We’re all proving we can rise to it in this hour of knead!

As the emergency continues to howl around us here, we seem to have lapsed unconsciously into different roles, like a deftly organised battle group. I venture forth periodically for essentials, masked and gloved and feeling like sanders of the River. My father gardens in bouts of vigorous energy – newly chitted potatoes already sprout on the windowsill – and, when not cooking or cleaning, my mother has, at this hour of scarcities, made protracted and ruthless search of the house.

The moment when she found epic quantities of forgotten kitchen roll under the stairs – probably there since the Major administration – was one triumph. And Monday begot another, when she found a small and unopened can of dried yeast. she was not greatly discouraged by an expiry date of August 2017.

Yeast is the latest thing to be unobtainable in the shops, as flour makes a sputtering comeback; our mills, I gather, have all but doubled production.

Half the nation, it seems, has donned a pinny and made a grab for sieves, spoons and bowls. In all corners of the land arise scones and sponges. Households everywhere, it seems, master gâteaux and gugelhupf and lemon drizzle cake.

But, too, folk everywhere are having a bash at making their own bread, even if just by machine and tipping something into it called ‘bread mix’, which I think is for wimps, though our local supermarkets have run out of it too.

The grand thing about making bread is the high improbability of failure. Like sylvia Plath’s mushrooms, there is something implacable about yeast.

It is one of those strange living things, like yogurt starter or vinegar mother, that makes any kitchen feel like a bioweapons lab – and is held for as long as anyone can remember in deep ambivalence.

In the Bible, ‘leavening’ – yeast – is used as a metaphor for sin. Yet in Chaucer’s England, as the splendid Elizabeth David wrote in 1977, ‘one of the names for yeast was Goddisgoode, “because it cometh of the grete grace of God”. These words simply imply a blessing. To me that is just what it is.

‘It is also mysterious, magical. No matter how familiar its action may become nor how successful the attempts to explain it in terms of chemistry and to manufacture it by the ton, yeast still to a certain extent retains its mystery.’

WHILE most respectable if, to our taste, heavy bread can be made in other lands with rye or spelt or millet, yeast comes into full glory when baked with wheat flour. This is because it is high in gluten and, when milled and mixed with yeast and warm water, of maximal elasticity, helped along by thorough kneading further to break down resistance as the gases bring your dough to life.

While you can bake a respectable enough loaf with ordinary plain flour, you really want clearly labelled ‘strong’ flour for making bread; it is the highest in gluten and, as the name hints, comes from wheat grown in robust environments.

Our climate here is too benevolent to grow the necessary wheat, which is largely imported from Canada. If you live in Glasgow, you may well remember the magnificent Meadowside Granary in Partick, the largest brick construction in Europe before its demolition in 2002, and the biggest grain store in the UK.

What sort of yeast you use makes no difference to the final loaf. Fresh yeast, which looks unnervingly like putty, is now extremely difficult to buy. This yeast you add to warm water.

Dried, granular yeast you mix with about a third of the water, add a little sugar and leave for about ten minutes till there is a respectable froth. Powdered easy-blend yeast you mix with the flour.

Yeast, really, is on a forlorn suicide mission: you awaken it only, at the last, to kill it with extreme heat in the oven.

It first comes to life as you knead for a conscientious 15 minutes, breaking down the proteins, increasing the elasticity of your dough. Then, for at least an hour, you rest the dough somewhere warm in a big bowl under a damp tea towel. This is the ‘first rising’ and it will double in volume.

A particularly enjoyable moment is when you ‘knock back’, returning to your dough and giving it a single, firm punch before turning it out and kneading it yet again for a couple of minutes.

Then you shape your loaves or rolls and leave them to rise for a second time – the ‘proving’ – before consigning them to the oven. Indeed, some fine breads have to rise three times before baking.

I have always rather venerated bread, perhaps because within living Highland memory ‘loaf bread’ was a luxury, the sort of treat great-grandparents would bring home from a rare excursion to stornoway.

That was to some extent because wheat cannot be grown in the north of scotland or the Hebrides. It is far too windy and, accordingly, flatbreads made with oatmeal or barleymeal were our staple. But it was really because hardly anyone had an oven.

IN the likes of Fife, older readers may recall snell New Year days when your mother would assemble her steak pie and (like all her neighbours) take it to the local bakery to be communally cooked.

The complexities of making bread in large quantities and all at once mean that in every civilisation professional bakers have arisen and removed its manufacture from the home, toiling from the small hours so you may enjoy the freshest rolls at breakfast.

No one, of course, takes bread more seriously than the French. The traditional boulangerie makes and sells nothing else, and (by force of law) your baguette can be made with nothing but strong flour, salt, a starter dough and hot water. Unless you are lucky enough, here, to live near a good artisan bakery, the typical British loaf is full of additives and ‘improvers’.

A robust etiquette surrounds French bread. It is quite in order to squeeze the proffered baguette and, if insufficiently crackly, hand it back to the baker and demand another.

In the days of the guillotine, execution was a family business; les bourreaux were all but social untouchables – the daughter of one operator never forgot how she dreaded having to go out to buy bread because she was invariably handed the loaf upside down as a gesture of contempt.

While the French stopped decapitating felons in 1977, bakers are still under the yoke of a law passed in 1798 and in the wake of the Revolution – to ensure that at all times many bakeries are open and no one has to go very far in search of a loaf. Bakers are only permitted to holiday in July or August and, in a typical commune, not all at the same time.

Meanwhile, my parents press me to make Welsh currant bread. That little tin sits on the worktop, like a bomb about to go off.