Elizabeth David’s book English Bread and Yeast Cookery is nearly 500 pages long. The title is also wrong, but more on that later. But it is a cookbook, so why not read it cover to cover? After all, its main function is to serve as a reference? The answer is simple: the cookbook was written by Elizabeth David, whose exquisite writing style and erudition are impressive and whose advice is probably beyond reproach. This is because no one but Elizabeth David would be able to actually try these recipes. Even she admits that when a recipe has not yet been tried, she informs the reader in the text and admits that it is a guess.
The text is filled with passages from historical cookbooks that the author simply copied from earlier books, even though the advice is sometimes patently absurd. These include dismissals of past pearls, for which advice such as “stir the vessel aggressively” rather than “start” was given. In addition, some of the old recipes appear to have been made for the military and were very thorough, some beginning with instructions such as “take a bushel of flour.”
This text, written in the 1970s, is of course familiar from supermarkets, but not from the amount of fast food that surrounds us today. It allows the modern reader to reflect on how much the average diet has changed in the last 50 years. Elizabeth David, for example, doesn’t like restaurant pizza and considers it the same as a hard fiberboard. We don’t know what she would think of muffins, McBoons, and the like, but we can speculate.
But a pizza recipe in a British bread book? Well, that’s partly a matter of the book’s title. Not only does she regularly visit Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, but she also travels to France, Austria, Italy, or even Russia and the United States, to use empty terms like “fusion” and “world cuisine” in the 1970s! I think that the willingness to recognize international influences and exchanges was greater then than now. If it’s not world cuisine, where else does it come from? As far as “fusion” is concerned, this critic also believes that much of it is a confusing ploy.
The author takes the time to explain the intricacies of flour, grains, milling, sanding, and sifting. There is also a very thorough historical section that discusses the techniques, skills, and technical aspects of baking. In doing so, Elizabeth David addresses many myths that still persist today. She points out that many commercially available dark bread is colored with molasses, not wholemeal flour, and that in many recipes that call for wholemeal flour, the germ is often extracted and pre-baked before being turned back into the flour. She also points out that in her day, commercial bread was aerated, basted, and chalked to increase volume and mass and increase profits. Yeast bread, patties, bries, muffins, pickles, bread crumbs, tortillas, baked bread, sourdough, soda bread, and other interesting combinations of flour, water, and leavening agents are described in detail.
In doing so, he dispels many myths, including the oft-repeated advice to throw away half the leavening. Personally, I’ve tried such recipes in the past, but when it came to cutting them in half and discarding one half, I was always confused as to which half to discard. If the suggestion is that the starter would otherwise be too much, the instruction would be to “do less.” Isn’t that obvious?
However, there are still many myths surrounding bread, many of which have their origin in religion. Men can’t live on bread alone, but for women, it’s probably fine. Bread is divine, but it doesn’t come out of my oven… There are many others, some of which are presented on this page. But there is room for the myths involved in the baking process. The reason is that baking is often completely unpredictable and depends on the amount, temperature, and method, so it is impossible to predict the results, even if the same recipe is followed to the letter. Elizabeth David points this out several times in her text.
This is why mass-produced bread has been baked on an industrial scale, to achieve the regularity and consistency that the modern consumer craves. But no two vegetables are alike, and shape has nothing to do with taste. Elizabeth David’s English Bread And Yeast Cookery offers the perfect remedy for this disease of waiting for uniformity. Mix, wait, cook and watch. If you make it again, it will probably be different. Isn’t this a recipe for an interesting life? Certainly an interesting book, but one should not try to devour it all at once.
About Author
Sara is a qualified food expert at Main food line, Canada. She had graduated from the University of Cambridge. Sara loves to write about healthy nutrients which help to prevent the human body from various diseases. So people enjoy a healthy lifestyle. She is well experienced in Affordable Bread and has an impressive portfolio of serving international clients.
