cobbett, Dorothy Hartley .. and so it goes on – someone whose roots are so deeply set within the same humus that inspires the Potwell Inn – I know I’m going to love.

There are books I’ve read which express something that so profoundly resonates with me I know I’ll read and re-read them. Patience Gray, for instance, is one such writer whose recipes express something much deeper; a philosophy of life. Bernard Leach’s book “A Potters’ Book” does the same thing. Hidden within the instructions and formulae is a whole way of being human that can move us on to a different track. I first read the Leach book in one session one summer day, leaning against the library shelf where I’d found it. I didn’t understand the half of it and even now, each time I re-read it I find something new that I never previously understood. That summer afternoon I knew I wanted to become a potter.

So this rather lovely book could be the manifesto for the way of being human that Madame and I dreamed of living out, getting on for 60 years ago. Bread making, fermenting, growing, rearing, foraging, pickling and preserving are the chapter headings beneath which lies a rich mother lode of personal memories. I spent this morning rescuing a batch of Tayberry jelly that refused to set. Tayberries lack pectin and it can make very sloppy jelly; good for rice puddings but not so good on a slice of bread and butter. My discovery today was that by increasing the boiling point to 105.5C – just one degree higher – the jelly (rather less of it) set perfectly.

It’s early winter and our storage cupboards are pretty full. Some crops went well and some not so well. Our weekend in the Brecon Beacons gave us the chance to share ideas, swap recipes and cook together with our oldest friends which is always an inspiring time and makes my creative juices flow. We tasted cheeses and helped to send pigs off for slaughter. Madame and I have brewed beer, grown crops, kept a goat, made terrible wine and maintained a flock of increasingly heterodox hens. Every page of “Modern Peasant” contained a reminder of our journeys in France, Portugal and Spain in search of food we’d read about but never actually eaten. The tripe sausages in a motorway service station near Lyon that tasted of shit were probably the worst thing we ever tried. In Portugal I had to almost fight a waiter to try Feijoada in the one restaurant that still produced it in its original peasant glory. The waiters were so amazed that they surrounded me and watched as I ate, and I swear I found a pig’s tooth nestling in it. In another restaurant a waiter refused point blank to sell me Stone Soup because, he said, I wouldn’t like it. I insisted and I didn’t – but at least I can speak from experience.

Ah yes, we watched handmade cheese being made in Wensleydale and we’ve now eaten our way through many of the artisanal products which have come back from virtual extinction. The Gloucester Services on the M5 have become a place of pilgrimage for foodies; unimaginable 50 years ago! The Potwell Inn kitchen has been assembled from all the recipes we’ve ever tried and loved. There are always two or three types of stock on the go, and the longer we go on the more likely it is that we will have the exact right tool for the job. Two or three times a week you’d see sourdough proving on the stove in a bowl that was given to us 67 years ago.

So yes I was excited, encouraged and inspired by Jojo Tulloh’s book, and if you live in a small flat in the middle of a city and long to discover your inner peasant, this lovely book will set you on the path for sure.

The Potwell Inn and the modern peasant

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!

Well I promised I’d report back

First attempt at the Ken Forkish method.

I realize, of course, that you may not be as fascinated as I am by sourdough baking; allotmenteering; campervanning; walking; field botany or green spirituality – and if you are fortunate enough not to be bothered by any of them I have no idea why you’re even reading this. My ordinary life would probably be seen as exceptionally boring by most sane people; but then, “ordinary” – to me – is completely fascinating. I sometimes stare at people in a way they might find disconcerting, because every human life is a limitless mystery even if it’s mostly taken up by stuff that’s never going to make it into the newspapers. Even our greatest idiocies and betrayals are crept up on an inch at a time rather than recklessly embraced in an eyes meeting across a crowded room sort of way. We fall in love and fall out of it again; laugh, bawl our eyes out and have cuddles that range from routine maintenance to OMG; love our children and hate them with equal ferocity. We indulge in self-pity and skulduggery, yet occasionally amaze ourselves with an unexpected act of kindness – so yes, I like ordinary, in fact I like it a lot more than exceptional or exciting, an attribute that probably places me on some kind of spectrum.

And having got that off my chest I can write that my new Forkish method loaf came out of the oven just before bedtime last night and it had pancaked spectacularly, exactly as I had anticipated. The whole method was a nightmare of never previously experienced textures; slimy; sticky; cold and wet like a barrel of pilchards. However that wasn’t the end of it because this morning when I hacked a lump off it and spread it with a lustrous layer of butter (I thought I’d better give it half a chance of delighting me) it had all of the rich flavour of my usual bread if a little bit (pleasantly) more acidic. The crust was thinner and much less tooth breaking than usual and the crumb – the actual inner, bread bit – was fabulous. The biggest failing was the collapsed shape which might make one giant flying saucer shaped sandwich if you sliced it horizontally through the middle. The only unforgivable fault was a stratum of flour that must have got there when I tipped more in at a late, panicked, stage and failed to mix it in properly. All in all it was a slow but encouraging first step.

I’ve only got one piece of black iron cookware in the kitchen – a twenty year old crêpe pan that’s never seen the washing up after hundreds if not thousands of crêpes and which never ever sticks. Sadly the new anti-pancake black-iron bread tin got lost in the post when it was sent from Wellington to Bridgewater and then unaccountably to Birmingham instead of Bristol so stage two of the sourdough adventure will have to wait. But even more ordinary screw-ups adorned the day with the blocked sewer downstairs finally being unblocked, but the hot water cylinder in the bathroom springing a leak. Madame was well grumpy by this time and we slept in an uncomfortable silence while the bathroom bucket filled a drip at a time with expensive warm water. On the plus side I had the first civil conversation ever with our landlord’s agent who, after years of getting annoyed with me, has realized that I’m not just grumbling about the black mould to annoy her. Later today we went to the van (you see how ordinary this all is!) and booked in at the garage to get a new cam belt fitted – an expensive job that had me searching the mechanic’s eyes for signs of dissembling : me thinking are you shitting me up? and him thinking (with his best poker face on) “he thinks I’m shitting him up; and him a retired Vicar!” There is, unaccountably, a six week minimum waiting list for this hideously expensive service but I don’t care – our campervan is what the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called a transitional object, although I think he had rather smaller things like cuddly blankets and teddy bears in mind. It gets us through the darkest days just by being there as a promise of better things to come.

Confession

December 2022

Many years ago before the church drove out the last threads of organised religion from my mind, I used to go to confession in a church carefully chosen miles from home in order that I wouldn’t be recognized. Father Barnard was an old school Anglo Catholic who reputedly slept in his cassock. The first time I went there I was surprised to see the church half full of people, but I soon realized why. Father Barnard was as deaf as a post and so any thought of private confession went out of the window. You had to shout your sins at him – greatly to the amusement of the gathered crowd. Having blurted out your private shame he would invariably dispatch you to the back of church to say the same psalm. It never varied – same old same old – and it was truly cathartic.

Anyway, and in search of the same sense of release I’m offering my full confession to a grave sin, committed this morning in full knowledge of the error of my ways. I added yeast to a sourdough loaf. There we are then, I’ve got it off my chest. A heretical book, well-known to the authorities, has tempted me from the path of righteousness, and lured thousands of us pale and unhealthy backsliders into sin. In a burst of what the Jungians call synchronicity, the sewer in the basement has been blocked and is flooding as a kind of divine retribution and our water heater has developed a leak. The management company has failed to respond to any of our complaints because – as we all know – old people have nothing important to do and so can be safely shunted to the end of the queue. Grumble grumble grumble!!

The plan is to make a serviceable white loaf that lasts a few days and can be cut for sandwiches but tastes great at the same time. Shop bread is so full of preservatives it never seems to go off – you just wake up one morning to find it’s grown a green fur coat. It’s early days, but after following the instructions to the letter I’ve got a sticky, sloppy and wet mass of dough that looks destined to pancake when it hits the oven. I’ve already weakened and added more flour to the dough but I’m not hopeful. Never mind I’ll see it through to the bitter end and – as the politicians always seem to say – lessons will be learned. However it turns out I promise I’ll publish a photo for your entertainment. But yeast in a sourdough loaf? I may never forgive myself.

Winter camping – here we come!

Pen y fan in February 2016

Did I mention that we love going to the Bannau Brycheiniog – the Brecon Beacons – or, according to the spellchecker here on my laptop, the “banana strychnine”. Every year as the clocks go back and it gets dark so painfully early, we try to squeeze in one last camper-van trip before we drain the water tank and pull the curtains. Summer is never long enough. It’s over now to fungi and ferns and we managed to fit in a walk around the woods on the Mendips last week which was disappointingly light on fungi but challenging on the fern front. I remember well the early days when I thought there were just Dandelions until I discovered that they were just a small part of a huge group. These discoveries always leave me equally exhilarated and depressed. On our walk, and with a good deal of hands and knees stuff, I confirmed what I already knew in my heart of hearts – that not all green and ferny looking things are called Bracken (any more than all overweight white middle class men in Rohan trousers are called Dave). At once, exhilarated and depressed, I lashed out on a couple (more) ferny books and settled down for a good read. I am abashed; vanquished; and breathlessly looking forward to a ferny bash in the Bannau.

So it’s been a bit of a week – two exhibitions; Paula Rego and Goya at the Holburne Museum and Rinko Kawauchi: “At the edge of the everyday world” at the Arnolfini in Bristol; an excellent talk by the Director of the Holburne at BRLSI and two films – “The Outrun” in Bath and “A sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things” – both of them lovely; the second, showing at the Watershed was a biopic of Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham a shamefully neglected modernist artist. After the usual depressing few autumn weeks we felt like students again, bathing in fountains of glittering inspiration. Of course the payback came with exhaustion and an urgent call to the doctor when my heart rate went down to 45 and blood pressure to 92/61. I’d have to have been a saint not to laugh when the doctor told me that my symptoms were caused by the drugs I was prescribed to cure the symptoms! I don’t want to expire in a Kafkaesque cycle of thwarted goodwill.

Anyway, the sun’s shining and we’ve booked a spot alongside the Monmouth and Brecon canal. I’ve also been sorting through hundreds of old flower photos but I’m held up by the absence of replies to emails requesting bits of information. If this army of citizen scientists is ever going to live up to its immense promise, the learned institutions need to get over themselves and answer emails from those of us without PhD’s. But then I’m a bit of a loner and the least clubbable person you could imagine. Madame is the only person who comes (dangerously) close to “getting” me – we even hold hands in bed: dangerous!

Finally, I’ve yielded to temptation and bought a black iron bread tin. I’ve had enough of pancake sourdough loaves. Tigger and Eeyore the two starters are going well, and so I’ll re-unite them during the week and start some experiments to create an organic sourdough loaf that stands up enough to make a sandwich with a soft enough crust not to rip the roof of my mouth or snap teeth off. Then when that’s done I’m going to write a long letter to Keir Starmer to explain that his job is not to shuffle bits of spreadsheet around like a junior manager in a shoe shop, but to reunite managerial competence with a bit of visionary leadership and some ethical backbone which he seems to have lost somewhere along the way.

More sourdough blah blah

Sorry about the spelling.

My friend Don kept a small flock of chickens in his orchard and I remember him telling me that there was one elderly bird in particular which would not lay an egg for weeks – but if he happened to mention in the bird’s presence that it would have to go to the pot he would invariably find an egg the next day. I think Eeyore, my elderly and neglected sourdough starter has a similar temperament. It’s all my own fault, of course, I neglected it shamefully for months because among many other things I didn’t feel like doing, I especially didn’t feel like making bread; far too optimistic an activity for a man sunk deep in melancholia and self-pity. Maybe that should simply read “self pity” because melancholia is essentially a posh middle-class euphemism for it. The stages of starter decrepitude are slow but very visible. No bubbles rise and burst on the surface like methane from a muddy lake bed. It sits there and glowers at me as gradually the golden liquor separates from the sludge and I begin to imagine it will soon be a stinking mess. That happened once many years ago and when I eventually sprang the top on the container the most dreadful smell burst out like a vengeful demon. In the end I had to throw the starter and its container away; both irredeemably contaminated.

I have read about keen but recently converted sourdough penitents advertising for surrogate parents to look after their starters while they pop out to the shops for a morning. This is never necessary because, like all living things, the whole life of a starter strains towards survival and reproduction and so Tarquin’s shopping is astonishingly unlikely to threaten its continued existence. Take heart! sourdough starters can survive almost any catastrophe except being tipped down the sink.

I’ve written about my attempts to revive the original starter but, briefly I fed the original one – maybe 15 years old – and miraculously not at the stinking stage – and watched it sulk for a week or so without so much casting a pinhead bubble. But I also scraped half a gram of dried starter off the top of the pot, added (tap) water and dark rye flour and watched in wonder as it sprang into vigorous action. I’ve never given my starter a name but I decided to call the old one Eeyore and the new one Tigger. Tigger did so well I was able to make the first loaf after a couple of days, which may have been around the time when I mentioned in the presence of Eeyore that I was going to have to let him go. Eeyore responded the next day by throwing a thick foaming head – just like the good old days. The Potwell Inn bakery was back in business and I was able to make side-by-side comparisons of the two starters. Unsurprisingly, (they are genetically identical), there was no difference and we are able to eat decent bread again after a long hiatus of melancholy and indigestion.

The new flour – 100% Maris Widgeon – is demanding some experimentation with baking times and temperatures to avoid the much sought after, (by masochists), palate ripping crust which neither Madame or me enjoy; and thirty six hour proving seems to make a better crumb texture; but then, I’m irredeemably excited by poorly designed experiments with too many variables to draw any conclusions. The sourdough world is full of overly masculine imagery with extreme temperatures and impossible physicality built into the mystique, combined with slashing and frequent applications of cold water. But better than all that nonsense; the Potwell Inn is filled with the fragrance of baking bread once again and the world seems a better place for it.