British comfort fare, without all the fuss

Cookbook is about comfort dishes minus the usual elegance or frills

Peering into bakery windows, taking stock of the biscuits, breads, buns, cakes and tarts inside, Regula Ysewijn has a long history of studying British baked goods.

Enthralled by a skipping-rope rhyme as a child — “White swans, black swans. Who's coming to England with us?” — the Belgian culinary historian, food writer and photographer eventually convinced her parents to make the British Isles their recurring holiday destination.

“The funny thing is that in Flemish, `England' sounds the same as `angel land.' So the song was about heaven: `angel land.' And that I only discovered years later.

“I was convinced it was about this island being guarded by black and white swans,” says Ysewijn. “I thought this must be a fascinating country.

“Everyone wanted to go to Disneyland (Paris), which was new when I was a child. And I was like, ` Why go to Disneyland if there is this real country where there are princes and princesses and castles and mythology? Let's go there!'”

Unbeknownst to her at the time — tracing the footsteps of King Arthur on summer holiday, studying British history just for fun and learning English by reading Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon and Jane Austen with a dictionary by her side — these trips laid the foundation for her latest cookbook, The British Baking Book (Weldon Owen, 2020).

On the whole, Ysewijn's family wasn't much for sweets. So as they travelled throughout the country, popping into a bakery wasn't an option.

“I was never allowed to go in because my parents thought it was a bit too frivolous to go into a bakery and buy a pastry just because you felt like it,” she recalls. “That was considered a folly.”

As a result, her exploration of British bakes was restricted to a thorough case study of plain bread rolls. Each new village, town or county presented an opportunity to experience regionality in bun form.

To maximize her education in British bakes, Ysewijn always ordered the soup at lunchtime so she could compare the subtle differences in the rolls served on the side.

Brits have a multitude of regional names for the soft white roll alone, she points out. There's the bap, barm cake, breadcake, buttery Vienna, cob, Coventry batch, morning roll, muffin, oven bottom, scuffler, soft roll and tea cake — all of which can refer to a plain white roll, depending on where you are in the country.

Surely, Ysewijn emphasizes, this fact is enough to counter the common slight that England lacks a cuisine.

“You can't not have a food culture if you have so many names for a bread,” she says, laughing. “It intrigued me so much to see that there were so many regional differences in the bread rolls.

“And that they never looked like the bread rolls we had at home or the ones that I knew from my travels in Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Austria. The buns looked completely different.”

Now a specialist in British food culture and history, Ysewijn found herself peeking into bakery windows once again while writing The British Baking Book.

In addition to the cookbooks, diaries and newspaper and magazine archives she drew on during her research, she scoured postcards from the early 20th century.

Some bore photographs of regional foods such as Devonshire junket and Cornish pasties and others in bakery windows. Taking her looking glass to the latter, she once again set out to identify the bakes on the other side.

“It's a needle in a haystack basically, but if you're passionate enough about it, you just get stuck in and do it and try to find clues any way and anywhere you can,” she says.

“For me, that's my life. I'm constantly looking for postcards that give a clue into something or a letter or a manuscript. Just to discover a link that might change the whole idea that we have about one type of bake and when it first appeared. That's so fascinating.”