I wonder if I should try to create a sort of commonplace book here on SW. I sometimes stumble upon pictures or pieces of writing that strike me as meaningful or at least that strike a chord. But if I don't record them somewhere they will get lost. In fact even if I do they usually get lost, perhaps that is as it should be.
Anyway, regardless of whether I create such a thing here is a snippet of what I stumbled upon just now:
Alan Bennett’s diary of his 90th year
1 March
It is absurd to say that I feel I am not yet grown up. I am not laying claim to perpetual youth (though 89 is something of a surprise), and youth I was never much aware of when I had it. What I mean is, there has never come a time when I could be thought to have acquired dignity, common sense, still less worldly wisdom, qualities that supposedly come with age and get lost with age, too. One doesn’t look for common sense from someone over 90.
It resonates with me, He goes on to say:
I was most conscious of this feeling when I was briefly appointed a trustee of the National Gallery. (When I asked why, I was told it was because I was the man in the street.) My fellow trustees were all distinguished in their fields – commerce, art, public service. I liked pictures but looking round the table I could see I was there under false pretences. I’ve never had to chair a meeting or sit round and persuade otherwise-minded people to my point of view. I was in my 50s but I was not a grownup. Thirty years and more have passed but that conviction has never left me. I have a partner, a house and some standing in the community but none of it counts. When I enter a room full of people (these days a rarity) I am 16. Except in the even more rare occasion of entering a room of 16-year-olds, when I am 90. I have the credentials but I don’t seem to have the baggage. Once upon a time, I think I imagined age itself as an eminence, years were a plinth, it had prospects even if the end was clouded in mist.
I also made a loaf of bread. This was also inspired by something seen on the web, probably YouTube. It was about a Middle Ages farming practice called maslin. Or was it just the mixture of grains that is called maslin or the bread made from it?
I thought I had mentioned it earlier but can't seem to find it. Anyway the point was that farmers would plant wheat, rye, and barley in the same field as means of reducing the effect of cereal pests because each pest specialises in, or at least prefers, one kind of cereal. So if one fails you still have some rain and also because the pests specialise they find it harder to spread in fields of mixed cereals.
I really don't know how true any of this really is; neither whether farmers really did it often nor whether it is actually effective. I can think of at least one complication and that is that the different grains ripen at different rates and times so harvesting might be difficult.
Anyway, one of the people commenting said they would try making bread according to this idea. They suggested proportions of different flours and the degree of hydration. So I thought I'd try it too.
Here's a rather poor photograph what's left of the loaf:
Here are the notes I made in my personal recipe book. It's very simple recipe that requires only about ten minutes of actual work. In my notes I make the assumption that whole flours would have been used at the time, is this actually true?
Maslin is a mixture of wheat, rye, and barley.
This is inspired by a YouTube video and a comment on it. The commenter said they were going to try 70% wheat, 20% rye, 10% barley, 70% hydration, 24 hour fermentation.
Lahey's recipe for no knead bread uses 2 g dried yeast in 900 g of flour, 720 g water. that is, 80% hydration.
Neither recipe specify whether the flours are whole or not. But Lahey's is clearly white flour.
Maslin was grown as a measure against crop pests in the Middle Ages so I presume that whole flours would have been used. I don't have enough whole wheat to be worth using just now (20260207 Saturday) The rye has 8% fibre and the barley has 12%.
So here is the recipe I'll try, just a single round loaf for now:
Ingredients 350 g white bread flour 100 g rye flour 50 g barley flour 10 g salt 350 g water (70% hydration) Very roughly 1g dried yeast, actually 1/4 teaspoon, level.
Method In a large bowl mix the flours and salt. Mix the yeast with the water. Pour the water into the flour and mix until there is no sign of dry flour.
Cover and ferment for at least 12 hours.
Carefully remove from the bowl and fold over a few times. Sprinkle some flour in the bowl and place back in the bowl and prove for a couple of hours.
Half an hour before the dough finishes proving place a cast iron pot with a lid in the oven and heat the oven to 230 C.
Take the pot out of the oven and tip the dough into it. Cut a shallow slit in the top with a sharp knife or razor blade or use kitchen scissors to cut several smaller slits to allow steam to escape. Replace the lid and put the pot in the centre of the oven. Bake at 230 C for 30 minutes with top and bottom heat. Remove the lid and continue baking for a further 15 minutes.
The internal temperature should reach 90 C.
Cool on a rack fro a couple of hours before slicing.
@ninalanyon When Poland was admitted to the EU in 2004, the bakery near my student lodgings in Cardiff invented a "golden korn" loaf to celebrate an influx of East European students. It was supposed to emulate a traditional Polish recipe, but largely replaced rye with wheat and tasted much better than Polish bread (not a difficult accomplishment). The multi-grain theme also appealed to the health conscious crowd ay the time . . the same people who probably refuse to touch bread these days.
@SunshineGirl I agree that Polish bread is not all that wonderful but they do make nice pastries there, at least in Krakow where I spent most of the time on numerous business trips.
I made a Cornish Hevva cake yesterday. I doubled the recipe that I found on YouTube so that I'll have some left over for afternoon tea during the week. It's such a long time since I'd had any that I'd forgotten how heavy it is.
@SunshineGirl It is :-) the scoring supposedly represents a fising net but I suspect it has a more prosaic purpose and that is to make it easier to break off a piece of a reasonable size!
Although I imagine a fisherman fresh from hauling a net full of pilchards from the sea would probably have a sharper appetite than I have.
