The first few loaves he made were so flat and hard that his son compared them to a Stone Age frisbee. With a flourish worthy of the most pretentious of wine snobs, Penn describes it as smelling of ‘hazelnuts, fresh grass, the earth’. ‘If I had been a Bronze Age farmer,’ he reflected gloomily, ‘a crop failure on this scale would have meant disaster.’ But at least his flour was something special. SLOW RISE: A BREAD-MAKING ADVENTURE by Robert Penn (Particular £17.99, 240 pp) Scientists still don’t completely understand the sequence of physical and chemical reactions that happen to bread mixture when it’s in the oven, rippling and rising before finally developing that lovely crust. In ancient Egypt, state workers’ wages were paid partially in loaves the French Revolution was triggered in part by a lack of the stuff, and Napoleon, whose armies travelled with field bakeries, once declared: ‘To defeat the Russians is child’s play, provided I can get bread.’Īlthough so familiar to us, there’s something mysterious about bread. Humans have been eating it for almost 15,000 years - the earliest version was probably baked in the Middle East, although harvesting the wheat and making the bread was so labour-intensive that it would have been eaten only on special occasions rather than as an everyday food.
Is there any smell more delicious than that of freshly baked bread? No wonder supermarkets pump the aroma through their stores to entice shoppers to spend more.Īs a nation we love our bread, gobbling nearly 12 million loaves a day.
By Robert Penn (Particular £17.99, 240 pp)
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