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.

The old ways

Consider the Fork

I've finally made my way through the pile of Christmas books to this much-awaited one: Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson. I've only just begun to read it, but already it's doing what I expected it to - it's made me see cooking (and baking) in a whole new light. Plenty of 'Oh I see!' and 'Gosh, really?' moments. Partly a walk through the history of gadgets in the kitchen (i.e. everything from the humble wooden spoon to sophisticated electronic mixers and the like) and partly an explanation of why we do what we do. Why is stir-frying food in a wok the culinary norm in China for example? Apparently it was originally devised as a very fast way of cooking food in areas where there was a scarcity of fire-wood (You're having a 'Gosh, really?' moment aren't you?). As so often happens, a particular manner of cooking became tradition and remained in place long after the original impetus had disappeared. 

Nanny C's mixing bowl with last year's Christmas Pud

Being both curious baker and nerdy archaeologist, this book draws me in on both counts (there's a good deal of delving into the past here). One comment that Wilson makes about cooks being inherently conservative struck a nerve (it is, of course, true and helps explain why so many traditions live on in the kitchen). I don't tend to think of myself as conservative though and had never thought too hard about my own habits in the kitchen - many of which are so deeply ingrained that I barely even consider why I do things a certain way. Why, for instance, do I always use my Grandmother's old baking bowl, which I inherited, to mix both Christmas puddings and cakes? I have other bowls big enough, yet I always find myself reaching for the lovely cream-coloured ceramic bowl. Admittedly, it is very pleasing to the eye (I'm a sucker for all things pretty), but it's also more fragile than a modern plastic bowl (I'm a terrible klutz). Being forced to consider the bowl (to borrow a phrase), I've just now realised that it's the twin of the one Mam always used and in which I would help to stir the mixtures every year as a small child. Perhaps this is less a case of conservatism, however, and more an example of kitchen nostalgia.

There have been times when I've had to pry myself away from doing things a certain way and grudgingly admit that, yes, there might well be a newer, easier or better approach (not just conservative but stubborn too - to add to the littany of my faults being catalogued in this blog-post). Take pastry-making: I always knew to add lemon juice to the water I was using to combine my pastry dough, because that's how I learned to do it from my mother. It wasn't until I began to read books about baking as an adult that I understood the science behind it (the acidity in the lemon juice helps to relax the gluten formed by mixing the flour and water, keeping the pastry nice and flaky). Naturally, I kept using lemon juice, much like I kept rubbing in the butter by hand, for many a year to come until finally, one Christmas about six years ago I tried a different method. I was making an awful lot of pastry that year, in preparation for my annual mince-pie and mulled wine party, at which I served not just mince-pies but also sausage rolls. Hungry mouths made hungrier by glasses of mulled wine required numerous trays of both pies and rolls. 

Pastry inspiration in Patisserie 

Hands cramping as I rubbed butter into the first three pounds of pastry dough (I kid you not), I went to my bookcase and searched through my cookbooks. Nigella (who had never let me down in the past) had a recipe for shortcrust pastry that involved an electric processor (controversial) and orange juice (not lemon?). With a mental shrug and without much wringing of my already sore hands, I decided to do a trial batch. To make a long story short, once you keep strictly to the 'everything must be as cold as possible' mantra, it works. And although I agree with my mother that you really can't beat the tender crumb and flaky nature of a shortcrust made by hand, it does produce a very good substitute. Sometimes the old ways really are the best, but when time or sore hands get the better of you, I've learned not to sniff at a new approach. I'm sure there were bakers who were once equally sniffy about the advent of the electric mixer (my most prized possession), and clung furiously to their wooden spoons and hand-whisks (more fool them I say). 

In the spirit of trying something new but also honouring the methods of the past (i.e. indulging in a spot of comfy conservatism), I'm determined to try a recipe from one of my new baking books (Patisserie by Murielle Valette). In a rather ambitious move, I'm going to try my hand at making one of my favourite things to eat with a cup of coffee - the fabulous almond croissant. It's something that I've never done before, which is understandable given the time it takes to prepare the croissant dough and make the pastries (hence the 'ambitious' - set aside at least two days, with lots of folding, resting and proving involved). This is one instance in which the old ways are not only the best way, but also pretty much the only way - short of buying them from a very good artisan bakery, there's no quick-dash ninja route to a delicious croissant (I'm going to be stern here people - supermarket / petrol station / corner shop ones do not count). I've had a longing for one since before Christmas and not having a wonderful French boulangerie on my doorstep (sigh), I think it's time to give it a go. No promises on when this will happen (my packed schedule this week and other baking commitments at the weekend suggest that I will have to employ the delayed gratification technique and make myself wait), but rest assured that as soon as I get the first batch out of the oven, you'll be the first to know.