On Sunday, I baked bread. I love making bread. It makes you feel like a better person. A virtuous person. You are making bread and this must somehow be a good thing to do. Kneading dough makes you a contented person. You can’t worry about anything when you are kneading dough. Also, it makes the house smell glorious. As though a domestic goddess might live here, and like Nigella, you get up in the middle of the night, tiptoe down to the kitchen in your satin dressing gown, open the fridge, slip a spoon into the leftover chocolate mousse and scoff it, sexily. A domestic goddess does not live here, I can assure you.
A bread-maker does. Sometimes I make no-knead bread. Here is one of the New York Times’ best-loved recipes, first published in 2006: “Mix flour, water, salt and yeast in a bowl just until they all come together. Cover the bowl and let it sit on your counter overnight. The next day, shape it into a loose loaf, let it prove, then bake it inside a preheated Dutch oven with the lid on. That’s it.” You take the lid off for the last 15 minutes. The result is a golden, cracked top. It looks as fancy as one of those loaves you pay almost a tenner for at flash artisan bakeries.
I make a rye and honey loaf. A focaccia with Maldon salt and fancy olive oil and rosemary painted on the top. If I can be arsed, which is not often, I make ciabatta. Sometimes, I look at a recipe for croissants. Then I have a lie-down. I never make sourdough bread. I leave that to the experts.
On Sunday, I made my grandfather’s bread.
After he retired from journalism – he never retired from being sarcastic – he took up cookery.
Cooking suited his character. The sort of cooking he practised was precise. His mind was precise. He liked the measurement of ingredients. He liked Chinese cookery, with its myriad tiny plates of this and that.
He made his two loaves of bread on Sundays. I had forgotten about his bread until an email arrived last week. It was from Helen who lived, and still lives, in the Ponsonby townhouse next door to the townhouse my grandfather, Les, lived in with his second wife, Rona, until their deaths. Les died in 1986, Rona in 1997. The email had a picture attached. It was of a page from a ring-binder folder. It was tattered and well worn. It bore the marks of spills of flour and water. It was a recipe for “Mr Edwards’ Bread”. Helen wrote that she makes my grandfather’s bread often and was “making it today”.
My grandfather took to cookery with gusto. He was less keen on kids. Children bored him and sometimes irritated him. Once, when my brother, Simon, threw a tantrum and locked himself in the bathroom, Les stood outside the door and pretended to be on the phone to the zoo. There was a monkey called Simon locked in his bathroom. Could a keeper please come to take it away and put it in the monkey cage? Strangely, this tactic did not encourage the monkey to emerge from the bathroom. Les had to remove the lock. The monkey was in bad odour for some time.
I made my grandfather’s bread. There is nothing remotely flash about it. It is a utilitarian loaf, slightly nutty and wheatgermy. My grandparents were socialists. My grandfather’s bread is, somehow, a very socialist loaf.
I had two slices, still warm from the oven, with butter and honey for breakfast. It was good. Even better, I was back in that 1970s Ponsonby townhouse, in the tiny kitchen with the blue and white patterned Formica benches, doing the Sunday lunch dishes with my grandfather.
We often had Sunday lunch in the townhouse. It was always roast lamb, and apple pie for afters. At a time when roast lamb was shoved in the oven for hours and emerged grey and inedible, Rona’s lamb was pink in the middle and studded with garlic and rosemary. She stewed her apples with cloves. I still stew my apples with cloves.
