Firstly – sorry I’ve been a bit behind with adding links to the 1947 Club post, but do keep them coming! It’s great to see so many different books being covered – and you have until Sunday to finish reading and reviewing.
This one might be my last for the week, though, and it’s the one I’ve been reading most of the week: Black Bethlehem by Lettic Cooper, probably best known to most of us (if at all) for the novel The New House, which was both a Persephone title and a Virago Modern Classic. That’s certainly why I bought it whenever I did buy it, which I think might have been almost a decade ago. It’s nice that I’ve been able to do all my 1947 reading from books I’ve had waiting on my shelves for years – though (and sorry to write what will probably be my final review for this club as a bit of a downer) I didn’t really like this one all that much…
The book is quite slim, but the font is tiny and I think it’s actually probably quite a long novel… or, indeed, ‘three long short stories’, as I discovered it was only towards the end of reading (from this not-super-positive contemporary review). Before that, I’d just got rather confused, trying to link the sections together – the only link, so far as I can tell, is the appearance of John Everyman in each part, and that is evidently a not-particularly-coded way of introducing an everyman throughout.
There is a brief Prologue in an air raid shelter in 1944 that wasn’t particularly promising – Cooper very much puts theoretical arguments in different characters’ mouths, without much attempt at verisimilitude. Thankfully it’s pretty brief, and then we’re into Part 1. This concerns Alan Marriott in the final months of the war, invalided out of fighting, and giving an account of his wartime experience as part of a radio broadcast. We then see his uncertainties about his future, how he’s trying to keep his family happy while still trying to understand his role in this bizarre new world – and he’s in the midst of something of a love triangle at the same time.
Part 1 was my favourite section. It’s quite odd to have a female writer describe the life of a soldier – particularly as so many writers were presumably available in 1947 who’d had firsthand experience; it’s in the third person, but very much trying to put across Alan’s views and memories. It’s that slight disjointedness that doesn’t quite ring true. Cooper is describing how she imagines soldiers lived and thought and reacted to the war – and she doesn’t quite hit authentic notes. I am a passionate believer that anybody should be allowed to write about pretty much anything, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be completely successful. BUT this is still the best part of Black Bethlehem – engrossing and detailed.
Part 2 was my least favourite… We hop back to 1941, and a first person narrator whom we eventually learn is called Lucy. I spent most of this centre chunk of the book trying to work out who she was and how she related to anybody else in the first section, and perhaps I’d have enjoyed it more if I’d known from the outset that there were no connections… Lucy’s work in an office was quite interesting, but mostly this part (in diary format) felt a bit tedious, and I didn’t care enough about the characters to get overly bothered when she found herself in a love triangle. Though there was the odd moment that will stick with me – such as this depiction of being in a house when a bomb hits:
After the second stick the raid seemed to shift farther off, and we all got rather drowsy sitting by the hot fire. Mrs. Everyman murmured something about taking the children back to bed. The baby was asleep. Muriel was half asleep, leaning against her mother’s knee. Marta sat smoking and staring into the fire. I began to tell Peter a story. Suddenly there was a whistle, not a very long one, and the floor heaved under our feet. I knew, – I don’t know how, – that it was a stick coming towards us. I jumped up and leaned over Peter in a futile attempt to keep him safe. We could never decide afterwards whether it is true or not that you don’t hear the whistle if the bomb lands very near you. I don’t think I did hear it. Mrs Everyman said she did. The whole room seemed to come up through my stomach. There was a loud explosion, and then a long crash of falling stone. The black-out blew in, the glass cracked, the lights went out. The room was full of smoke and choking dust.
The third part is much shorter – about a boy called Simon (of all things) and him coming to terms with the arrival of his baby brother, in 1935. It was pretty good, but quite different from the tone of the rest of Black Bethlehem, and by that point I was rather tired of the whole thing.
So – not a 1947 book I’d recommend, though also one that I suspect others would enjoy, going into it eyes open. Maybe I read it too quickly to get it finished this week. And I’m still not sure why it’s called Black Bethlehem. Oh well – it still adds to a perspective of the year, which we wouldn’t get if we only read the best books of the year!
I’ve really enjoyed the serendipity (if that’s not too great a stretch) of finding 1947 books that have been on my shelves for ages, waiting to be read – and particularly glad when it happens to be a Persephone title. The Blank Wall has been on my radar since Persephone reprinted it in 2009 – and it was nice to finally read it.
The Blank Wall concerns Lucia Holley, left with her teenage daughter Bee, son David, and her father while her husband is away ‘somewhere in the Pacific’; left to manage the home and the emotional tangles of Bee, who fancies herself much mature than she is, and who is involved with an older man. (When I said ‘manage the home’, I should add that her maid Sibyl is also there – The Blank Wall is a fascinating depiction of the relationship between a white employer and a black maid in 1940s America; a loving and close relationship that is yet divided by the rules and restrictions of the period.)
After this, Lucia gets involved in some dodgy dealings – feeling out of her depth, she somehow manages to take control of the situation nonetheless. Despite a few rather doubtful moments, the novel does a good job of showing ordinary people experiencing extraordinary events – and, somehow, the power of that ordinariness overcoming everything. That is, Lucia always feels like she is experiencing real life – even when that life is far from normal reality. That shows an impressive strength in depiction of an everyday wife, mother, and daughter – who earns our affection along with our respect and our anxieties. In some ways, this is far more a domestic portrait than it is a thriller.
Oh, and the brief depiction of New York – where Lucia travels, from her lakeside rurality, to try to raise funds for blackmail (yes indeed!) – is equally interesting for its snapshot of the time and place.
I read it in its entirety on the plane back from Siena – well, probably with time sitting in the airport added on too – which gives you an indication of how quickly I was able to race through around 230 pages. It is certainly a page turner – maybe even a thriller, though there is nothing particularly tense or terrifying here. There is very little in the way of a mystery to solve (though the reader does wonder if the carpet will be pulled from under their feet). Raymond Chandler called her ‘the best character and suspense writer (for consistent but not large production)’ and particularly championed this one and – though his judgements are not always to my taste; he was no fan of A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery – but in this case he has picked a charming writer. Her strengths perhaps lie more in character than in suspense (though I suspect suspense has taken more of centre stage in the decades since he made that pronouncement), but The Blank Wall was certainly an extremely entertaining way to pass a flight.
In 2011, probably around the time I was writing my doctoral chapter on Sylvia Townsend Warner, I madly bought up all her collections of short stories. And, let me tell you, some of them are not easy to find affordably – but I wanted to stock up my shelves. Fast forward five years and I’ve read… none of these collections. And possibly none of the stories, thinking about it. So hearty cheers for the 1947 Club sending The Museum of Cheats up my tbr pile – it’s absolutely brilliant.
Warner tends towards the brief, with short stories, which is exactly how I like them – presumably because she had to fill certain spaces in the New Yorker, and anywhere else that housed these. The only exception is the title story – and I’m actually going to gloss over that one, as I found it much my least favourite story in the collection; it is on the model of The Corner That Held Them (a Warner novel I found intolerably dull, though it has many devoted fans), concentrating on the history of a building rather than the details of people’s everyday lives.
But, setting that one aside, Warner has an expertly observant eye. I was reminded a little of Katherine Mansfield – in terms of the searing through to the centre of a matter, and the potentially life-altering moments among the banal; indeed, how the banal can be life-changing. We see a hostess curious about the unkind caricature she finds on a notepad by the telephone; a woman show paintings to an uninterested visitor; a returning solider discover his books have been given away. The most striking story, perhaps, is ‘Step This Way’ – about abortion.
Warner opens each story with confident finesse, immediately taking the reader into her unusual view of the world. Here is the opening of ‘A Pigeon’:
The two large windows of the room on the first floor looked straight out into the trees of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. A pigeon was cooing among the greenery. Tears rushed into Irene’s eyes. She had a sentimental character, and how sad it was, really, a girl of her age, as innocent as that bird, and all by herself, sitting opposite a solicitor called Mr. Winander and having an interview about her divorce.
The balance of that sentence and those clauses, ending on the word ‘divorce’, strikes me as so cleverly done. And she is not simply concerned with drama; I love the way Warner finds a gentle humour in the curious patterns of normal speech. This is in the same story:
“Mrs. Johnston, you must forgive me asking this. Are you quite sure that you wish to go forward with a divorce?”
“Oh yes, definitely. I never was one to stay where I wasn’t welcome.”
I suppose we have to acknowledge that these stories were probably written and published in 1946, at least some of them, but the collection certainly came out in 1947 – and, yes, the war looms large. I wasn’t expecting it to, actually. It seemed the sort of thing that would pass Warner by in her concentration on the minute. Having said that, she still looks at the war as it affects individual relationships and minds – nothing so dramatic as a world stage. This, from ‘To Come So Far’, is representative of the way Warner uses the war for her own quirky angle:
She was worn out with getting on her husband’s nerves, being alternately too strong or too weak – like tea. If he were a returned soldier, all this would be natural. Magazines were full of stories about manly nerves unable to face the return of civilian life or articles on How to Re-Acclimatise Your Man, and newspapers were full of accounts of murdered wives. But throughout the war Arnold had been an indispensable civilian, jamming enemy broadcasts, and throughout the war they had got on together perfectly, complaining of the discomforts of living and giving each other expensive presents because to-morrow we die. Now, in 1946, Arnold was mysteriously as indispensable as ever and they hadn’t died.
She has such a great turn of phrase. It’s there throughout Lolly Willowes and, twenty years later, her style remains unmistakably hers – and these sorts of unexpected stylistic quirks seem to me to be even more appropriate in a short story. It’s the sort of context that can carry the weight of something slightly bizarre, without it distorting a full-length character study. For example, in ‘Story of a Patron’ – all about the discovery of a ‘primitive artist’ – she includes this:
Mr. Haberdone asked to see more examples of Mr. Rump’s art, and Mr. Rump produced a portrait of Mrs. Rump. It was a remarkable likeness, quite as accurate as the portrait of the cactus but more dispassionate, as though Mrs. Rump had been grown by a rival seedsman.
One of my favourite stories in the collection was also one of the most curious – ‘The House with the Lilacs’. Most of the stories in The Museum of Cheats capture moments in ordinary lives, showing how extraordinary they can seem to the people experiencing them. In ‘The House with the Lilacs’, the reader is left uncertain – Mrs Finch reminds her family of a house they looked at when choosing where to live, and recalls it in perfect detail, but not where it was. The rest of the family know that neither they nor she have ever seen such a house. And that is more or less where we leave it. Even more intriguingly, in a letter Warner wrote to William Maxwell, she describes Mrs Finch as ‘my only essay at a self-portrait; her conversation and her ineffability’.
Sadly, The Museum of Cheats is pretty scarce – though more copies seem to be available in the US than in England; despite living in Dorset, Warner’s stories always found a more appreciative audience in New York. I can only imagine that her other stories would be equally rewardingly tracked down (if not as appropriate for the 1947 Club). I’ll certainly be making sure I read more from my Warner shelf before too long.
I’ll use this page to collect the reviews across the blogosphere – I’ll try to track them down, but do leave links (or, indeed, reviews) in the comment section :)
Just in case this all means nothing to you – Karen and I are hosting a week where we ask everybody to read and review books published in 1947, to get an overview of the year’s publishing. Everything is welcome – novels, stories, plays, non-fiction, whatever – published anywhere in the world, in any language.
(I’ll hunt for new reviews, but will also have a section for older reviews if you send ’em to me :))
The 1947 Club kicks off tomorrow (for the uninitiated – across the blogosphere we’re encouraging everybody to read and review any book published anywhere in the world in 1947, to get an overview of the year collaboratively) – so I thought I ought to make sure the GBBO recap happens first. After the somewhat confusing theme last week, we’re back to tradition with… dessert week!
And… we don’t get any Mel and Sue bit before the titles. This is rather disconcerting, and a Taste of Things To Come. Instead, we get our brief recap, that young girl eating raspberries in the opening titles (I hope she’s now doing shopping centre appearances and signing autographs; she is the most recognisable silent TV child since that lass who pointed at the blackboard next to the terrifying doll in the old BBC test card), and a bevvy of bakers putting on aprons.
Andrew assures us that he is ‘a desserts man through and through’, and the interviewer somehow engineers a way to get him to say ‘down’, as it is one of the best words to hear in a Northern Irish accent. Jane, meanwhile, says of the other contestants “I love them all, but” and I stop listening because I don’t want to be the witness to the death threats that will inevitably follow.
“I shall bathe in the blood of my nemeses.”
Nah, but I love Jane. My favourites are Benjamina, Selasi, Candice, and Jane – but Jane is the only one of those I’d feel able to talk to in person, as the others are so young and cool and collected that I’d just giggle and cry. I hope Jane takes this in the warm-hearted spirit with which it was intended; essentially, I can see us at a coffee morning together.
Candice points out that, with so few bakers left in the tent, ‘there really is nowhere to hide’, which suggests that hitherto she has evaded eviction solely by folding herself up into the fridge.
“Candice? Come out of that cupboard” – Selasi
Tom talks about The Curse of the Star Baker – apparently Mel and Sue’s efforts the other week to make that an accepted benchmark have succeeded. What has ALSO succeeded – segue much? – is the attendance at Blazer Watch. All four are lined up for inspection, and you can tell by his face that Paul knows he hasn’t brought the necessaries.
Verdict: loving Sue and Mel’s blazers and colour combos. That’s not really a blazer, Mary, but we’ll let it slide because it’s colourful and you’ve made an effort. Mr Hollywood – see me later.
The signature challenge for this week is a roulade – of the sponge variety, rather than meringue, and known as the Swiss roll to many of us. I have made a rather bad apricot and brandy snap roulade in my time, so I feel fully equipped to assess. What I will say is that this follows the trend of the series of doing relatively simple challenges. (Incidentally, I made Viennese whirls this weekend, and they were very tasty though my piping is very much not up to scratch.)
Benjamina confides in the listener that it is another week, while Selasi adds the helpful addendum that we are getting closer to the final. Having sorted out the rudimentaries of time, we’re ready to see some roulades being made.
Mary is in the Garden of Instruction, letting us know that a roulade should have a nice spiral (which is a step better than these segments usually are, as Mezza and Pezza tend only to advise that the baked good should be ‘perfect’). Yes, she just moves her finger round in a circle, rather than a spiral, but we’ll take it.
Baby steps.
Andrew is playing to his strengths – having ginger hair – by introducing orange stripes in the sponge of his bake, a technique which has a French (?) term that I am not going to attempt to type down. It’s a nice idea.
He’s possibly the only baker who’s doing very much out of the ordinary, in terms of technique and decoration. Selasi, for instance, is making a nice lemon and strawberry roulade with the rather unambitious addition of piped cream. ‘Fresh’ notes Colouring Pencils Man, doing the best he can without a lot to excite.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure it’d be delish.
Mary advises that she wants no crack at all in the roulade – the sort of request one need only make if one has already been offered a hash brownie.
Slightly more adventurously, Tom is intending to put the ingredients for millionaire’s shortbread in his roulade – possibly (I wouldn’t like to guess) in a veiled comment about Paul’s decision to pursue money rather than honour in choosing Channel 4 over the BBC. Look, it’s possible. Also possible is that Paul detects this subtle jab, and this is why he seems uncertain about the introduction of a biscuity-type-thing (technical term) to a roulade. I couldn’t say. (NB: I do realise none of this is possible.) (Or is it?) (No.)
Benjamina is making a pina colada roulade, replete with cocktail umbrella, but this is all white noise for Mary B until she hears the word ‘rum’. Which earns Benjamina (hurrah!) this excellent Mary Berry wink.
Oh, I love her.
Candice seems to be relegated this challenge to being the baker who tells us what the time is, and puts things in and out of ovens as a marker of said time. Which is a shame, because her raspberry/passion fruit/white chocolate roulade sounds entirely delicious. Those flavours are making me feel desperately hungry. I shouldn’t recap before dinner.
We head over to Tom, who is starting again – much to Mel’s consternation in her usual doom-laden voiceover. He seems pretty chirpy about it himself, waggling an eyebrow around with aplomb. Meanwhile, Jane is busy taking the controversy of the week – rolling her roulade the wrong way! Gasps a-plenty. Colouring Pencils Man makes sly digs at this decision, with his illustration that preempts the lack of a complete spiral in Jane’s roulade.
This is the colouring pencils version of a subtweet.
Apparently she does this to get more slices out of it – which seems rather unnecessary in the context of the competition, but I do also like that she’s sticking to tried and true techniques.
Various curds are made – Selasi makes a victory grimace at the camera when Benjamina enjoys his – and then Mel seems entirely overcome by mere proximity to Selasi. We see bakers spread cream or curd or sauce in their roulades, and there is much talk of overfilling. Let me tell you, I wildly overfilled that one roulade I made. And then – rolling! They all make the rolling look pretty easy. It’s almost a relief to see Tom spread chocolate with the (sorry Tom) lack of finesse that I would anticipate in my own efforts.
Relatable content.
A little orchestra, and a montage of people doing absurd things like filling raspberries with cream, tell us that the challenge is over.
Jane’s roulade looks delicious – but, as Nostradamus with the colouring pencils predicted, it does not have a full spiral.
Paul isn’t sure about the alcohol, but Mary enjoys the mixture, and looks delightfully self-aware about her boozehound status.
Benjamina does OK, though her fake coconut is too fake, and Tom is told he should have added cream. Over at Casa de Candice, I enjoy once more the amount of effort she puts into the presentation of her bakes – an effort which, as always, appears to be entirely overlooked by the judges (especially since Selasi gets fits of giddy appreciation from Mary after dumping his roulade on a photo frame – presumably the closest thing he had to hand at the time). But just look at this.
There is a roulade there somewhere, promise.
Andrew comes out on top, though, despite his swirl being rather collapsed because of the softness of the filling. Selasi does well, but doesn’t provide enough lemon curd for Mary “loves a lemon” Berry.
Aaaand it’s Technical Challenge time! The bakers are being asked to make… a marjolaine. Sure sure. My response was not unlike Candice’s:
“Marj-a-which-what?”
Turns out it’s a French layered gateaux, with cream and meringue and ganache, and nobody knows anything about it. Tom immediately claims that the only part of it he’s made before is ganache – I absolutely refuse to believe that he’s never made meringue before.
Andrew pronounces the ‘l’ in almonds so he swoops to the bottom of my rankings.
They start off with a dacquoise – which Mary Berry describes as a ‘glorified meringue’ – and we whisk (ahahaha) through the initial stages so quickly that I can only assume it’s quite easy. They make what they can of a ‘to pipe or not to pipe’ moment. It’s the Hamlet/Magritte mash-up we’ve all long been waiting for.
In the blink of an eye, everybody seems to have done more or less everything except compiling and decorating, and two excellent things happen. Firstly, this little lad:
and, secondly, Mel delivers her intro to Whither Baking? by popping out from behind a tree, squirrel-like.
This takes us to a history of praline that you’d know about if you read OxfordWords. Sue matches her personal best with awkward interviews; the poor French folk she quizzes don’t seem to get her sense of humour at all. At one point she starts mocking the French accent. Let’s go back to the tent, shall we?
The bakers are removing their dacquoise (whatever the plural is) from the oven, and make an impressive job of taking them out of tins without them crumbling into piles of piped dreams. (I am on FIRE with my pipe jokes today, n’est-ce pas?) Andrew’s does crack, but Mel promises to keep the secret to the grave – apparently unaware that they are being filmed.
My favourite moment of the episode is when Andrew describes the desired look as ‘like a Viennetta but posher’, and Sue replies ‘Doesn’t get posher than a Viennetta, my darling’. Do people have Viennetta outside of the UK? Will that translate? It’s a wonderful cultural benchmark.
How should one pipe the chocolate around the top? This has all the marks of the Arbitrary Judging Factor that will prove all-important.
Some nuts and whatnot are scattered in intriguing lines on top, and everybody is finished. I’m super impressed by this line up. It all looks extremely good – and very similar – to me.
Mary and Paul make the most of the judging – and yes, of course, the chocolate piping comes up. They manage to say ‘layers’ a lot, even though everybody has done them correctly and there is nothing to say. Paul is left with such evident nonsense as “though it’s crisp, there’s a nice chew to it, and the chew melts”.
From last to first… Selasi, Tom, Jane, Benjamina, Candice, and Andrew. Well done Ando. He described himself as ‘chuffed’ in the outside interview bit, which I hope will baffle some non-British viewers.
Time for the Showstopper Challenge, you say? Well, you’re not wrong, give or take the judges and presenters sitting around the table and telling us that pretty much everybody is in trouble, Mel and Sue included. Heck, even I might be in trouble. Anyway – they will be making mousse cakes. Yum!
Mary and Paul describe what the texture of the mousse should be like (combined, oddly, with shots of Benjamina cutting apples and Candice zesting a lemon) and Mary warns that it should not be too set, whatever that means. Back in the tent, I’m already very impressed with Jane’s fleur-de-lis. I have spent much of the episode wondering if this had initially been French week, and then changed to dessert week, and these do nothing to dispel that suspicion.
Oo-la-la!
Apparently these are created in ‘decor paste’, which sounds disgusting, but is actually just cake mixture with egg whites instead of the whole egg. Whatever it is, sign me up. Only partly cos Colouring Pencils Man gets to dig out his non-beige-scale crayons.
YES PLEASE.
Less enticing, to me, are Benjamina’s and Tom’s – as they’re both using apples. I like an apple, but it’s always at the bottom of my list when it comes to dessert ingredient choices.
Mel makes dire warnings about the time mousse will take to set. Selasi intends to use the freezer for a bit, and Mary thinks this is an excellent idea. “It adds an extra chill” she notes to Selasi, who must surely have known what a freezer does. Mary is still remembering the days of being sent down to the ice house, of course.
I learnt something in this episode about gelatin. Apparently it comes in sheets. Who knew? (It’s also making me wonder if all the mousse I’ve eaten in restaurants over the years has secretly not been suitable for vegetarians… oh well!) Here’s Jane tossing some sheets into her bowl.
Guess what? Too much gelatin is TERRIBLE. Too little gelatin is TERRIBLE. ‘Twas ever thus in the Bake Off tent.
Tom is piping mousse into his hipster sandwiches (don’t ask) and doesn’t seem to be put off by Paul’s elaborately horrified reaction to the news. “You’re PIPING mousse?” he asks incredulously…
“Yeppers,” grins Tom, blithely unconcerned.
Candice is making a million different components to her delicious-sounding desserts. (Let’s call them desserts, sure.)
Though it is nothing compared to the five mousses Jane is making, and she seems to be constantly surrounded by enormous – albeit apparently empty – baking bowls. These sit precariously over her desk, and she appears to be counting them over and over in the early stages of some sort of breakdown.
Tom has brought the best equipment to the tent: this handheld fan.
It’s not even battery-operated. He has to turn a handle to generate the fan. It can’t possibly be any more efficient than wafting those bizarre paddle-fans around. But I am a gent who loves a fan, and recently made the middle-aged purchase of a battery-operated fan in Marks and Spencer – as well as quite genuinely considering my enormous fan as among the best investments I have ever made.
Some delicious-looking chocolate and raspberry mousses are going around the tent. And then we cut from Andrew’s mint mousse (a subtle hint of green to it) to Selasi’s mint mousse… erm…
Frankly I’m surprised the tent wasn’t evacuated immediately.
Jane is worried about whether or not she’s included gelatin in all her mousses. Since this is never mentioned again, I can only assume she did. There is much talk of whether or not mousses will set in time, and some very delicious looking concoctions coming out of freezers and fridges… speaking of, is this a secret fridge we haven’t seen before?
Perhaps they were wary after #bingate?
Let’s have an update from Selasi’s radioactive bunker before we finish:
I’m pretty sure I saw this on a Goosebumps cover once.
And they’re done! Some very good mousses. Mary describes Jane’s as ‘startling’, though apparently that’s meant to be a compliment – and Paul responds with ‘that’s mousse!’, as though waking from a dream and discovering anew where he is. Mary applauds the ‘moussiness’. Let’s take a moment to applaud her fleur-de-lis cakes.
Selasi’s mousses are too big, and the layers are in the wrong order, so we are told – but his passion fruit mousses get a thumbs up.
Mmmmm
I can’t begin to understand what’s going on with Candice’s display. The mousses seem to be floating on jelly or something in wine glasses. I feel like Damien Hirst maybe had a hand in it all.
Benjamina’s look bad but taste amazing (definitely the right way around, IMO), and Paul seems almost reluctant to concede it. Having said that, his concession includes ‘more mousse-like’, which is rather damning with faint praise.
Tom’s hipster sandwiches help us learn that piping mousse doesn’t work. Live and learn. Doing rather better, though, is Andrew and his Ferris wheels of mousse.
Fun fact: did you know that Ferris wheel is eponymous?
We get the post-judging debate, but I can’t remember an episode in any series where it was more obvious (from the comments and general tone) who was going to win and who was going to lose.
Star Baker is…
And, going home, is…
Hope you’re enjoyed Dessert Week, y’all! Come back next time for… whatever happens then. And now I’m going to immerse myself in 1947 books for the #1947Club…
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.
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!”
With that forced jollity, you have a career as a children’s presenter ahead of you.
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.
Jane’s face says it all.
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.
Thanks Selasi. Thelasi.
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.
I think you can put them put them still further, Selasi. Dream big.
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?)
#brokenBritain
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:
“More beige please” – Colouring Pencils Man
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:
Swit-swoo.
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.
So sorry.
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.
Somebody bought a multipack of citrus fruits and didn’t want to waste ’em.
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.
Though, for all I know, it’s meant to resemble the skin of a lime.
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:
Get ready to hear ‘leaf-shaped’ a lot.
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.
I wonder what Richard’s pencil is up to nowadays?
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.
At least to somebody who hasn’t the smallest idea what air traffic control is in practice.
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.
BUY! SELL! Look, I don’t know.
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.
Well, I’d be pleased with it.
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”):
Paul calls it a mess. A mean, how DARE he.
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.)
But they are very impressed with his tea flavours.
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!
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
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.)
Yes, they’re singing an absurd song. RIP Mel and Sue.
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.
I miss you already.
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?
So. Many. Questions.
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.
“Stay over there, Channel 4. Don’t come any closer.”
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.
Maybe just a warning?
“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.
Maybe it was arranged just so Colouring Pencils Man could use non-brown colours in his set.
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?
His face implodes at the thought.
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?
Thank you, Mary.
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.
“Tofu is very bland,” he says encouragingly.
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.
J’ACCUSE
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…
I’m beginning to see why yours don’t turn out great, Jane.
…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.
Look at those seeds. Appearance is the least of his problems.
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:
Yorkshire NOings, morelike.
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:
Remember these, dear reader.
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.
“I turned down The Apprentice for this.”
“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.
“Srsly, why?”
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.
“Oh hahaha THIS? Well, if you promise not to tell anybody…”
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:
*heart emoji*
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.
Oh my LORD I would watch a show where these two fought crime.
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.)
And if that weren’t enough: rosewater
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.
“Well done, you’ve cracked it” – Mezza
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…
My new fave, and not just cos I’m hoping she’ll pop those churros in the post to me.
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.
Firstly – sorry I’ve been a bit behind with adding links to the 1947 Club post, but do keep them coming! It’s great to see so many different books being covered – and you have until Sunday to finish reading and reviewing.
