It’s time for Shiny New Books Issue 12! Come on over and explore lots of reviews and features for the autumn.
I’ll be linking to specific reviews and whatnot over the coming weeks – and I’ll be delving into it all myself this week too…
Author: StuckinaBook
Roger Fry: A Biography by Virginia Woolf
I’m a bit behind with reviewing, to put it mildly, but I did read Roger Fry (1940) for the biography phase of Heavenali’s Woolfalong. She suggested a biography of Woolf, or Orlando or Flush, but I piped up with this one – the only actual biography that Woolf wrote, as opposed to those novels she tagged ‘a biography’ onto the end of. Sorry that it’s come so long after the months in question, but I promise I read it during the relevant period!
It feels quite odd, to read a biography by a woman who has been so very biographied – particularly one that was published only a year before she died. How would she write about someone? What precedent would she leave for those who would write about her? Well, it wasn’t quite what I expected. And I’m not quite sure how to write about it.
Firstly – who was Roger Fry? In some ways, he would have made an excellent character in a Woolf novel. He was a painter whose paintings never quite lived up to his hopes – and certainly never got the acclaim he sought. On the other hand, he was an art critic of great repute, whose writings of criticism were popular and respected by many – while also being castigated with horror by the old guard. Indeed, Kenneth Clark said that Fry was ‘incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin … In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry’. Alongside this, his personal life was fraught. His wife Helen became mentally ill not long into their marriage, and moved to an asylum for the rest of her life. Fry had affairs with several women, including Virginia Woolf’s sister, but Woolf does not spend much time on these – perhaps unsurprisingly. He was a kind, damaged man, not content with his lot or his achievements – but seems to have been warmer, less difficult to love, than some of the Bloomsbury Group.
My favourite section, I think, was the chapter on the Post-Impressionists. This was mostly fun in the oh-so-subtle pleasure Woolf takes in showing the people who railed against the ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ exhibition that Fry organised in 1910 (it is argued that Woolf’s famous words ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’ refers, at least in part, to this exhibition). Fry apparently coined the term post-impressionist, and he was the first to introduce Manet, Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and more to the British public – and most of them did not take well to it. It is astonishing, reading this chapter, to see how much vitriol there was in the press, in essays, even in letters to Fry; it damaged his standing in academic circles. It is difficult to imagine anybody caring that much about art today. But even by the time Woolf was writing, in 1940, these artists had become accepted parts of the European artistic landscape.
I went into the book expecting him to appear as something like a character in a Woolf novel, built up piece by piece, description by description, until the complex composite appeared. It wasn’t quite like that. She is fairly linear in her depiction of Fry, concentrating chiefly (in his later life) on his professional successes and failures, but Woolf does describe some of the less concrete elements of Fry’s life. I think what surprised me was her style in doing so. Here, for example, she is writing about Helen’s illness:
The end of his work in America coincided with a far more terrible conclusion. When, three years before, Sir George Savage had told him that in his opinion Helen Fry’s illness was hopeless, he had refused to believe him. He had gone from doctor to doctor; he had tried every method that held out the least chance of success. It is a splendid record of courage, patience and devotion. In the hope that his wife could still live with him he had built a house from his own design near Guildford. In 1910 the house was ready, and he brought her there. But the illness increased, and in that year he was forced, for the children’s sake, to give up the battle. It had lasted, with intervals of rare happiness, since 1898. “You have certainly fought hard to help your wife, and shown a devotion I have never seen equalled”, Dr Head wrote to him in November 1910. “Unfortunately the disease has beaten us.”
She is not quite the impersonal biographer, but she is very far from the novelist here. You can’t imagine a sentence as prosaic as ‘In 1910 the house was ready, and he brought her there’ appearing in her fiction. Yet you can’t imagine ‘It is a splendid record of courage, patience and devotion’ being found in the work of a modern day biographer. Throughout Roger Fry, Woolf’s writing falls a little between two stools. It is never bad writing, of course – she would be incapable of that – but it feels rather held back. Woolf wears the hat of the biographer a little uneasily, if she is not aping or exaggerating it in her fiction.
Woolf also makes no mention of her personal relationship with Fry. Stranger still, she refers to Leonard Woolf and Vanessa Bell throughout without acknowledging her connection with them – and at one point even refers to ‘Virginia Woolf’ as though it were a different person. She is trying on a persona which cannot find its reflection in the cast of characters she is depicting – awkwardly, when those characters are real and include herself.
So, is this a good biography? Yes – rich and informative and sensitive. And normally I don’t much care about the style of the biographer – indeed, I don’t want it to intrude on the reading experience, or get in the way of the subject. But any reader of Roger Fry today is likely to be more interested in Woolf than Fry, and this is a strange piece of that jigsaw puzzle. Yes, a good biography – but not quite what one expects from Woolf, and disconcerting to see her talent hide in the shadows of her own book. A fascinating read, and a curious footnote to my understanding of Woolf’s life and style.
Great British Bake Off: Series 7 Episode 6
Sorry that you had to put up without my recap of last week’s episode (in which we bid a sad farewell to Dame Val, mere days after I’d finally decided what to call her) – and general apologies, to those who read StuckinaBook for the bookish bits, that I’ve been rather absent of late. But let us put those things out of our minds while we think about… botanicals!
As usual, Mel and Sue are hanging around in the sunshine for our opening bit – and they make an elaborate riff on there being 7 bakers left in the tent – just like the 7 dwarfs. I would love to spend some time working out which of the contestants matched which of their descriptions – shakey, cakey, etc. – though I was distracted by the constant anxiety that they might break into Achy Breaky Heart. Seeing them together is now always bittersweet, since their days in (and around) the tent are numbered.
Mere moments later, as the bakers sidle in, it is pouring with rain – which is apparently worth at least three establishing shots, as well as many interviews with bakers under clear umbrellas (which are swiped away from at some point in the few steps between lawn and tent by an invisible crew). Before we look more at this week’s themes, let’s take a quick swing by Blazer Watch – and I’m loving the yellow/grey that Sue has going on. And Mary is looking fabs, of course. Dr Death over on the left has given up even interacting with the others.
Jane thinks botanical week “could almost have been made for her”. Either responding to the blank look of the camerman, or the vocalised question of the production team, she adds “because I’m a gardener” in a sing-song voice, as though addressing a peculiarly stupid child. Jokes on you, Jane, because your gardening abilities have zero relevance to the tasks in hand today. Tom makes brave guesses at what the theme might mean (“…aromatic?”) before adding, with evident reluctance, “anything that grows goes!”
And what’s the first challenge? It’s citrus meringue pie. Which is delicious, ticks the box for ‘people might want to try this at home’, but… botanical? They make repeated assertions that anything that has stuff that grows in it is botanical, but this generous description includes literally every cake (sugar; flour). It also includes literally every foodstuff that isn’t dairy. It’s a mess.
But I’m very much here for any challenge that allow somebody to make a lime and coconut meringue pie. And it’s encouraging to see that even GBBO bakers seem to get orange everywhere while grating it for the zest.
Speaking of Selasi’s general awesomeness, he is wearing a floral shirt – as is Jane (a rather nice one, actually; well done Jane). I love this commitment to a theme, and wish we’d seen more of it in the past. Blue and white stripes for French week. Queen Victoria costumes for cake week. About the only week they’ve done this for before was gluten-free week, during which I can only assume most of the outfits were, indeed, gluten-free.
Mary gives the useful advice – from her vantage in the once-again-sunny outside – that the citrus meringue pie should be ‘sheer Heaven’. Has anybody even said ‘citrus meringue pie’ before, incidentally? I fear not. To illustrate ‘sheer Heaven’, we have Selasi choosing to hold his ingredients as far as possible from the bowl.
Paul, in turn, is just playing a botanical version of Kim’s game, listing citrus fruits in the garden (again, sunny), before realising that there are basically only three. “Grapefruit” he adds hopefully, while the cameraman slowly, sternly shakes his head.
The downside of an accessible challenge is, as always, that is nothing very unusual to say. Rav is putting tequila in his (somewhere, Mary’s sponsor winces), to help live up to his week one bio of using “unusual” ingredients; the other side of the tent has to make do with the non-earth-shattering stem ginger chosen by Andrew. While we’re recovering from that excitement, Mel explains how to make pastry while we get a montage of bakers’ hands obscuring their ingredients entirely. My favourite tip was “…and sugar, for sweetness”.
Tom (interviewed while using his food mixer on its loudest setting) tells us that he isn’t making a sweet pastry. He’s using something to give ‘a savoury, aromatic sweetness’. I listened a few times and couldn’t work out what that something was, but I’m intrigued as to what could provide sweetness better than a sweet pastry. (Or is this the sugar-free challenge all over again, where adding melted sugar somehow counted?)
Selasi flirts with Mary over his shirt – he will flirt with anybody, it seems, and more power to him – and explains that he is making a grapefruit, orange, and mint meringue pie. To see those words again in a different front, look below:
My favourite bit of this section, of course, is where Mary asks Mel if she’s ever had a ‘sharp-edged kiss’, and then turns this look at Selasi:
But this is also the start of another adorable narrative in my head: the love (possibly fraternal/sororal) between Benjamina and Selasi. It’s lovely. They are both making grapefruit meringue pie, and bicker over it like a pair of siblings who want their parents to pick them but also don’t really care, because the process is fun in itself. They have a bit of a giggle while using rolling pins.
The question of the day is about presentation of meringue. You can tell that this will be the part Mary and Paul judge most assiduously. Not even whether it’s French, Swiss, or Italian (sidenote: why doesn’t Mel’s voiceover explain the differences between these, which I imagine would be more elucidating to most viewers than ‘sugar is sweet’?) – whether it’s piped or not, and whether it’s blow-torched or oven-baked. Paul enquires whether Benjamina will be ‘dumping’ her meringue on the pie – something of a leading question – and she quickly replies with a negative, saying it will be ‘piped nicely… with a… nice nozzle’. The word ‘nice’ seems rather redundant here.
Andrew, meanwhile, has always remembered the flavour of his mum’s key lime pie. Lime, one suspects. “I enjoy a good citrus tang,” he adds, immediately regretting it.
In this series, Paul has started using the word ‘fascinating’ in place of every negative adjective. “That will be fascinating to see” he says of breads he thinks will be underproved, flavours he abhors, and identifications at the morgue.
Jane tells us that she is making a lime and coconut meringue pie inspired by a Harry Nielson song – a joke that I assume you have to be a couple of decades older than me to understand – and she tells us this while we watch a close up of her juicing a… lemon.
People are pairing off, and Candice/Jane are the new Selasi/Benjamina – i.e. they’re both making coconut/lime meringue pies. There is rather less chemistry here, and the editors swiftly move on – to Mary restating that she prefers an oven to a blowtorch. Well, don’t we all, Mezza.
The Bake Off, bless them, finally trust us to know what blind baking is – but I do wonder, with Tom’s, whether or not he remembered to put the baking paper between the baking beans and the pastry? His looks rather riddled with bullet holes.
SOMEBODY RESURRECT TOMORROW’S WORLD. I WANT THESE TWO TO TEACH ME SCIENCE.
All of the bakes come out pretty well – because, after all, they are simply putting curd in pastry – but things get a bit more tense with the meringue layers. Some are gloopy. Some are stiff. Some look like the fever dream of the Hulk. (Yes, that’s you Candice. In retrospect, Colouring Pencil Man’s depiction looks like a cruel and sarcastic joke.)
Too cruel, Colouring Pencils Man, too cruel. Why so cruel, with all your cruelty?
A medley of blowtorching later (who actually owns a blowtorch?) and we’re all good to go. Long story short: the women do better than the men. Jane probably does best, and I entirely want to faceplant in her meringue pie. It looks so good.
Outside, the bakers do more interviews in the rain. Have the production company arranged so it’s sunny when the judges and presenters are outside and rainy when the bakers are outside?! I smell a conspiracy! (Ed: no, they haven’t. Many apols.)
Onto the technical challenge! Paul’s words of wisdom are ‘be patient, and remember the shaping’ – Sue adds that it’s something of a catchphrase for him, reminding me how much I’ll miss her. It’s the French classic ‘fougasse’, which apparently slips into botanical week solely because it’s got herbs in it. They might as well just be whipping up some creme de menthe and calling it a day. This is apparently what the fougasse should look like:
You know how the technical is always based on one criterion which is very specific, entirely arbitrary, and completely unclear? In this case, it’s the lines down the middle. Should they be next to each other or in a single line? “Who cares?” I hear you ask. “Just gimme some delicious bread, and put the lines wherever your sweet mind wishes.” Well, thank you for the kind words about my mind, but I’ll tell you who cares: Paul. It is all that occupies his not-so-sweet mind.
More on that anon.
For now we see the usual flour-sifting, dough-kneading, proving-drawer-opening montage – and this curiously poignant still of a pencil on the floor by Selasi’s station.
Despite Paul’s example ‘leaf-shaped’ fougasse being demonstrably rectangular, this is less important than those lines. Andrew helpfully tells us that, from an engineering background, consecutive lines are one on top of the other. I think the bakers are divided about half and half on the topic of lines, but I’ve become more or less snow blind on this issue now.
(Herbs might have mentioned in passing, but I don’t recall.) (#botanicals.)
They do all look delicious, and I love that Tom takes fougasse as a cinema snack. That is such a good idea. I’m off to see Bridget Jones’s Baby on Thursday, and I now fully intend to take some foccaccia in a bag. Imma live dat life.
The word fougasse, you would think, leaves little room for puns. Oh ye of little faith. Mel and Sue do their best with ‘fougastric bands’ and another one that I didn’t understand even while it was being said. The pun that is probably in your mind was, blessedly, left unspoken. Sue, meanwhile, has joined Selasi in his recumbent position – and, more importantly, the pencil has been rescued from the floor. Look, it’ll never be as iconic as Richard’s pencil, but every pencil needs its moment in the sun.
The cameramen/camerawomen know that there isn’t much going on here, so we have close ups of people’s mouths, lots of cooling racks, and nothing whatsoever of interest beyond Selasi lying in various positions on the ground. And then bakers waving around fans that look like they work in air traffic control.
The judging is mostly, as we suspected, Paul pointing at lines. He isn’t content with saying that the cut should be in a line down the middle, but repeats it for every. single. bake. Mary does her best by saying the word ‘crispy’ occasionally. Ultimately, they all seem pretty close – but it goes Selasi (last), Andrew, Candice, Jane, Rav, Benjamina, and Tom wins out. Why is he wearing one blue glove? Answer comes there none. But it’s raining again for the baker interviews.
The sun has come out for the showstopper challenge, and it’s the first one which could be even loosely considered botanical: floral cakes. My well-documented dislike of floral flavours in cakes has, it seems, made not a bit of difference to the powers that be at GBBO. I’m not disappointed, I’m just angry.
Various bakers tell us that they’ve got a lot riding on today – presumably they’ve all been down to the bookies to put their money on Benjamina to win – and the camera guy loses his head completely with this Candice shot:
It’s a fun challenge, but pretty vague. It’s got to be three tiers, but there’s no stipulation about whether they have to be different flavours or not, or even if there has to be floral flavours in there. Rav, for instance, is only doing one flavour, and that is flavoured with orange blossom. How this differs from orange, in terms of taste, I don’t know.
Tom is making tea-based cakes, though no honest English breakfast in sight: it’s jasmine and… some others, I forget, I got too caught up in my immediate desire to drink a cup of tea. Paul and Mary warn that it’s hard to get the flavour across, which sounds like it might rather be a blessing.
Candice, if you’ll travel with me to her side of the tent, has added an extra tier – stymied, as she is, but the number of seasons there are. She is basing each layer on a season, though this does include such tenuous links as ‘chocolate and orange for spring’.
In a touching moment, Candice is using a sheet of paper written by her gran for the top layer. That’s quite sweet, but I do rather dread how much will be made of this sort of thing when the show moves to Channel 4. Learn some lessons, C4.
Jane is using orange (“a flowery flavour”) but no actual flowery flavours – instead, she’s concentrating on moulding flowers and making a white chocolate collar for each layer, with abstract flowers. It sounds perfect to me, and probably the one I’d be keenest to sample.
(Selasi, for some reason, has a pineapple – though I’m pretty sure there was no pineapple in his recipe.)
This is what happens when an engineer is allowed to bake. I feel – and I can’t emphasise enough that this is based on a profound and total ignorance of it – like I’m at the New York Stock Exchange.
It’s all good fun, but they’re essentially making sponge cakes. It ain’t tricky, and it’s tense. It sure ain’t no fondant fancy. The bakers do their best to amp up the drams, though, with Jane pouring away some mixture, and such exciting pronouncements as Rav’s “I’m just putting some food colouring in my buttercream”; Mel and Sue seem to have popped to the pub for a quick half, as they have nothing to say throughout almost all of the cake baking. Except on the Voiceovers of Doom, naturally.
Watching people decorate cakes is often quite stressful. We’ve all been in the crumbs-in-the-icing stage, but (contrary to the rules of most activities) watching other people do it is more stressful than doing it yourself. Amidst Rav miserably forming icing flowers, Candice peering at butter icing, and Benjamina wisely deciding to go for deliberately poor icing, we have Selasi – demonstrating a rather astonishing icing talent. And so fast. Check out these roses. I don’t even know how he’s got the multicolours so perfectly.
He and Candice are the only ones who come close to the decorating panache of previous years. I can only imagine the wonders that Frances would be producing right now. I also quite like the abstract flower collars Jane has crafted, though she (and, later, the judges) don’t seem happy with them.
How do things go? Candice’s does quite well, and Mary gives an excellent (accidental) subtle bitch comment: “It’s like you – over the top”. She makes another needlessly gluten-free layer, but we’ll forgive her for that.
Andrew’s is rather simple (“blobs” – Mary) and the flavours are too subtle to detect. Look, basically the cake is hardly there at all. The whole thing is a postmodern illusion.
Benjamina’s is a little underdone, and they ain’t fooled by her “deliberately unfinished” look. The same argument, it turns out, also doesn’t work for roofing or open heart surgery. Live and learn.
Rav gets a whole lot of blah for his.
Jane apologises a lot for what looks like a delicious cake to me (though Mary corrects Paul’s “overdone” with “only a little overdone”):
Selasi’s is an ombre dream:
Poor old Tom gets told that he’s done a “very simple finish”. This is at least ten times more complex and beautiful than any cake I’ve ever decorated. (Apologies for the slight blur; this screenshot comes from a moment when the cameraman decided dramatically zooming in was both warranted and tasteful.)
So, how did things work out in the end? After some debating, and some interviews with the bakers that aren’t in the rain (but which are on some overgrown steps; go figure), the Star Baker turns out to be… Tom!
And going home… Rav. Bless him, it’s probably time. (Sorry that they don’t come with the usual images – iPlayer stopped working just before the end of the episode.)
I hope we’ve all learned a lot in botanicals week – even if, sadly, not what ‘botanicals’ means to an meaningful degree. See you next week!
Tea or Books? #26: give up vs soldier on, and Matilda by Roald Dahl vs Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian
Roald Dahl, Michelle Magorian, and whether or not to give up on books – I’m back from holiday, and Rachel and I have a lovely new (…long) episode of Tea or Books?
In our first half, we discuss whether or not we give up on books, and what factors might play into that decision – and in the second half we get all children’s-literature-focused. We’re supposedly pitting Matilda by Roald Dahl against Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian (which only have in common that Rachel and I loved them both as children) – but we end up talking about every Dahl we can think of.
This is the excellent airbnb place I stayed in Siena, and this is our iTunes page. Listen to the ep up above, over there, or any which way you choose. We’re not the bosses of you! Having said that, I do want to boss you into telling us what you’d choose for each half. And more ideas, please! We got so many good ideas from people a while ago… and we’re running out.
Here are the books and authors we talked about in this episode:
Collection of Sand by Italo Calvino
Casting Off by Elizabeth Jane Howard
Sword of Bone by Anthony Rhodes
Chatterton Square by E.H. Young
Miss Mole by E.H. Young
But What If We’re Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman
Jane Austen
The Dover Road by A.A. Milne (book your tickets here!)
Private Lives by Noel Coward
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Zadie Smith
P.G. Wodehouse
Patricia Brent, Spinster by Herbert Jenkins
We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Crash by J.G. Ballard
Possession by A.S. Byatt
The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt
The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Black Dogs by Ian McEwan
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Elizabeth Bowen
Jane Austen
Muriel Spark
Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
Who Was Changed and Who was Dead by Barbara Comyns
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith
Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
P.D. James
The Chateau by William Maxwell
A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor
Stories by Edgar Allan Poe
Matilda by Roald Dahl
Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian
Going Solo by Roald Dahl
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
James and the Giant Peach: a play by David Wood
The BFG by Roald Dahl
Danny, Champion of the World by Roald Dahl
The Twits by Roald Dahl
The Witches by Roald Dahl
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
George’s Marvellous Medicine by Roald Dahl
Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Doreen by Barbara Noble
Kisses on a Postcard by Terence Frisby
Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh
The Great British Bake Off: Series 7: Episode 4
Look, let’s not ignore the elephant in the room. You’ve almost certainly heard by now that this is the last full series we’ll get on the BBC, before GBBO moves to Channel 4. For those not familiar with British channels, this is admittedly the classiest channel after the BBC… but the idea of ad breaks in the Bake Off is anathema. And this couldn’t be more of a BBC show. It’s quite heartbreaking, and I was quietly proud of how outraged the British public was. I felt a bit like I was in mourning myself. And I’ll be taking next week off recapping, I’m afraid – partly because of mourning; mostly because I’ll be in Italy.
And we’re gonna also lose these two! (No word from Mary and Paul, at the time of typing.)
Anyway, let’s get on to the episode itself – and it’s Batter Week. You will see very little baking this week. They should have stuck to cake… it is batter the devil you know (a joke I made before Mel made it on the show, I’ll have you know thankyouverymuch). I’m not above thinking this episode was chosen solely for the fresh new range of puns it afforded – and Mel & Sue leap right in the deep end with an elaborate skit based on the word ‘bat’. It’s the most innocent, ridiculous fun.
The bakers parade in, wrapped up in dozens of layers and – is that frost I can see on the grass? #Spring. In this crowd I can pick out Andrew and Val, but have no clue who the others might be. Who’s that person in the blue check? Have they just got extras to fill in? And is that the cake from the opening titles and is it seven years old?
Before we get onto the controversies of Batter Week, let’s have a quick peek at Blazer Watch. Well, we’re down to two blazers – as Mary is rocking an asymmetric bomber jacket. But these might be my fave blazers so far (my fazers, if you will) (no, of course you will not; that was a given) – I especially like Sue’s navy and yellow combo. Strong work, team. And thank goodness there was a 4-for-1 sale on straight leg jeans.
So, what IS baking? Dictionary definitions seem to be pretty much all-encompassing (anything heated not over an open flame, apparently, which would seem to include anybody standing near a radiator) – for me, it’s cakes, biscuits, bread, and pastry. And that’s it. The challenges today are cooking and frying. It just ain’t right.
The first challenge, indeed, is Yorkshire Puddings. One can only assume that somebody in the production team heard the word ‘pudding’ and is labouring under the misapprehension that they are some kind of dessert.
Mary – swathed in an enormous jacket – sits outside and gives us the usual helpful info that she’d like the bakes to be good, if it’s not too much trouble. She mimes the shape of a Yorkshire pud – presumably not to scale – and looks rather as if in the process of yelling hello at somebody across a great distance.
She’s after identical Yorkshire puddings – a feat that has yet to be achieved, or even attempted, by anybody, ever – and she wants to leave room for filling. Literally nobody has ever made a filled Yorkshire pudding. You might put stuff in them afterwards, sure, so long as it’s roast potatoes, carrots, peas, or gravy. Nothing else is welcome in a YP. I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.
Paul talks about the rise coming from eggs – and this is helpfully accompanied by a brief montage of eggs, for those unaware of what they are and curious to find out. It does beg the question what this baker, Jane I think, has used the enormous knife for – as, so far, she has only sifted flour into a bowl.
“We’ve all got a different family recipe for Yorkshire puddings,” Mel alleges in the voiceover, falsely, while Andrew suggests that the ‘Yorkshire pudding community’ has much debate about the number of eggs to use. Presumably that debate is more pressingly occupied with such questions as ‘Why have we formed a community?’ and ‘What are friends?’.
First stop for Mezza and Pezza is Dame Val’s counter – as Mary says, somewhat accusingly, “You’re from Yorkshire”. Val laughs her way through a story about how her husband will effectively throw her out if she doesn’t win this week. She is cut off midway through a story about her mother teaching her to make Yorkshire puddings which would, one has to imagine, have continued in an indefinite spiral of “and her mother before her“, until we reached Eve.
It seems unlikely, though, that Val’s Mum would have added chilli to them – if only because, again, literally nobody ever has added fillings to Yorkshire puddings.
Candice is growing on me quite a lot – partly, today, because she drops her fork on the floor and is witty about it. Certainly not for her ‘deconstructed beef wellington’ – it seems to be deconstructed only in that she’s not putting it in pastry and it is, thus, not a wellington. Look, I don’t know how much I can bring myself to write about the monstrous things these bakers are planning to do to the humble staple of a Sunday roast. About the only acceptable one is Jane’s Meat and Two Veg (a euphemism that Mel and Sue miraculously leave alone). There is the caveat that she insists she is terrible at Yorkshire puddings – a brave admission, one might think, though taken with surprising indifference by The Male Judge.
One of the few vegetarian choices is Rav’s – which has Thai tofu in it. Look, I can’t. The Thai meal sounds delicious. But in the name of all that is sweet and pure, keep it away from my Yorkshire puds. Serve it on a Monday, when Yorkshire puddings are but a distant recollection of Sunday’s dinner.
Does Paul like tofu?
Also vegetarian are Tom’s ‘fusion puddings’ – no – because he insists that the only vegetarian meal you can eat on a Sunday was at an Indian restaurant. I mean, sure, let’s pretend that’s a thing. He’s decided the best thing to do is use chickpea flour. Mary, be a doll and sum up how that makes you feel?
He’s also using nigella seeds, which ends my speculation about whether or not the word ‘nigella’ can be used in this programme.
Bakers briefly debate whether or not to chill their batter – they really are making the very simple process of making a batter seem inexluctably complicated – and we wander back to Rav’s to see him making candles or preparing for this week’s laundry or something.
Selasi is filling his with various forms of pork, and apparently took the recipe from his girlfriend’s mum – news which filled some of my colleagues with heartbreak, I won’t lie. It’s the first time that pork crackling has been on GBBO, Mel advises, and Selasi could not seem less interested in that information. “Chill,” he may or may not have replied.
Kate tells a dark story about compromising over Christmas because her husband – innocently enough, one would think – quite likes a Yorkshire pudding and her family “never, ever had them”. She speaks of them as though they were something rather indecent. Her compromise seems to be… simply to make Yorkshire puddings. I don’t know. It also looks rather as though there is a fly in her batter mix, as the camera pans past.
Benjamina is doing what Tamal did in a previous series, and is choosing her flavours – onion, brie, bacon – based on what she’d like in a sandwich. Well, why not. She also tells us that we need “smoking hot oil” – which is a rare instance of ‘smoking hot’ used in its literal sense. (Val, on the other hand, asserts that you have to use beef dripping, though where she has found this I can’t imagine. I sort of assumed dripping grew extinct around 1957.)
It’s quite fun watching the bakers pour or spoon their batter into the trays – mostly because of how unabashedly inept many of them are. Here, for example, is Jane’s attempt…
…while Mel is so incensed about Tom’s slapdash approach that she leans over him, and scolds him like a disappointed aunt. “They’re all over the shop! Look, you were star baker last week; you’ve got to raise your game, my love.” Bless.
It sounds like it’s time for oven-staring, am I right? Stare away, bakers, stare away.
They start to emerge pretty quickly. Some are very big (Selasi’s are huge); some are little more than biscuits. What nobody has achieved is consistency, of course. Yorkshire puds cannot be uniform.
Saddest of all – and please take note – are Tom’s disasters:
Luckily they seem to have ages, so plenty of bakers start afresh – presumably leaving Selasi et al to kick back and relax, or marinade whatever non-Yorkshire filling they are planning to destroy their puds with. Tom cannot fill his, of course, because they are mini Yorkshire plates. He seems to deal with it well, but this is rather horrifying:
Somehow, Mary and Paul stomach these bizarre concoctions as they go bench to bench. Paul’s gibberish for the episode is ‘irregular air pockets’ – which, of course, is something we’re all dying to see when we tuck into a Yorkshire pudding. It’s a little confusing because ‘irregular’ is also a criticism when he’s looking at Kate’s array.
Incidentally, they use a curiously large knife to chop the YPs, scraping the blade against slate in a manner calculated to send shocks of horror down the spines of those of us of a nervous disposition.
Who does best? Selasi, Rav, Andrew, and Val come away with happy nods – and Val gives a pantomime sigh of relief that is something akin to a hot air balloon deflating and seems to take about 20 minutes.
Are you ready for the Technical Challenge? It’s… lacy pancakes. Tom’s response is a look of kind confusion, perhaps assuming (as the rest of us naturally had done) that this was a slip of the tongue, or some kind of belated April Fool. Mais non, mes amis, this is what passes for a challenge in Batter Week. I can only imagine the execs at Channel 4, watching this together in their Knightsbridge apartment, turned silently to each other at this point and slowly shook their heads. Perhaps a single tear ran down one of their cheeks.
“Lace pancakes were traditionally eaten by the rich at their dinners,” lies Mel in the voiceover, cleverly crafting a statement that can’t possibly be checked or verified.
“Paul, why did you choose lacy pancakes?” poses Mary, rather more appositely.
Paul mumbles about it being a vast improvement on the regular pancake while Mary looks on sceptically. He even discusses “that great pancake flavour”, presumably because there is so little surface area to it that a flavour is all you’re going to get.
This is one of the worst challenges I can recall. Because this isn’t baking. And pancakes aren’t difficult. And they don’t have the same designs, so they’re not even compared like for like. AND they’ll be served cold and unpleasant. It’s all so absurd.
The poor editors are left having to cobble something together about the thickness of batter (yawn) and try to fill up the time with incidental shots of grass, people leaning on desks, and Benjamina doing a solid impression of a high schooler with a crush that she’s desperately hoping somebody will ask her about.
Rav has sketched out some crosshatch, while Selasi apparently can’t even draw an empty heart. Bakers have one practice pancake they can get rid of before they have to commit themselves. “Paul hasn’t said what temperature they should make the pancakes at,” Mel warns – which is fair enough, since (a) making pancakes is childishly simple, and (b) they would have no way of reaching a specific temperature.
All of my criticisms are made to look rather stupid in the face of the beauty of Benjamina’s design. No, it wouldn’t be pleasant to eat once it’s cold and congealed – but this is still something pretty impressive:
Rav loves to burn things, doesn’t he? “The tester was much better than this one,” he comments of a charred pancake, “I wish I hadn’t dropped it on the floor now”… leading one to wonder at which stage he was pleased that he’d dropped it on the floor.
Selasi loses a couple cool points at quite how thrilled he is to have flipped his pancake. Dame Val has, of course, made a series of mismatched horrors, and doesn’t care at all. (Oh, by the way, I am now going to call her Dame Val. She deserves no less.)
Mary and Paul bravely face an array of unappetising looking cold pancakes, and apparently test them by flinging them around, smacking them against slate, and eating minute corners of them. They have, of course, absolutely nothing to say about them. At this point, I should say that my housemate made lacy pancakes while we watched, and they were very nice – but we got to eat them while warm.
Rav comes last, followed by Selasi and Kate. The top three are Jane, Candice, and Benjamina.
The bakers stand in the rain and reflect on the results.
But it’s sunny for Showstopper Challenge – which is churros! Paul, incidentally, uses ‘churros’ as both plural and singular throughout, but I am advised that this is not correct. Churros are traditional served with a chocolate dipping sauce, advises Mel – she seems to be doing the bulk of the voiceovers this week – but you can imagine that the bakers are going to play fast and loose with that unbeatable recipe. Dame Val, for instance, is adding orange extract – “for a nice hit of orange”, she cordially explains. Benjamina, meanwhile, is including “every kind of coconut”. I’m pretty sure that totals one kind, right?
Tom, on the other hand…
Nobody likes to see a pestle and mortar more than I, but fennel is not a flavour to include in a sweet dish. Or, to my mind, in any dish. Not a fennel fan, thankyouverymuch. And I’m *also* not a fan of the fact that Tom always puts his name into the title of his bakes. (I use the word ‘bake’ loosely – this is, of course, a deep fat frying challenge.)
Clearly churros should be served with chocolate, toffee, caramel, or something in that family. It shouldn’t have matcha or be served with ‘white chocolate and wasabi’, which is what Rav has done. He explains matcha to us, in case we’ve forgotten from that time someone used matcha a couple of weeks ago.
Consistency and uniformity are, as ever, the watchwords of the day. Some of the bakers are piping theirs out onto greaseproof paper – Dame Val’s are unexpectedly precise – while others are loitering around, waiting for this stage of the filming to be over. Kate, meanwhile, is apparently making bunnies – and it feels a lot like Colouring Pencils Man is sassing her with his depiction which is anything but lapine:
I should say, my exception to just-serve-it-with-chocolate is Benjamina’s: coconut and passion fruit are the keys to unlock my heart. Just in case you wondered.
Chill, freeze, or stand? The choice is yours. But I’m guessing (by Mary’s look of incredulity at Selasi’s choices) that freezing is not the best idea. I mean, I also saw the episode, so I do know that it wasn’t a good idea. Soz, Selasi.
Dame Val wanders into shot and says “CHOCOLATE ORANGE”.
“My children’s favourite,” she adds. Her children must be fifty if they’re a day.
From here on, most of the rest of the episode consists of close-ups of deep fat fryers. Or, I learn, friers. But not friars. (I will let you have a single shot of one:)
I wonder how many bakers were able to practise these? I suppose you can do this with vast quantities of oil in a big pan, but otherwise I can’t imagine many of them can lay their hands on deep fat fryers. We had one once, I believe, though goodness knows what happened to that.
Each baker is making 35 (or was it 36?) of these, minimum, and it feels like we’re in a repeating montage of boiling fat. It’s somewhere between calming and unnerving. It definitely made me want to eat some churros – which, dear reader, I have yet to do since the episode aired.
It’s judgement time, and I spend most of salivating. Churros look so delicious.
Query: where did Tom get astroturf from? And why?
His feedback is very bad – they don’t like the taste, texture, or appearance. REMEMBER THIS, READER.
Indeed, quite a few people get negative feedback – Selasi’s frozen dough, Val’s doughy churros, Kate’s oily churros, Rav’s unpleasant flavour – but Jane does well and essentially has hysterics, while Benjamina also gets smiley nods all round with this very tempting display.
Mary throws around the word ‘impregnated’ far too often for my liking.
Judges and presenters huddle around the table and mull over everybody’s chances. It seems pretty obvious to me who ought to win and who ought to lose.
The winner is (hurrah!) is…
The person leaving the tent is…
Tom was convinced he was going – and he’s not the only one. I reckon he was the clear loser this week (nice though he seems), and I’m rather perplexed. Not just cos I’m out of my office sweepstake now. It does seem like the production team might be playing a bigger role in deciding who stays and who goes this year – because we’ve had a series of unlikely choices… hmm…
Next week: some baking, maybe? As I say, I’ll be away – but I’ll be back recapping in a fortnight’s time.
Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys #ReadingRhys
I had enthusiastically signed my name (figuratively) for Jean Rhys Reading Week run by Eric and Jacqui, back whenever it was announced, and promptly put it to the back of my mind – and hadn’t spotted that it had started until I saw people tweeting about it. Luckily I had Voyage in the Dark (1934) on my shelf – thankfully it’s short, so I was able to read much of it on the train to London yesterday.
Voyage in the Dark is one of the rare copies I have where I have omitted to write where and when I got it inside, so I have no idea when I picked it up – but I do know that I’ve been mulling over reading another Rhys novel since I read Wide Sargasso Sea when I was 18, and liked it at least to an extent (though my impressions have mostly left me now). How very many people have read Wide Sargasso Sea and nothing else by Rhys? I suspect it’s a common refrain this week.
The novel – novella? – tells the tale of Anna Morgan, who has moved from her West Indies home to England and has recently lived with a stepmother who clearly considers her more of a burden than anything else. Anna is one of those characters who combines naivety with worldly wisdom – things have not gone well for her, but she retains something of a childlike optimism about the world. Or maybe just a childlike view of the world.
Anna must fend for herself – but (though at times this involves a rather haphazard training as a manicurist and a stage performer) this chiefly means relying on men. She skirts on the edge of being no better than she ought to be, let us say, but she also falls in love with an older man – Walter – who lavishes her with attention, but is never quite trusted by the reader. Discussions about men and women and their interactions are given in the bawdy, cynical voices of Anna’s friends, or the conservative tones of her stepmother or landlady, but we seldom hear a narrator’s perspective – or even much of Anna’s own. She is fixated on Walter alone, rather than men in general – though does get immersed in this sort of conversation:
“My dear, I had to laugh,” she said. “D’you know what a man said to me the other day? It’s funny, he said, have you ever thought that a girl’s clothes cost more than the girl inside them?”
“What a swine of a man!” I said.
“Yes, that’s what I told him,” Maudie said. “‘That isn’t the way to talk,’ I said. And he said, ‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it? You can get a very nice girl for five pounds, a very nice girl indeed; you can even get a very nice girl for nothing if you know how to go about it. But you can’t get a very nice costume for her for five pounds. To say nothing of underclothes, shoes, etcetera, and so on.’ And then I had to laugh, because after all it’s true, isn’t it? People are much cheaper than things. And look here! Some dogs are more expensive than people, aren’t they? And as to some horses…”
“Oh, shut up,” I said. “You’re getting on my nerves. Let’s go back into the sitting-room; it’s cold in here.”
Voyage in the Dark seemed to me to fuse comedy and tragedy in the way of a certain sort of interwar novel. Indeed, it blends fairy tale and realism in a manner that should cause disjunct in the reading experience, but actually blends very effectively.
Actually, the writer I was most reminded of was Barbara Comyns – who does the same matter-of-fact depiction of harsh realities almost as though they were fantasies. Rhys has a greater simplicity to her tone – and, I have to confess, much though I enjoyed reading the novel and was impressed by her handling of character, I was a bit surprised. Rhys is so often mentioned as being among the greater writers of the period, and this novel felt like a very good example of something that a lot of people were doing in the 30s, 40s, and 50s – rather than an example of unique or unusually excellent authorship.
In Eric’s excellent review, he writes a lot about the influence of the West Indies on Anna’s life and on the novel. I have to confess I saw these only in fleeting moments, and I daresay a lot of the questions of identity were lost on me – but that certainly doesn’t prevent me valuing the book, and being very glad that I’ve read more Rhys. Perhaps it is all a matter of expectation. I’m not sure I’d elevate Rhys to the highest echelons of writers, based on this novel alone, but I am certainly more likely to return to her again now that I’ve better made her acquaintance.
Theatre review: The Dover Road by A.A. Milne
With apologies to those blog readers who are unable to get to London (and more particularly the Jermyn Street Theatre) before 1st October – I can’t resist writing about the play I saw this evening, The Dover Road by A.A. Milne. It’s absolutely phenomenal, and I am so grateful to Mary for bringing it to my attention.
I’ve written before about the special role that Milne played in my development as a reader, and how much I love almost everything he wrote – novels, stories, essays, poetry, memoir, sketches, and plays – but I never thought I would have the opportunity to see one of his plays on a London stage. Sitting in the tiny underground theatre on Jermyn Street – which seats 70 people, many of whom seemed to be regulars – I kept having moments of happy disbelief that this dream was coming true. And, better yet, with what is possibly my favourite of his plays (the only rival being Mr Pim Passes By). I’d read it many times, and even given a conference paper on it, but seeing The Dover Road actually being acted in front of me – well, I almost had to pinch myself.
A little about the play before I talk about how good this particular production was. The Dover Road features ‘a sort of hotel’, run by the mysterious and witty Mr Latimer, outside which Leonard and Anne find themselves when their car breaks down. They have no choice but to seek shelter, but it is almost immediately obvious that the hotel is unconventional, and that Latimer knows more about them than he should – he knows, for instance, that Leonard has left his wife Eustasia for Anne, and that they are eloping. With impossible charm, Latimer (aided by Dominic and Joseph) imprisons them. His sort-of-hotel, you see, is run to help these sorts of couples get to know each other more closely, before they embark on potentially disastrous second marriages.
Also at the hotel, however, is another couple – one coming to the end of their week of genial imprisonment. Look away if you don’t want spoilers, but I don’t think it negatively impacts the play to know (and is, indeed, somewhat inevitable) that one of this pair is Eustasia herself – and the other is Nicholas, heartily regretting his absconding in the face of Eustasia’s maddening attentiveness. There is a wonderful scene where Nicholas calculates how many times he may have to protest that he really doesn’t want anything else to eat, at the end of meals.
The couples, of course, meet – and masks fall and plans unravel in the face of this encounter, albeit always with Milne’s characteristic wit and brilliant construction of lines. Though there are certainly more poignant moments, the stakes are never quite as high as they would seem in another playwright’s hands. (One has to wonder how intentionally Noel Coward was influenced by The Dover Road when writing Private Lives; the overlaps are considerable.)
And this particular production and performance? I don’t think I have ever seen a better ensemble cast. There is no weak link, and the casting and directing were pretty much flawless (my only tiny caveat is that, while Stefan Bednarczyk was fantastic in the role of the wise, unshockable aid Dominic, also lending his skills on the piano in inspired musical additions to the play, it was somewhat hard to believe that he would be physically threatening towards the taller, younger, and bulkier Leonard).
The play depends upon a great Latimer, as the puppeteer of the whole piece. Milne helps with the fantastic lines he writes, but even with his humour and obvious good intentions, he could seem cruel – but Patrick Ryecart carries the role so smoothly and warmly that you can’t help side with Latimer and fall under his charm. It is up to he and Georgia Maguire, as Anne, to provide the pathos of the play alongside the comedy – and she does this equally brilliantly. A quiet scene where they have breakfast, and Latimer guesses the past that has led her to this present, was far more moving on stage than I had expected from the page. Anne is perhaps the most typical Milne character in The Dover Road – he loved a determined, amusing, slightly vulnerable, female lead – and AAM would have been thrilled by Maguire’s casting.
I could eulogise about everybody in this. Katrina Gibson has all the fun that is deserved in the entertainingly awful persona of Eustasia, particularly in her first glorious appearance. Tom Durant-Pritchard works wonders with the role of Leonard – who can come across as rather unattractive on the page, but is here an appealing, good man pushed beyond his boundaries and vulnerable to foibles. And Durant-Pritchard does more with an outraged side-eye than anybody I’ve ever seen.
But my favourite performance came from a character whom I hadn’t paid that much attention to when reading it: James Sheldon as Nicholas, suffering the attentions of Eustasia, had me choking with laughter. Not being an actor, I don’t know how much the audience affects them, but… well, if you were distracted by the guy roaring with mirth throughout much of the play, and particularly for the first scene in which we meet Nicholas and Eustasia, then that was I. Sheldon’s facial expressions, delivery of lines, and half-formed throwaway words, demonstrated such excellent comic ability that I ended up more or less just laughing at what the character was thinking. So good.
As I say, there were no weak links here. I’m hardly objective, but I think it isn’t a day too soon that a Milne play has been revived. The comedy and the poignancy of The Dover Road were shown in this production beyond anything I could have hoped, and I (for I believe this is what is done in the theatre review world) unquestioningly give it 5 stars.
Now, can I persuade anybody to stage Mr Pim Passes By?
Tea or Books? #25: to adapt or not to adapt, and To The North vs The House in Paris
Elizabeth Bowen and novels adapted into films – though not in conjunction…
In the first half of this podcast, we discuss novels adapted into films – and whether or not we would like our favourite novels to be adapted into films – along with our takes on many different films we’ve seen. (By the by, do go and listen to my brother’s films podcast, The C to Z of Movies, which you can also find on iTunes.)
In the second half, we pit two Elizabeth Bowen novels against each other: To The North and The House in Paris, and I get into a mess trying to work out what I think of her. I’d love to hear what Bowen fans (and antifans) think of these books.
Listen in the player above, or a podcast app, or visit our iTunes page. Sorry for slightly lower quality than usual – we spoke for so long that the file size was too big for the usual quality!
Here are the (many!) novels and authors we mention in this episode:
The Dover Road by A.A. Milne (on at the Jermyn Street Theatre)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
Persuasion by Jane Austen
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson
The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson
The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson
To The River by Olivia Laing
One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
A History of England by Jane Austen
Emma by Jane Austen
High School Musical: the book of the film (so sorry)
Sabrina the Teenage Witch
Sister Sister (look, I don’t know why I’m typing these out)
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
The Harry Potter series by J.K Rowling
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger
Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Thank You For Smoking by Christopher Buckley
Submarine by Joe Dunthorne
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
The Ghost and Mrs Muir by R.A. Dick
Patricia Brent, Spinster by Herbert Jenkins
Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day by Winifred Watson
Beryl Bainbridge
The Cazalet Chronicle by Elizabeth Jane Howard
Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer
Divergent by Veronica Roth
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White (The Lady Vanishes)
‘The Birds’ by Daphne du Maurier
To The North by Elizabeth Bowen
The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen
Manservant and Maidservant by Ivy Compton-Burnett
The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Muriel Spark
Friends and Relations by Elizabeth Bowen
Family and Friends by Anita Brookner (is what I meant!)
The Little Girls by Elizabeth Bowen
A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen
The Demon Lover by Elizabeth Bowen
The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen
The #1947Club is coming
I thought it was about time I sent a reminder that The 1947 Club is on its way – and it’s time to start preparing!
Together with Karen/Kaggsy, I’m running the week-long event from 10-16 October, where we encourage everybody to read books published in 1947 and share their thoughts about them. Together, we’ll build up an overview of the year’s reading – having already had lovely success with the 1924 Club and the 1938 Club.
I think it’s always best when people explore their own shelves, but the 1947 in literature list on Wikipedia can also help as a starting point. But here are some of my tips (please forgive formatting issues with the reviews that were imported from my old blog)…
A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor
Sisters By A River by Barbara Comyns
Manservant and Maidservant by Ivy Compton-Burnett
Of Love and Hunger by Julian Maclaren-Ross
Abbie by Dane Chandos
but the best ones I’ve read so far are the phenomenal novels The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton and One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes. If you’re struggling for inspiration, I’d recommend those as a great start!
Do let me know any suggestions you’d particularly like to make, and whether or not you’re hoping to join in with the 1947 Club. Feel free to use the badge, and do spread the word!
The Great British Bake Off: Series 7: Episode 3
Sue is back (with hair so different from the rest of the episode that it was either very windy or this is filmed long afterwards), a laboured pun has been made on the word roll (PUN KLAXON), and somewhere Paul is looking in a mirror and saying “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, who’s the breadiest of them all?” It must be… Bread Week!
Tbh, I always find bread week a wee bit annoying. Partly because there are very few ways one can be creative with bread without making it substantially worse than regular bread, and partly because Paul suddenly fears the challenge of anybody else in the bread arena, and wildly criticises everything he sets his eyes on.
But, as promised, Candice is wearing red for bread. I’m wondering how distinct her different lipsticks have to be over the series. By the final, will she be donning a shade of ultraviolet?
Blazer Watch, you ask? No? Well, here is is. Some very muted colours this week. And some intriguing turned-up sleeves from Sue.
In the Signature Challenge, they are making chocolate bread (“the bread must contain chocolate”, as Mel helpfully elaborates). I’m going to come in with a hasty ‘no’ at this point, as I don’t think sweet bread is a thing or should be a thing. If I want sweet bread, I’ll have cake. I do not want chocolate bread. I do not want chocolate on my bread. I hope I have made myself clear.
Mary, though, is apparently excited about the challenge, because they haven’t had it before. As the series go on, they will have to come up with increasingly unlikely (and unappetising) challenges. “Pineapple bread,” Mel will announce in Series 9. “METAL BREAD” squawks Sue in Series 12. By Series 15 they’ll be making flatpack furniture while Paul murmurs the word ‘bread’ in the background.
Another downside to bread week is that it’s not the most fun to watch. We learn (grab your notebooks, stat) that yeast is involved, and that people are putting entirely normal and bread-like ingredients into their bread. We’re left to gasp in awe and/or dismay at Candice putting in 250g of butter. Paul Reaction Face time, for a change:
KNEADING DOUGH HELPS DEVELOP GLUTEN PEOPLE. (An object lesson in the importance of punctuation.)
Val apparently kneads her 500 times, and wearily counts to eight before the camera mercifully pans away. I suspect she is the sort who would skip numbers while playing hide and seek.
Rav is making a babka, which he thinks is a Middle Eastern bread. Paul says it’s a Polish cake, and waltzes away. Right over to Benjamina, who thinks she’s making a babka, but is apparently make a couronne. Gosh, it’s intense. Sorry, no, it’s just in one tent. *orders some new sides because mine have split*
Mary tells Paul not to be ‘grumpy’ about it (glorious) and Colouring Pencils Man totally has Benjamina’s back when it comes to the name of it.
Kate is making two types of chocolate dough, because apparently some of her family will get knifey if they don’t get the one they like. She laughs nervously about pleasing everyone.
Over at Tom/Michael’s desk, he’s doing the windowpane test – which someone does most years, but GBBO always tells us about as though it were a fresh new invention. One can imagine GBBO as a caveman, forever trying to impress people with a circular stone or fire.
This year, we skate past the usual prove-in-proving-drawer-or-oven debate, in favour of Andrew’s daring (apparently) decision not to double prove. Look, I had no idea double proving was a necessity, but then I’ve never made bread. Mary is certainly shocked, and Rav treats it with the polite subdued horror that one would the tid-bit that a friend was considering bestiality.
The downside to proving and long oven times is that the bakers don’t have much to do for a while. Not enough screaming and running about and trying to turn demerara into a miniaturised sculpture of Weston-super-Mare. Selasi is really committing to his relaxation schtick.
Val takes a jaunt down memory lane, telling us that she couldn’t afford chocolate as a child. That can be added to the lollipops she couldn’t afford last episode. I’m fully expecting her to continue on this path throughout the series, confiding (by the end) that she couldn’t afford grass or friends or the number seven.
She does advise that you can make your own chocolate spread, instead of buying it. I economise by not having chocolate spread.
Michael (they just said his name! I’m golden) is every one of us who has tried to spread cold butter onto a sandwich:
People fill their doughs, twist them, cut them, and worry about whether they have too little, or too much, filling. Selasi wisely decides not to go for “too much”, suggesting only that he knows what the word “too” means. Andrew, meanwhile, with his SINGLE PROVE – remember that scandal of a paragraph ago? – has little to do but stare into his oven, and perhaps wonder if that butter wouldn’t be better off in the fridge. Otherwise it might be butter off, amirite.
I’m ten minutes into the episode and I can’t bear hearing the word ‘prove’ anymore. This always happens.
This is a shot that the editing team decide is a keeper:
We get intermittent shots of streams and daffodils, suggesting that we have inadvertently wandered into the mind of William Wordsworth, and then effectively a montage of people taking bread out of ovens – and a shot of Candice apparently taken by somebody lying on the floor.
She is wearing quite the fancy dress, incidentally, looking a fair colleen, as our Irish friends might say.
The fiddles come out, and the final minute is filled with people fanning their bread, scattering nuts, and saying “glaze, glaze, glaze” with the wild-eyed intensity of an insane ceramicist. Adorably, showing just how friendly this competition is, everybody rallies round to help Candice in her hour of need. She is doubtless grateful, but also adds “I hate oven gloves” – though presumably the alternative would be worse.
And there we have it. Suddenly the breads are all revolving in front of us, and we’re ready for some judging.
Paul likes Andrew’s bread DESPITE that single prove. Or single proof. Hmm. Not so good for quite a few of the other bakers, who have an unusually high proportion of underbaked bread. Which Paul invariably calls ‘raw’. Surely it is underbaked rather than raw? Isn’t it only raw when it’s a pile of ingredients? Look, Paul says “less curls” so I have no faith in anything he says, thinks, or feels. (He also tells Candice that hers is “down to the eat”, whatever that means. Whatever it is, it’s not good; she has a little cry and it’s very touching.) (THIS is how unsporty kids feel in your P.E. classes Candice, let me tell you from bitter personal experience.) (This took a turn.) (I’ll stop.)
Rav seems to do the best at this stage, and he adopts a Little Miss Muffet stance under a tree. Still wearing his apron, which doesn’t seem particularly hygienic.
That sun has suddenly disappeared by the rainy Technical Challenge – which is one of the more unpleasant sounding (and, it turns out, looking) bakes they’ve had for a while. Dampfnudel. I forgot to ask my German colleague if anybody actually eats these in Germany, but Benjamina is all of us on hearing the task:
We get our usual collection of bakers telling us that they haven’t heard of it, and haven’t made it before – they have this in common with literally everyone ever – and Candice says she was rather hoping to be making toast. Paul’s defence for assigning this task is that “we’ve never steamed bread before on the Bake Off”. Again, nor has anybody, ever. The camera operator does their best to make the dampfnudel look attractive in panning close-ups, but this only serves to ensure that nobody will ever make these again.
Like all the best breads, it’s served with a spoon. Mary damns it with faint praise by saying it is like an iced bun without icing. Mmm.
Selasi uses those muscles of his to slam the dough against the counter, and the BBC’s Foley artist has a high old time creating unlikely noises to go along with it. He also does something in the line of a fan dance with it.
Oh excellent. There’s an interesting history of dampfnudel saving a town or something that takes Mel off on her hols and allows Germany’s foremost food historian to repeat everything she’s just said in her voiceover.
Apparently dampfnudel is still very important to this community, as proved by a photo from about 1996 and a barbershop quartet singing something that almost all of the audience won’t understand, myself included. That’s quite enough of that. Let’s get back to the tent to see bakers making that noted baked good, plum sauce, and watch Candice attempt to divide 900 by 12 solely with the use of her fingers.
Somebody’s found some timpani, and that’s what accompanies the bakers putting unattractive looking dough balls in saucepans, and looking gloomily into the steam-covered lids. We see but through a glass darkly, y’all. At some point, inexplicably, foil gets added.
Having been told earlier that the bakers shouldn’t lift the lid early, it is with a delicious sense of dramatic irony that we watch every baker do precisely that.
Val. I love you.
Mel makes an excellent ‘rising dampf’ joke – see, she can do it when she needs to – and the unappealing dampfnudel are presented in their pans to the judging eyes of Mezza and Pezza. In short: all of them are hideous. It’s inconceivable that anybody could want to eat these. That German conflict probably ended because both sides developed a common enemy in the dampfnudel.
Rav comes last, followed by Jane. Winning the technical challenge, much to everyone’s surprise and consternation, is Val. She puts it down to the “pure luck that I’m older that everyone else”, showing that she has only the vaguest understanding of how time works.
Aaaand we’re onto the Showstopper Challenge. It’s ‘savoury bread’ (this should be a tautology), and we have to go through another year where we accept the harmless fantasy that a bread centrepiece is now, ever was, or ever could be a thing.
Oh, and they’ve got to have plaits in them.
Things kick off with Kate, who is taking a turn for the pagan with her corn maiden – but it does give Colouring Pencils Man another opportunity to show off his admirable shading.
It does sound delish, with foccaccia and goat’s cheese and other good things. Mel raises the topic of fertility and Kate violently asserts that she doesn’t want any more children. It all gets a bit awkward, and we wander over to see Michael plying Mary with (the prospect of) a Cypriot alcohol akin to white spirit.
Andrew is making a basket; Tom is making Thor’s hammer; Val is making… Noah’s Ark. While I am fully willing to believe that she was a passenger on said ark, her actual construction ambitions only seem to be tangentially related to it. She’s essentially shoving a few animals into a basket. “Yes, it’ll be plaited,” she explains to Paul, with the bright smile and weary patronising tone of an exhausted kindergarten teacher.
Look, I haven’t got a clue what’s going on in Colouring Pencil Man’s illustration, but it does end up eerily accurate.
There is quite a sweet moment where Mel queries why there aren’t two giraffes, rather than one (Bible knowledge time: there would actually have been seven giraffes, as there were seven of each animal considered kosher) and Val says “they’ve argued”. One of the doves, she adds, has flown away – which has more of a scriptural precedent.
Selasi tells some anecdote about sitting under a tree that apparently justifies his centrepiece not being a centrepiece. His voice remains like one that Marks and Spencer would use to advertise caramel puddings. Rav, meanwhile, is making something he’s calling pesto but which has seemingly none of the correct ingredients – and is interrupted by Mel and Sue playing ‘guess the smell’, where Mel tries (and fails) to fool Sue with a timer. I remain wholly in love with the fact that these two have the professionalism of two teenage girls putting together a dance routine for the end of year assembly.
Oh good. Lots of close-ups of cooking meat. I suppose that’s the price we pay for bread being appropriately savoury.
We scurry around the tent finding out who can’t plait (Selasi, Val), who can (Kate), and who has decided just to make a basket instead (Andrew). Kate, of course, used to do this to her pony.
Tom refuses to join in Mel’s naughty suggestions about the shape of his dough, because his mum will be watching. I applaud you, Tom, to the extent that I think I’ve finally established that your name is Tom rather than Michael. I’m not promising anything.
The word ‘prove’ has lost all meaning. I want a company to set up that does PR and baking, and it could be called PR.OVEN. And it would be wonderful.
Less wonderful is Val who, in the process of ignoring Mel’s questions about her Noah’s Ark animals, manages to… cut herself on an oven tray? I’m pretty sure she burned herself, and Sue has got entirely the wrong health and safety response in mind.
Paul looms around the tent like some sort of grim reaper, and we get our usual flurry of ovens taking things out of ovens while Val wanders around with her hand still in the air, apparently doing nothing whatsoever. Except look a little like her Statue of Liberty from last week.
After a quick final immersion in daffodils, we’re onto the judging. I don’t think any of them look particularly nice enough to feature in a ‘my favourites’ section. Instead, let’s have a gander at Val’s debacle. (“You can do design,” lies Mary, stroking the bread.)
Most people do pretty well – perhaps something with actually giving them enough time to bake the bread properly – but Selasi is criticised for just dumping a pile of shapeless loaves on the table, and Michael’s is considered a mess. There is not, I am sorry to tell you, enough coriander.
Most heartbreakingly, Candice gets all upset at her quite bad feedback on her underworked dough and appearance, but they do like her flavours. She’s obviously one to take things to heart – as opposed to our Val, who could be told that she was literally on trial for her baking ineptitude and would cheerily, madly, laugh it off. They seem to narrow it down to Val and Candice going home, in their pre-announcement debrief.
Then, rather out of nowhere, the winner is…
Tom – whom Mary describes as having been “consistently in the middle” over the past weeks – which, can I remind you, have only numbered two so far. How consistent can one be twice?
And it’s not Candice or Val heading home – but rather:
So, Tom has won and Michael has gone. Finally I can conclusively remember which name is whose. Sorry it took this, Michael, and all the best! You’ve still got hockey.
Next week – besides the threat of a return of Kate’s pagan doll – we’re on batter week. Who knew that was a thing? In what world is making pancakes a baking challenge? We’ll find out next time – hope you can join me!
