The bliss of proper bread

I cannot claim the gift of prophecy, but early this year — before lockdown panic-buying and the warnings of a dire wheat harvest causing bread price rises — I became a bread-maker. I dug around on the internet for a good recipe for sourdough, and found one padded out with the usual bloggery and waffle. Absent the philosophy and the pious musings, it gives a clear, sensible route to bread self-sufficiency.

Sourdough doesn’t need bought-in yeast, only a ‘starter’ of flour and water. This is often called a ‘mother’, and attracts wild yeasts as it develops; after five days in the jar it is a gently bubbling ferment of living yeasts, and you keep it going by adding flour and water to it day by day. When my son was making his own bread at university, he left his mother at the back of the fridge for more than six months, and after a little feeding it revived, perhaps better than ever.

According to Bee Wilson’s The Way We Eat Now, the richer you are as a family or a nation, the less bread you will eat. The working classes expected a buttered slice with their tea, but we are more middle class these days. Yet the coronavirus has had a tremendous impact on our collective desire for bread — during lockdown Instagram was thickly leavened with photos of homemade sourdough. It is as if we have rediscovered our Christian roots. Man shall not live by bread alone, says Jesus; but the prayer he taught us puts it fair and square on the dining table — and it is as bread, after all, that he renews his compact with his followers at every Communion. Bread is the staff of life, and the first foodstuff to vanish from the supermarket shelves in times of crisis.