The Art of Baking Blind (16 page)

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‘I can't believe you're not going to be there to support him.' Emma Briggs, ever opinionated and forceful, is summoning as much indignation as she can muster when Jenny phones her to tell her she won't be going to Paris to cheer on her father.

‘It's not like it's a local 10K run, Mum. This is the Paris marathon. A big event. And we were all going to meet there, weren't we?' Her voice, on a mobile phone line from Montpellier, is as insistent as if they were standing in the same room.

Jenny feels exhausted. With the self-righteousness that comes with being twenty-two, her middle daughter is managing to convey extreme disappointment in her mother while being oblivious to her petulance. Her voice goes on and on; hectoring, questioning, challenging in her self-appointed role as Nigel's advocate. Jenny lets the barrage wash over her, keeping half an ear open for when her daughter mentions Mrs Eaden. It is a long time coming.

‘And what is this baking competition, anyway?'

Jenny has to remind herself that her daughter is living a far more interesting life than hers in a different country. While the competition is of huge interest to bakers who shop at Eaden's, it has not reached the radar of the average student: certainly not a third-year enjoying an academically light year in the south of France. Of course, Jenny has mentioned it but Emma persists in feigning ignorance as if to suggest she has better things to do with her time than look at YouTube clips of middle-aged women making shortbread biscuits. As indeed she has. Jenny refuses to be riled.

She takes a deep breath. ‘You know what it is, darling. It's the Search for the New Mrs Eaden – you know, the competition that I told you was being judged by that rather attractive baker, Dan Keller. It's going on for three months and, at each stage, the winner and runner up are filmed demonstrating their baking on YouTube. We appear on the Eaden's website and we'll be in their magazine, too.

‘The winner's just chosen by the judges though. If I win, I'll get a big enough cheque to help write off uni debts for the three of you – and I'll get the chance to write about, and advise on, baking.'

‘So, it's quite a big deal then?' Her daughter still sounds bolshie.

‘Yes. Look, I know I'm letting Dad down, and that he's disappointed, but I can't give this up to watch him from the sidelines. I want to be doing something for me.'

There is a pause, so lengthy that Jenny wonders if Emma has lost her mobile signal.

‘Emma? Em, are you there? Say something.'

She hears her middle daughter give a sigh plump with disappointment, and she knows she's in for an emotional ride.

‘I just think it's a shame. Put like that, of course I understand. But Daddy' – Emma resorts to the name she used as a child to convey her loyalty – ‘has put so much into this and it's just a bit sad you won't be there to support him.

‘It's no one's fault', she continues, adding a dose of martyred magnanimity. ‘But I can see why he's so disappointed about it – especially as we were all going to meet up, and make it a family celebration.'

The idea of a cancelled family reunion – already mythologised – obviously rankles. Jenny is just wondering how to atone for this when Emma mines a different emotional vein.

‘You've put me in a bit of a quandary now. I don't know who I should support.'

Her mother, familiar with her daughter's skill at manipulation, recognises her cue. ‘Oh my darling, it's not a competition but you must support Daddy if that's what you feel you'd like to do.'

‘You don't mind, do you?' Emma can afford to be conciliatory now that her Paris weekend is no longer in jeopardy. ‘You won't feel that I'm not supporting you, or that I'm taking your place?'

‘Of course not, darling.' She too can be magnanimous now that the aggression has been defused. ‘In fact you'd be doing me a favour, and making me feel much less guilty. You go and have fun.'

16

To make two basic white loaves, take strong white flour; yeast; warm water and a smidgeon of butter, sugar and salt. Time, a little skill, and the wonder of nature are then all that are required.

Sunday morning, late-March, and Mike Wilkinson is as close to happiness – or what constitutes happiness, post-Rachel – as he is likely to be.

Pippa and Sam are sprawled on the floor next door, watching a slapstick TV game show, and chortling with the infectious laughter unique to very young children. Not for the first time, he wishes he could remember how to laugh like that and wonders at what age they will lose their capacity for sheer glee.

He pokes his head round the door. Heads close together, all bickering is forgotten as they delight in the misfortune of the competitors, slipping down slides, splashing into water, wading through mud.

‘What's so funny?' Like the permanent outsider, he is keen to be in on the joke.

Sam, for whom the forbidden words bum and poo can still provoke manic giggling, can barely contain himself. ‘The man … the man … got hit by a…' His red face creases with the effort of getting a sentence out, and convulses as a fresh wave of giggles rises up from his belly.

‘Idiot,' his sister joshes him. At eight, Pippa likes to think she is above such unrestrained hilarity. A second later, her behaviour undermines her.

‘Look … Daddy, did you see that one?' She gives a squeal, her exquisite face flushed with excitement as she turns towards him. ‘He fell all the way down!!!!'

Mike reckons he has forty minutes of peace, tops, and, for once, feels justified in sticking them in front of the telly, their remote parent. He has just taken them on a four-mile bike ride and their mud-splattered legs will be aching – though he knows that, after lunch, he will have to run them round the rec.

Forty minutes gives him time to whack his casserole in the oven, put on the mashed potatoes and crack on with his bread-making. The bread stage is next but Mike, a realist who knows he is not going to win the competition, is not intent on practising. He is going to make bread for the sheer joy of doing it.

Late last year, he had been baking one Sunday lunchtime while indulging in one of his unashamed middle-class fetishes: listening to Radio 4's
The Food Programme.
As he'd begun his gentle kneading, folding the dough towards him then pressing down with the heel of his hand; turning the dough around and repeating the process, the programme – in one of those rare moments of coincidence – had described what he was doing. More to the point, it had talked about making bread as therapy. Veterans of Afghanistan who had set up a bakery were interviewed, as were victims of torture who met for a bread-making session every week. The rhythmic kneading of dough was a means of soothing and calming when intrusive thoughts and memories threatened to overwhelm them, explained the charity organiser. And the smell, taste and texture of bread transported them back to happier times – baking bread with their mothers, perhaps – before their trauma.

Listening to the programme, Mike found he had tears running down his cheeks, not just for the torture victims – refugees from Iran, for the most part – but for himself as he tried to achieve some sort of equanimity after Rachel's death. He hadn't seen his bread-making as therapeutic, but he suddenly realised he could date its start from the week after her funeral, when grief, initially staved off by adrenalin, engulfed him. Pounding the dough – rather than lightly folding and gently punching it as the books advised – was cathartic; a means of distracting himself when he had felt overwhelmed with anger, just as more active men might go for a run or pound a punch bag in a gym.

Now, making bread is a regular weekly fixture and has become not just therapeutic but creative. Where he once used it as an acceptable means of releasing his anger, he now views it as something more positive: a means of creating something unique, of providing for his children in the most basic way. He also loves the sense of continuity it gives him: even the Anglo-Saxons made bread, he is fond of telling his pupils, and, as hunters rather than farmers, had been so terrified of wheat growing and dough swelling that they cast spells at every stage of their bread-making. Bread is intrinsic to British culture and language, he tells them. Think of the phrases taken from milling: grist to the mill; nose to the grindstone; and the colloquialisms: make some dough; earn a crust; upper crust. Even Jesus – and here he is on shakier ground, having been agnostic even before Rachel's death – recognised its centrality to human existence, describing himself as ‘the bread of life'.

His enthusiasm for bread-making and its place in British culture has led him to experiment in a way he avoids with cakes or puddings. He bakes with spelt or rye flour; sprinkles poppy and sunflower seeds; adds olives and rosemary, pancetta and caramelised onions, blue cheese and walnuts. And yet his trademark loaf remains a standard bloomer, slashed three times across the top to allow for satisfying gashes in the crust, and a basic wholemeal. He knows he will have to shine in the competition; to demonstrate that he can make naan, or bagels, or challah loaf. But, for today, in his warm kitchen, for his hungry children, it'll be his bog-standard farmhouse white.

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Claire Trelawney is also baking – in her case hot cross buns, saffron bread and tea loaf – as she works alongside her mother and daughter.

Her hands move lightly but her jaw is set as she flings the dough down on to the worktop and stretches and rotates it. Chloe's father, Jay, has been in contact and she always makes bread rather than more delicate cakes and pastries when this happens, reaching for the strong white flour, just as other women might launch into a flurry of obscenities; open the vodka; light a cigarette.

‘Easy, love.'

Claire looks up to see Angela raising an eyebrow.

‘Sorry.' She smiles and takes in grandmother and granddaughter: two generations united in the simple pleasure of mixing a handful of ingredients – flour, yeast, water, salt and sugar – and witnessing culinary magic take place.

‘Am I doing this right, Mum?' Chloe, ever keen for parental approval, is struggling with the sticky bun dough, which clings to her fingers.

‘You want a little more flour – not too much.' Claire's voice rises to a squeak as Chloe tips a mound of strong flour on to the surface.

‘You don't want tough, dried-out dough.'

‘Leave it to me, my lover.' Angela, the matriarch and the acknowledged premier baker in the family, despite what Claire might think, takes over, scooping up the flour and putting it in the packet, pulling the dough from Chloe's fingers and kneading it on the worktop for her.

‘Let her do it for herself, Mum. She needs to learn.' Claire is irritated by her mother's involvement.

Angela is implacable. ‘No point letting her struggle. I was just helping.'

‘It's great now, Nanny. Look, it's gone more stretchy.' Chloe looks from one to another as she points at the smoother dough her grandmother is creating. Her enthusiasm dampens the spark of tension.

‘That's fantastic, lovely. Really well done.'

‘Now just work it for about ten minutes like that: we want it silky smooth and elastic,' advises Angela, handing over to her granddaughter. ‘These are going to be really bouncy hot cross buns.'

The three work on in companionable silence, Claire creating the saffron dough by pouring lukewarm milk, liquid gold, on to dried fruit, sugar, yeast and buttery crumbs. The soft, rich dough reminds her of the play-doh she made for Chloe when tiny: sensual; tactual; elastic. The smell is better though: the scent of dried fruit and earthy warm yeast gentler than the saltiness of the child's dough; and the texture is softer: not scratchy but smooth.

‘Smells good, don't he?' Angela looks on approvingly, her own mixture now rounded to a smooth sphere and placed in a bowl, a damp tea towel stretched over it.

‘You're getting to be a fine baker.' She says this with a verbal wink; a tacit admission that her daughter has every right not to take her advice now that she is doing well in the competition.

Claire smiles at the compliment, rarely bestowed and all the more precious for it. ‘Thank you! Yes, I'm getting better. Not there yet, though. Not by a long shot.'

‘Well no, but you can get there – can't she, Chloe?'

Chloe's delicate face breaks into a grin, nose wrinkling between her freckles, wide eyes sparkling with pride and excitement.

‘Course she can. She's the best baker and the best mum in the world.'

‘Oh well. I'm getting better. They liked my gingerbread house.' Claire cannot help smiling, but her kneading becomes heavier as she recalls the result of it being good enough for her to appear on YouTube: Jay bombarding her with emails and texts.

‘Not worrying about it, are you?' Angela, ever attuned to her youngest child's anxiety, notes the crease deepening between her eyes.

‘Well, a bit. Well, a lot really. I know I won't win, I'm not stupid, but I want to do all of us proud.'

She smiles, trying to mask her continual sense of responsibility for Chloe's sake but failing as her voice trembles. She is back to being seventeen and telling her mother she is pregnant. ‘I don't want to let you down.'

Angela is all arms, all bosom, as she gathers her daughter, and a concerned Chloe, into her apron. She smells of Pears soap and baking. ‘Oh, my lover, you'd never do that.'

They stand there for a couple of seconds before Claire extricates herself, embarrassed by her mum's soppiness and wary of scaring Chloe.

‘That's wonderful, my lovely.' She gestures at her daughter's dough, now placed in a bowl with a plastic bag over it. ‘Will you just go and put that by the radiator? Then wash your hands and you can put a CD on?'

Her daughter nods and carries her dough; solemn with responsibility. Then she flies to the bathroom, freed from the responsibility of worrying about her mother, fired by the thought of a dance.