Heaven? A warm house and the smell of fresh baking
Cookery writer and former MasterChef winner Sue Lawrence on her passion for the brilliant Scottish recipes she’s sharing with Mail readers all next week
‘We are most definitely a nation of bakers’ ‘I do love a good shortbread... and all scones’
IDON’T see what’s wrong with butter,’ declares Sue Lawrence. ‘Proper Scottish butter, preferably with good old eggs. What more could you want?’ You’d have to go far to find a greater advocate for Scottish baking – and its traditional ingredients – than Miss Lawrence.
When The Great British Bake Off was no more than a glint in Paul Hollywood’s eye, this Scottish cook was already in the kitchen cooking up cakes and tarts, bridies, buns and bannocks.
Now she is sharing her 40-plus years of expertise with Scottish Daily Mail readers. On Monday, we kick off a five-part series of Miss Lawrence’s most mouth-watering baking recipes. You’ll find lots of Scottish stalwarts – oatcakes, shortbread, black bun, scones and sultana cake – as well as twists on traditional recipes such as Dundee cupcakes and Cullen Skink bridies.
Then there are the treats: mascarpone, honey and raspberry tart, warm chocolate, shortbread and pistachio mousse cake, chocolate, coconut and cherry traybake… this is the sort of baking that will have you reaching for the mixing bowl immediately.
‘There’s something so comforting about baking,’ says Miss Lawrence. ‘Particularly when it’s cold outside, what you want is something sweet that smells delicious. If you come in to a warm house smelling of fragrant baking you’re just in heaven.’ The former MasterChef winner has been in love with baking since she could reach the kitchen counter.
‘I remember when I was very little clambering up on to a stool to lick the bowl,’ she says. ‘I remember Mum making Scotch pancakes on the girdle, the smell of those and the sight of them being flipped over and the smell of the raspberry jam.’
Miss Lawrence, 61, was raised in Dundee, and her childhood memories are imbued with the comforting flavours of home-baked treats. She says: ‘The cake tins were always full – it’s just what everybody had when I was growing up. If you went round to somebody’s house for a cup of tea there was always a cake tin open.
‘There was always shortbread, maybe sultana cake, whatever the speciality of the house was.
‘Nothing fancy, usually simple, but always homemade and always delicious.’
She has always been a champion of the sort of Scottish baking most of us associate with our grannies.
‘We are definitely a nation of bakers,’ she says. ‘Scottish baking certainly isn’t fancy or elegant, as it is in France. We aren’t into sauces and refined cooking, but what we are good at is simple, delicious baking.’
She is passionate about local and regional Scots dishes and worries we don’t do enough to preserve them.
‘We’ve got so many wonderful regional culinary traditions but we’ve always just been a bit ashamed of them. ‘Look at the Aberdeen buttery, for example. In Edinburgh you’d struggle to find one. Whereas, a French croissant, everyone in the world knows what they are. There’s little difference and they are both equally delicious.’
It was back in 1991 that Miss Lawrence, a mother of three living in Edinburgh, won the BBC’s MasterChef. She was as surprised as anyone.
‘My kids were nine, six and four and, as they were at school, I had a tiny bit more time on my hands. I was doing more cooking and really loved it and just randomly applied, not thinking I’d get anywhere. And then it all happened.’
MasterChef back then was a rather different programme from the complex, multi-challenge show it is today. Loyd Grossman presented and cogitated for the camera while three amateur cooks whipped up a three-course meal in only two hours.
Miss Lawrence gained notoriety for her pasta-drying machine – a clothes horse-style contraption made by her husband Patrick – and her serene attitude on camera.
‘I remember there were only a couple of days between the semi and the final so the producers suggested I stay down in London,’ she says.
‘I had to get most of my ingredients down there, which was dramatically different to the good old Scots ingredients I’d been using. I insisted on getting my lamb sent down anyway.’
Her winning menu involved buckwheat pancakes with smoked salmon, noisettes of lamb with rosti of pasta, and a chocolate marquise.
‘I do remember it being very exciting and challenging,’ she says. ‘I was used to small children bothering me all the time and doing two things at once – chatting to the camera and carrying on with whatever I was doing. I think that might have helped.’
She doesn’t fancy her chances if she were to enter MasterChef today, saying: ‘There’s so much pressure. The judges can be incredibly mean and they always end up at some stage in a professional kitchen. It was meant to be a competition for amateur chefs.
‘They are trying to emulate the professional kitchens which I don’t think is a good idea at all.
‘Who’s got two pints of veal jus or a pint of sugar syrup in their fridge? Certainly not normal cooks. And I’m just a cook, not a chef.’
She might be ‘just a cook’, but MasterChef opened myriad doors for Miss Lawrence. In addition to food columns, she has a total of 16 cook books under her belt including her two most recent – Scottish Baking and the The Scottish Berries Bible.
Not bad for a woman who, by her own admission, baked ‘flat and absolutely shocking’ scones as a teenager.
Hold her feet to the girdle pan and she will confess to some particular baking favourites.
‘I do love sultana cake and I do love a good shortbread,’ she says.
‘I love all scones, particularly treacle, because no one
makes them nowadays, and a cheese scone.’
She is no fan of the clean eating movement which has swept the nation in recent years, and despairs of those who shun local ingredients in favour of expensive substitutes that have to be imported from far afield.
‘We’ve had our recipes for hundreds of years using butter and eggs, why would we want to substitute something like dates, which come from North Africa, or coconut oil, that comes from the Far East?’ she asks. ‘It makes no sense to me.’
One of the joys of baking, Lawrence feels, is that its results are ‘100 per cent about sharing’.
‘You’re not going to eat an entire cake by yourself, and you’re not going to eat it four times a day’ she says. ‘But as something delicious either after lunch or as a mid-afternoon treat, it’s just a joy.
More recently, Miss Lawrence has turned her hand to writing novels and has just finished the edits on her third book.
‘After I’d done 16 cook books I started looking around and thinking about doing something else, so I started to write and thought, “I absolutely love this”. It’s not easy, though. I did lots of creative writing courses. It’s a different ball game from anything else I’ve done.’
Her second novel, The Night He Left, is about the Tay Bridge Disaster and has won rave reviews.
It draws in part on her culinary expertise, as does her first book – Fields of Blue Flax – in which baking is ‘actually quite instrumental in the entire plot’.
Miss Lawrence says: ‘I suppose it’s just ingrained in me. I almost can’t help it. I put food and baking in without realising because it’s just so much a part of me.’
Despite the books, the fame and the large family (she has just become a grandmother), cooking has never been a chore for Miss Lawrence, and she still does it every day.
‘I love to be able to go out shopping and not have an idea in my mind but just go in and see what is delicious, or choose something I love. It’s less restrictive than when I’m in the middle of writing a cook book when I have to do certain dishes. It’s quite liberating to choose whatever I fancy that day.’
And she is ‘always baking’, she admits with a laugh. ‘I just love it. Even if there’s nothing happening that day I’ll bake lots and freeze it. My freezer is always bulging.’
She is delighted that baking has become fashionable, thanks in part to The Great British Bake Off and its winners, some of whom have gone on to become successful cook book writers in their own right.
For Scottish Daily Mail readers keen to try out her vast range of recipes over the coming days, she has some typically no-nonsense advice.
‘You have to be really, really diligent,’ she says.
‘Read the recipe right through to the end. It might say “cream the softened butter”, so you need to ensure that butter is softened.
‘You really do have to ensure everything is ready and precise. I know there’s the Jamie Oliver style of cooking – sling in a handful of this and a drizzle of that – you can’t do that with baking.
‘But I promise you, it will be worth it.’