Baking

If you’ve stuck out my cookery writing for long enough, you’ll know that I am a bit of a Labrador when it comes to different dishes: greedy, ready to try anything, and likely to enjoy it. Food is where my general cynicism and air of ennui gives way to unbridled enthusiasm. There are very few dishes that, when done well, I won’t chalk up in the ‘good’ column. For a long time, crème caramel was the exception to that rule. To be fair, my experience of it had been limited: childhood self-catering holidays in northern France meant that my introduction to the crème caramel did not show it at its best.

When it comes to home cooking, we’re obsessed with optimisation. Today this manifests itself in reels on Instagram offering a ‘hack’ to make the time you spend in your kitchen shorter and your dinner to arrive more quickly. Harder, faster, better, stronger. None of this is new: there was a time when every Jamie Oliver cookbook shaved ten minutes of the promised cooking time off the last. Delia Smith’s How to Cheat at Cooking caused a public outcry (can you believe she advocated for frozen mashed potato?). The whole appeal of air fryers is that they’re fast, and while slow cookers don’t exactly get to their destination quickly, they do so with as little intervention as possible from the cook.

Ihad a culinary revelation this week. I like to think I’m an egalitarian when it comes to food – I like beautiful, fancy restaurant stuff and home-cooked one-pot dishes, I like punchy, in-your-face flavour, and subtle, softer flavours. I love trying new-to-me dishes from around the world, and I love the comfort of eating suppers my grandma would make. You can put virtually anything in front of me and I’ll be thrilled. But as I contemplated this week’s recipe subject, I realised that I avoid foods that ooze. Doughnuts splurging out their jam, uncontainable ice-cream sandwiches, croissants or Danish pastries with custards or compotes that blob onto my clothes. Even really juicy stone fruit or a particularly ripe soft cheese makes me nervous.

We all did mad things during the first Covid lockdown. For some it was getting a dog or starting up a microbakery. For me, it was signing up for a NVQ Level 2 in butchery. I’m still not quite sure how it happened, but, once the schools reopened, I spent my Tuesdays in a cold butchery store in east London, socially distanced from my septuagenarian master butchery tutor, who would teach me how to break down whole carcasses, the art of seam butchery and the trick to linking sausages.

‘It’s just a hot dog bun with icing!’ the iced-bun detractors will shriek. I’m a lady with a lot of opinions about fairly esoteric foodstuffs, many of them declamatory, immovable, or strident, but I do not understand taking against the iced bun. I’m not sure what awful bakery-based trauma must have happened to you during childhood to make iced buns the target of your ire, but they are undeserving. For anyone not a self-proclaimed detractor, iced buns (also called Swiss buns or iced fingers) prompt reveries: forgotten childhood memories of plump buns in trollies and sticky fingers holding grown-up hands.

Roast potatoes shouldn’t be complicated. We’re talking two ingredients, plus some salt and maybe herbs if you’re feeling fancy. It’s just shoving some parboiled potatoes in a hot oven, right? Yet I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve had a decent roast potato in a pub or restaurant. Bad ones are to be found all over the place. I don’t just mean school dinners, mass-catering, hospital-canteen potatoes here. The most carefully prepared Sunday roasts at charming establishments feature beautiful melting meat and thoughtfully cooked veg, all sitting alongside miserable roasties. Clammy. Dark brown. Soft (but not in a good way). A waste of a good potato. No one doesn’t like a roast potato; they’re practically our national dish.

A pecan pie has been on my kitchen table for the past few days, due to circumstances rendering every other surface or shelf unusable, thanks to badly timed building work and an absent fridge. A mixing bowl sits over it, protecting it from dust and sticky fingers. I’ll tell you what I’ve learned: everybody loves pecan pie. Everyone who has walked past it has stopped dead, done a double take, and then rhapsodised unprompted about the pie’s virtues. At one point, excitement was generated simply by the pie being in the background of a video call. Pecan pie, one of America’s traditional celebration (especially Thanksgiving) puddings, is adored by children, but it has a dark, complex sweetness that wins over grown-ups too, and the toasty nuts bring texture as well as richness.

My theory is that sachertorte is a victim of its own success. Over the past 150 years, it has become an Austrian icon and, as such, can be found throughout Vienna. And that’s the problem: its ubiquity means that inferior versions abound. It has developed an unfortunate reputation for being dry, dull, tasteless – a pale imitation of a chocolate cake. It is often described – even by its supporters – as a ‘grown-up’ chocolate cake or an ‘elegant’ chocolate cake, but I feel like this does it a disservice. Both feel a little like euphemisms for ‘not that nice’, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.