Duguid Naomi - Home Baking: The Artful Mix of Flour and Traditions from Around the World

Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid

Location photographs by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid Studio photographs by Richard Jung

ARTISAN NEW YORK

Copyright 2003 by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid
Location photographs copyright 2003 by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid

Studio photographs copyright 2003 by Richard Jung
Food styling by Susie Theodorou
Prop styling by Bette Blau

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproducedmechanically, electronically, or by any other means, including photocopyingwithout written permission of the publisher.

Published by Artisan
A Division of Workman Publishing Company, Inc.
225 Varick Street, New York, New York 10014-4381
www.artisanbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
eISBN 9781579656041

Home baking is different from professional baking, just as cooking at home is different from cooking in a restaurant. Ovens are different, ingredients can be different, and, most of all, our motivations and expectations are different.

In many parts of North America, home baking has taken a back seat to professional baking over the last few decades, and its too bad. On the positive side, we probably can buy better bread (at farmers markets, bakeries, natural foods stores, and supermarkets) than at any other time in history, and we have commercially made cakes and pastries that are unimaginably good. But with the rise of professional baking, home baking has suffered. Here in the city, we dont know of a single household where someone bakes on a regular basis. People are busy. Both parents generally work, and anyway, baked goods can be easily purchased.

In this book, and in these recipes, we raise the flag of home baking because we believe that if home baking traditions wither, then as a culture, and as home cooks, we lose a great deal. Not only do we lose these foods for future generations to enjoy, and all of the tastes, smells, and textures that they embody, but we lose the traditions themselves. Going relaxedly into the kitchen to make bread or a batch of cookies, knowing that you can and that its an easy, rewarding thing to do, is as important as the food itself.

So in the recipes we try to put a more casual approach back into baking. Not everything has to be exact or perfect, whether it is a bread, a flatbread, a cake, a cookie, or a pie. Part of a yeasted dough can be put away for later, used perhaps to make a simple fruit cake or tart or a savory flatbread. It may seem silly to take a dough and see how many different shapes of rolls you can make, but maybe silly is good, and so are whimsy and fun.

The point of it all, it seems to us, is to have fun baking, and to make good food for yourself and for the people you love.

To Dazzle Guests

Our Household Staples

Last-Minute Baking

To Feed a Hungry Crowd

Standbys for Snacking

Child-Friendly Recipes to Make Together

Campfire Baking

Great for Sandwiches

Unusual Techniques to Try

For Those Who Cant Eat Gluten (Celiacs)

For Those Who Prefer Whole Grains

Great for Toast

Classics

Exotic Flavors

To Take as a Present

WE BURY OUR HANDS IN A BIG BOWL OF FLOUR, add water and salt, perhaps butter and sugar. We make a batter or a dough, then maybe let it ferment. We shape the dough or pour the batter. We bake it, and it becomes food! This is one of lifes great transformations, from grain to flour to food. It embodies generations of creativity and artfulness, of care and human effort, all around the world.

HomeBaking is all about this process, this art, this daily rhythm of turning flour into food. We write about Naomis grandmothers treacle tarts, about a rye bread from Gotland Island in Sweden, about a Thai tuile, and about a flatbread in faraway Turkmenistan, but what powers the engine, our engine, is that incredible magic of working with flour, simple flour, to make food we love.

We are home bakers, and it is home baking that this book is most specifically about. Home baking is an enormous subject; its also a subject too personal to fit tidily into straightforward descriptions of techniques and results. A home baker makes a pie in a particular way because thats the way my grandmother made it. The breads, pies, and cakes that we grew up with are foods filled with personal history, foods that resonate with meaning. We hold on to them because they embody a part of who we are, a part of where we come from. Kneading a bread dough, or baking a cake on someones birthday, or having homemade cookies or crackers to put out when friends stop by, these are things that feel good, like riding a bicycle, or quilting a quilt, or walking in the woods.

In the course of working on this book, we bought a rundown old farm two hours northwest of where we live in downtown Toronto. Soon after we bought it, we began fixing up the farmhouse, an eight-hundred-square-foot wood-framed saltbox. We peeled off what seemed like a hundred years worth of wallpaper and took down all the lathe and plaster, and we put in new windows, new wiring, and new insulation. Wed never renovated a house before, so by the end of each day, we were exhausted, our hands swollen, our bodies stiff and aching. We bought a cast-iron cookstove and put in a chimney, and winter came. We then returned to the city, happy to be back with the comforts of our city home, happy to be baking in a well-equipped kitchen where everything was easy.

Throughout the fall and winter, to learn more about baking, Naomi went on trips to Portugal, Germany, and Hungary, and Jeffrey traveled to Ireland and Nepal. We visited bakeries and stayed on farms and in peoples homes. When wed come back from a trip, sometimes on a weekend wed drive north to the farm, clearing the lane if there were large drifts of snow, and chopping wood for the stove to keep the house warm. We began feeling more at home at the farm. It reminded us of the places where wed been. The smoke from the juniper in the cookstove smelled like Nepal; the wind that lashed against the house felt like a winter gale on the coast of Ireland. We liked the feeling of connection to farms and villages around the world, and we liked, if only for a weekend at a time, having our daily rhythms patterned by simple necessities.

When spring arrived, we were outside working one day when we saw a Mennonite family traveling by horse and buggy to Sunday services. The buggy wasnt going fast, it wasnt going slow, just purposefully making its way down the road. But we stood there wondering how the world looked from the buggy. How big do the barns look, and how tall the trees? What is the size of a hundred-acre farm when youre traveling by buggy, and whats the real distance to town?

It was buggy speed, it occurred to us at that moment, that cleared the land, that built these barns, that made the farms. It was buggy speed that cultivated the soil and harvested the grain and brought family and friends together. And it was buggy speed that first gave life to the wonderful world of home baking.

Our decision to buy the farm had nothing at all to do with baking, but over time the farm has come to influence how we bake and how we think about baking. We realize that many of the recipes we are including here came originally from farmhouse kitchens not unlike our own. Theyre several generations old, from a time when most people in North America and Europe lived on farms (in 1870, 85 percent of North Americans lived on farms; now only 3 percent do). People cooked in cookstoves fired with wood, and there was no electricity.