Bread

Bread is basic in the staff-of-life sense, but making it is hardly a fundamental activity for most of us. I don’t get the urge that often, but every time I have, and have consulted a suitable book, I have been directed to make wholemeal bread. You may as well bake hessian. Why should it be thought that only those who want wholemeal bread are the sort to bake their own? Good wholemeal bread is very hard to make, and I suspect needs heavy machinery or enormous practice and muscularity.

Anyway, I give you this recipe for old-fashioned white bread, really good white bread, the sort you eat with unsalted butter and jam – one loaf in a sitting, no trouble. The recipe comes from Foster’s Bakery in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, and found its way to me at a breadmaking workshop given at the Flour Advisory Board in London by John Foster. He was an exceptional teacher, and completely turned me, a lifelong sceptic of the breadmaking tendency, into a would-be baker.