Once upon a time...

Living in the 21st century means that we are often slaves to time. The alarm clock alerts us that it's time to awaken and wrenches us from sleep. We rush to get the 7.32 train or the 8.16 bus or to cycle our 40 minute commute. We take an hour's lunch (if lucky) and a 15 minute break (if very lucky) during our working day of carefully clocked hours, squeezing in a 20 minute presentation or a two hour meeting. For a quick dinner, we might cook pasta (boil for about 10 minutes) or watch the timer on the microwave count down the 3 minutes it takes to heat a ready-meal. We're told to take at least 30 minutes of exercise every day. We're constantly measuring time, whether by ticking clock or watch, or by digital display on a phone, computer or TV, and we're regulated by the minutes and hours that make up each day. 
  

Of course human beings have always lived and worked to a rhythm (with the rising and setting sun being the most basic), though modern technology has allowed us to take this to extremes. But as regimented as this can be, being able to tell the time down to the minute is not always a bad thing and no more so for me than when baking and cooking. Take a typical cake recipe, which will instruct you to beat the butter and sugar for 10 minutes with an electric whisk or to bake in the oven for 35 minutes. Giving specific timings in a recipe means that (in theory) anyone can follow the instructions and successfully bake the cake. Similarly, we can set a timer when boiling an egg, knowing that in precisely 8 minutes we'll have the perfect hard-boiled egg. 

Obviously being able to time certain parts of the cooking process has always been necessary, but what do you do if you don't have a clock or other time-piece? Well, an experienced cook can usually tell by the look and smell of a cake that it's done, even if there's no timer beeping officiously when the requisite 35 minutes is up. But how to discern if an egg is boiled to your satisfaction while it's still in the pot? How to instruct an inexperienced cook or to describe the timings in a new recipe? It all becomes rather tricky without the handy device of precise time-telling. The mechanical clock wasn't invented until the 14th century and clocks (and subsequently watches) remained a rare and expensive luxury during the medieval period and into the early modern period. Surviving recipes show that cooks relied on communal knowledge to measure time, using prayers (e.g. boil for the time it takes to say two Hail Mary's) or even distance (e.g. bake for the time a person would take to walk three miles), though the latter is rather subjective, depending as it does on the speed, height and gait of the person walking. 

Timing by prayer would have been a particularly useful measure in an age when daily life revolved around the Church and everyone was expected to attend mass and know their prayers. I've been trying to imagine how 21st century cooks might manage if all of our clocks, watches and digital appliances magically disappeared. In our more secular and multi-racial society, we would struggle to find a prayer, song or poem that would be known by both young and old alike (I might know all the words to that classic 80s power ballad - ahem - but I can guarantee that my niece will not). For all that I sometimes resent being tied to timetables and schedules, hours and minutes, I won't be giving up my precious timer anytime soon.


You might be wondering right about now what any of this has to do with the photos of French pastries dotted throughout the post. Well, I had plenty of time to ponder the rhythms of our days and our reliance on clocks while I was making them. I've long wanted to try my hand at making croissant dough and finally had a few days free recently and a good incentive (Mam's birthday weekend). 

Full disclosure here: Making French pastries at home is a labour of love. I enjoyed both the process and the result (outstanding pastries, well worth the effort), but it would only be repeated for very special occasions. Granted, I made life even harder for myself by making three types of pastries - plain and almond croissants and pain au chocolat - so if you fancied giving it a go, making just the one type should ease the burden slightly. If you do decide to try, I followed Paul Hollywood's recipe, which is clear, concise and illustrated with photos of the different steps (happily it also sticks to modern conventions of timings, with not a Hail Mary in sight). 

It's a long, drawn-out affair- albeit not particularly difficult - that is very much regulated by time and by the different stages in the process over a period of two or three days. There's lots of rolling, folding and chilling involved and to describe it in detail here would bore you silly, so in case you're rushing to catch the 17.13 train home, here's the abbreviated version: 

Once upon a time, I made some French pastries. They were flaky, buttery and delicious and everyone loved them. 

The End.