A RISING TREND

A good bike, an iPhone and a barely functioning train service: all that is required for modern mastery over the British mainland, for the roaming blue dot to converge with the red target.

The only enemy is darkness as country roads are subjected to the fiendish speed of motorcars, seemingly angry at their impending obsolescence; they hunt down cyclist-pioneers with bright lights and revving anger.

My destination was the School of Artisan Food at Welbeck, Nottinghamshire, but the lumbering behemoth that is British Rail had let me down. Discovering an inner-Northerner I cursed the Tory legacy of privatisation, as I had missed a connection in Sheffield and was compelled to negotiate the 11.9 miles by bike.

The crystal ball of the iPhone can tell you most things, but alas its maps do not reveal the contours of a landscape. I had failed to appreciate that Sheffield is situated on seven hills, just like the Eternal City, as any local will tell you before they hastily add that there the comparison ends. Precipitous climbs lay ahead.

Along any route I am always fascinated by the culinary scene and Sheffield’s strip malls revealed worryingly eclectic tastes in the City of Steel: one enterprising take-away, displaying a keen appreciation of the broad sweep of Mediterranean cuisine, was selling both pizzas and kebabs, while another premises offered a hybrid of Chinese and English food: Yorkshire pud with soya sauce anyone?

At least there were plenty of vintage fish and chips which Yorkshire claims as its own creation, to any Lancastrian’s intense irritation (the reality is that fish and chips is believed to have been brought by Jewish migrants at the end of the nineteenth century).

By the time I reached my hotel, the day’s travel had brought hunger to a crescendo, and now it was time to sample Yorkshire’s finest fish dish, inferior variants of which I have previously likened to a decaying albatross. In the hotel ‘Grill’ I ordered ‘the Moby’, their gargantuan version of surf and turf.

Sniffing around as I awaited my meal, I noticed that the hotel displayed an attachment to that great Northern institution that is the tribute night. Alas, I wouldn’t be around for the forthcoming Freddie Mercury occasion, and while the tribute night isn’t for all tastes, you have to hand it to our friends up there, practice over generations have left them with the know-how to crisp the batter over a fish to a tee. I can understand why that dish is the Madeleine food-of-memory for any Northerner as he wearily staggers home on a Friday night.

Monday morning brought with it the chilling certainty of the week to come, and my biking hands were laid raw by a spring frost. More fool me for not bringing any gloves.

The School of Artisan Food is situated in the sumptuous grounds of Welbeck estate close to mythical Sherwood Forest. Without an ounce of pomposity, it is establishing itself as the leading centre in Britain for education in the lost artisan crafts of food production such as cheese-making and brewing.

Fittingly perhaps, the school is located on the site of a former abbey. I wonder whether Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries had the unintended consequence of removing a vital source of expertise in food production: the rule of St. Benedict specified a meat-free diet which encouraged the development of most of Europe’s cheeses in monastic settings, while the ordinance not ‘to drink to stupefaction’ did not deter monks from advancing brewing techniques. With the arrival of industrial preservation techniques, a few centuries after the Reformation, there was little artisan competition, unlike in France where monasticism endured, to confront the steady march of the tin can and, more latterly the freezer bag.

I was seeking insight into the third (after brewing and cheese-making), and probably the most influential process of microbial breakdown upon which Western civilisation has been built, that of bread-making.

It is possible to imagine the serendipity with which the first bread was realised: a pot of flour and water left in the open air for a few days which began to rise and give off a pleasantly fermented scent. Then, when cooked up with a little salt, it would have tasted considerably lighter and more pleasant than the heavy coagulate that had served as dinner the previous night. A few millennia of tweaking latter and you have the artisan loaf in all its glory.

The important aspect in this process is the sourdough starter or leaven which gives bread its distinctive lift, enhancing texture and providing a mildly acidic taste. Sadly, eighty percent of bread consumed in the UK is now made using the Chorleywood process which allows inferior flour (no need for protein-rich strong white flour) to be combined with chemical improvers and high quantities of commercial yeast so that it lingers much longer in the gut than the memory. Perhaps the reason why many people often prefer this industrial bread is precisely why children don’t like alcohol: they haven’t acquired the taste, but when you do, oh boy.

I wanted to learn how to make bread shorn of anything beyond the three basic ingredients of flour, water and salt. My teacher, Emmanuel Hadjiandreou, a baker of distinction, was the man to impart the skill and in the space of a day I learnt the rudiments of the craft. I can impart a few tips that I picked up on the course: first, it is important to follow a recipe strictly if not rigidly; second, purchase a useful plastic scraper from any department store; and finally, leave a tray of water at the bottom of your oven to create a firm crust.

I will never recreate the magnificent structures which Emmanuel dexterously forms, and the household oven does impose limitations, but fine bread is now within my reach. I heartily recommend that either you take a short course, buy a book on the subject (Dan Lepard’s was recommended), find out online or phone a friend. The knowledge is out there and catching on.

Indeed, I feel sourdough is beginning to form a part of the zeitgeist along with bicycles, iPhones and trains, and this technology operates at quite a deep level in our consciousness connecting us with the trials and tribulations of our Neolithic ancestors as they endeavored to go forth and multiply. Perhaps this accounts for the veneration accorded to holy bread; the Judeo-Christian association is well known but the Slavic pagan god Jaryla is also depicted carrying a sheaf of rye.

The anthropologist Martin Jones has observed that for humans ‘the flip side of a generously provisioned, massive brain seems to be an economically downsized gut’. Bread-making is one of the great chains of production from farmer through miller and on to baker, requiring the deployment of a range of technologies and skills to produce what is known as the ‘staff of life’. If we fail to devote our collective mental energies to the task of baking fine bread and allow the abominations of the Chorleywood process to prevail it is our “downsized guts” that suffer.