What the experts say
How baking banished the blues
The Orange Bakery, in Oxfordshire (see recipe below), is renowned for the quality of its baked goods, says Tim Lewis in The Observer. But the story behind it “might be even more remarkable”. In 2018, local teacher Al Tait noticed “something was up” with his 14-year-old daughter, Kitty, who was becoming withdrawn. “Soon, she couldn’t get out of bed, and stopped going to school.” He and his wife Katie tried everything – therapy, gardening, poetry. Then one afternoon, Al made a loaf of bread using the “no-knead method” pioneered by New York baker Jim Lahey. “It was like alchemy,” Kitty recalls. She began baking avidly, and was soon even sleeping in the kitchen – to be “around her dough”. Soon, her hobby had become a business. Funded initially via Kickstarter, Kitty and Al launched the Orange Bakery in 2019. In their new book, Breadsong, the pair have collected many of their recipes, and describe how their shared love of baking helped Kitty recover. “Fundamentally, when all my fragments broke, when I was just all over the place, Dad was there and bread was there,” Kitty says. “And that’s just who I am.”
Making the most of asparagus
During the all-too-short English asparagus season – from April until June – I cook the stuff “every third day”, says Diana Henry in The Daily Telegraph. It’s a vegetable that rewards being treated simply – it’s hard to beat steamed asparagus with melted butter – but for those inclined to experiment, there are “hundreds” of ways to prepare it. You could go for the Veneto approach, which is to serve white asparagus (though green is fine too) with a sauce made of four hard-boiled eggs whizzed in a food processor with eight anchovy fillets,
1 tbsp of capers and 1½ tbsp of white wine vinegar. Then slowly add 200ml of extra-virgin olive oil. Crab mayonnaise is another fine accompaniment for steamed asparagus: mix white crab meat with mayo, chopped chervil and chives, and put a small spoonful of salmon roe on top. Roasting asparagus with olive oil – it takes about eight minutes at 200°C fan – makes it better able to “take Mediterranean treatments”. Try serving it with black olive and bacon vinaigrette; or with Hollandaise with chopped anchovies (which have been “melted” by being gently heated in olive oil); or with homemade Romesco sauce.
Our hidden taste for nutmeg
To hold a nutmeg in your hand, said Bee Wilson in the FT, is “to be reminded how much our ideas of what is precious can change”. A few hundred years ago, these “ridged brown kernels” – product of a tree native to Indonesia – were prized by cooks for their “musky flavour”, and very expensive. Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy – the most influential 18th century English cookbook – “contains no fewer than 318 references to nutmeg”. Today, that prestige is long gone: nutmeg is valued less than other warming spices, such as cinnamon, and nutmeg graters are no longer “standard kitchen kit”. Yet the odd thing is, we’re still consuming plenty of nutmeg; we just don’t always know it. Nutmeg is contained in many of the world’s most popular spice mixes; it “finds its way into numerous packaged foods”; and it’s an ingredient in Coke and Pepsi. Perhaps the “true story of nutmeg in the modern world”, then, is “not that it is unloved, but that we often don’t recognise our own desire for it”.