bread

The length of the gardening day is rapidly reducing.  I got up at quarter to eight, and it was only just getting light then.  There was no rush to leap out of bed any earlier, since I could hear from the drumming on the roof that it was raining.  I didn't know until I got up what time it was, since the fusebox tripped in the night and knocked out my bedside clock, but my body seems predisposed to rise with the dawn.  Getting out into the garden was further delayed by my plan to make soda bread for us to eat with our lunch.  I've been meaning to make soda bread for months, if not years, but yesterday took a slightly decisive step and bought a pot of buttermilk.  I still wasn't immediately committed, since the buttermilk would keep for ten days, but thought I might as well get on with the bread, especially since last night I made some soup for today's lunch.  Plus it was raining.

We used to have a mother's help when I was a child who made extremely good soda bread.  She made good shortbread as well.  As a child she seemed to me very old, although looking back I have no idea how old she was.  She may only have been around the age I am now.  The awfulness of the life of a paid companion has been fertile territory for novelists, from Anne Bronte to Daphne du Maurier, and I can't think that our untrained mother's help had a very nice life, living in our draughty Victoria pile a mile's walk from any amenities (she couldn't drive), with no economic security and two lippy children for company.  My parents disliked her, because she was noisy and not very bright, let alone academic.  It can't be pleasant, living on sufferance in somebody else's house.

Anyway, she made good soda bread.  I have tried it once or twice in the intervening decades, but not for a long time.  Hot to trot after breakfast, I discovered that while I'd remembered to buy buttermilk, the bicarbonate of soda had theoretically expired in April 2010.  It had gone rather solid in its pot, and as I jabbed at it with a teaspoon I wondered whether it still had any fizz in it.  Then I needed a recipe.  The Good Housekeepers, normally a reliable source of information on old-fashioned staples, didn't have a soda bread recipe, or at least I couldn't find it in the index under either S or B.  Elizabeth David's bread book wanted me to use wholemeal flour and talked about raising the loaves under inverted cake tins, which sounded too complicated.  I thought I remembered seeing soda bread in Tom Norrington-Davies' book Just like mother used to make, and since everything I've tried out of that so far has worked, and he doesn't over-complicate things, I thought I'd go with the erstwhile gastro pub supremo.

Almost immediately I started deviating from the recipe, halving the amount of salt, since I couldn't believe that 500 grammes of flour needed two teaspoons of the stuff.  Neither the Systems Administrator nor I have a very salty tooth (the soup didn't contain any).  When we have guests we have to remember to put some on the table for those that like more of it than we do.  I know that in yeast cookery you have to be careful about reducing the salt too far, since it affects the structure of the dough, but with bicarb raised bread I thought I could do what I liked.

Once the ingredients are all mixed up, Tom Norrington-Davies talked about kneading the loaf for up to ten minutes.  I couldn't believe that.  After all, soda bread is a giant scone, and the ideal with those is to handle them as little as possible.  Thorough kneading is helpful in making bread with yeast, when you are trying to develop the gluten, but I didn't think it applied to cakes.  I decided to ignore the instructions in the book, and put the loaf in the oven as soon as it felt smooth.  I did cut a cross in the top as instructed.  Tom Norrington-Davies said that this would make my bread 'traditional looking', but from past reading of Elizabeth David  and other bread books I thought it had a structural point, to help the loaf open out.  I dropped it to a lower point in the oven than his suggested temperature as well after fifteen minutes, since the top was going rather dark, but mapping given cooking temperatures in non-Aga cookbooks on to the best position within an Aga is a black art and not a science.

The bread was fine, as was the soup.  Leek and potato.  I cooked it last night while I was doing the supper, and liquidised it before lunch when it was cold.  Having a completely home made lunch gave me quite a glow of virtue, and I really will try yeast raised bread sometime soon.  When it is raining all morning.

In the afternoon it drizzled in patches, so that I was never quite sure whether it was going to come on to rain hard and I was going to have to run inside.  I am still clearing suitable places to use the home made compost, so that I can start refilling the bins.  The clay soil at the lower end of the sloping bed in the back garden would surely like a dressing of nice crumbly decaying organic material.  Weeding it after all the rain is a pain, since it goes to a slick when you touch it, each weed comes up with a great gobbet of clay stuck to its roots, and every footprint sinks in and makes the bad structure even worse.