There is a game people like to play, and it goes like this. Potatoes or bread? Cheese or chocolate? Around the table late at night, I usually refuse to answer. Why should I have to choose? But push me, and in the end, I’ll always pick bread over potatoes, and cheese over chocolate – and for the same reason.
If food is culture, it’s also alchemy, and never is that particular magic more apparent than in the hands of the baker and the cheesemaker. Put the two together, and in a single mouthful, you may be transported to a near-heavenly realm: the apotheosis of all that is straightforwardly good and healthful in life.
In Britain, it’s bread that has the greatest hold over us: a food with an ancient history which has long been so fundamental to life that the two words (bread and food) were once equivalent (this is also why, in vernacular modern English, bread means money). Even as some of us take it for granted, its value is embedded in our island story, and therefore in our hearts and souls.
The Anglo-Saxons, after all, called their lords hlafward, or loaf guardian, and their ladies hlaefdige, or loaf kneader. Putting aside the terrible gender stereotyping of the early Middle Ages – young people, calm yourselves, perhaps with a glass of mead! – these words are a beautiful reminder that before human beings learned about such things as gluten, milling and leavening, the common man lived on gruels, pottages and wafers. Bread is hard-won and precious, a miracle by any other name – and some deep part of us knows it.
Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to sourdough. Big news. According to the restaurant booking site Resy, which has talked to several leading chefs, it seems that sourdough, lately so beloved of restaurants and home bakers alike, is on its way out. Next year, they insist, we will all be hacking away far less often at these tangy, chewy loaves; we will finally have grasped, as one chef puts it, that they are no good at all for a bacon sandwich. Instead, we’ll be getting into breads that deploy ye olde grains: millet and spelt, and amaranth, einkorn and teff (no, me neither).
I read about this – a story reported with utmost seriousness in my newspaper – and laughed. For one thing, bread making has relied on fermentation, aka sourdough, as a leavening agent for much of human history; it’s not exactly modern. For another, you still have to leaven bread somehow; bakers of a spelt-ish ilk are unlikely to use added yeast. More to the point, that very morning, I’d passed the milk float that’s used as a mobile market stall by the Dusty Knuckle, a hip bakery where I live; its most popular bread is sourdough, and I could see a queue of happy-looking customers.
No, my guess is that people won’t, in fact, be abandoning sourdough any time soon. Its holes may well allow butter to drip all over, and it’s often overpriced. But it also tastes good, and has a surprisingly decent shelf life.
Bread is, of course, a repository for all kinds of snobberies. We use it to send messages, to other people and ourselves. Some doubtless will move on to pastures/breadbaskets more fashionable, as instructed. Their baps will be of einkorn and their loaves full-bodied with teff(I’ve looked it up, and it’s cultivated in Ethiopia). They may already have done so, in fact; Sainsbury’s stocks a flat-looking “ancient grain pave”, whose ingredients include millet. These are the kind of people who think garlic bread is only for children, and who’d rather go on I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here than eat white sliced; if they ever do, it’s either ironically, or when they’re ill.
But most of us, happily, are not like this. We mix it up. If sourdough is a Saturday treat, there’s Hovis in the freezer for “emergencies” (that occur every day), or just because we like it, and it’s affordable. We love baguettes and garlic bread, focaccia and flour-dusted white rolls (known in Sheffield, where I come from, as bread cakes). Which bread to eat, and when, comes down to a mixture of taste, suitability and, above all, nostalgia.
Personally, I think the chefs may be right about sourdough and bacon; on a Sunday morning, I like the cheapest, softest rolls. But I also think it makes the best cheese toasties – though be warned: it won’t fit in your old Breville sandwich maker.
Rachel Cooke’s new book Kitchen Person: Notes on Cooking and Eating is out now
