Bread of the yeasted kind - soda-bread is leavened with baking-soda, soured milk and light fingers - is the subject of a discussion next Wednesday June 7th at the last event of this year’s British Library’s Food Season. Olia Hercules, Katrina Kollegaeva and I will be talking about the importance of Europe’s staple grain-food (with particular emphasis on rye) in Ukraine, the Baltic and Eastern Europe.
Which put me in mind of the yeast-raised wheat-bread of southern Europe, particularly that of Andalusia, where I lived and brought up my young family through mid-1960’s till the end of the ‘70’s. The first schoolroom the children attended, a one-size-fits-all (5-year-olds to 16 year-olds), was in the pueblo of Pelayo, just down the road on the way to our market-town, the port of Algeciras. The school was housed on the ground floor of the Guardia Civil’s living quarters, conveniently across the road from the bakery, adjacent to the wheat-fields and a donkey-powered threshing-floor. Everything was in its proper place and working as it should before industrialisation emptied the countryside, including a patch of well-watered earth for growing potatoes, garlic, tomatoes, peppers and storable beans.
The wheat for the bakery was stone-ground to order between mill-wheels powered by a stream that rose in the mountains behind and never dried up, even in the hottest summer. The baker’s wood-fired oven was in use every day except Sunday. The dough was raised with leavening kept overnight from the day before, and the bread were sold as 1k or 2k loaves, though special requests were accepted for 5k or 7k loaves if required. As would certainly be the case for those embarking on a long journey to Seville or even Granada, or who cropped the cork-oak forest that provided forage for semi-wild herds of ibercio pigs, or stripped the cork for sale to the wine-makers, or prepared the charcoal that was the principal source of heat and warmth in the countryside.
The shape of the loaves never varied: 1k loaves were round, 2k loaves were oblong with a twist at each end. The crumb was cream-coloured and dense-textured, and the crust was deep and brown. Very little salt was added, but each loaf included a tiny amount of lime shoveled into each batch from a heap in the yard for (I was assured) medicinal reasons - to strengthen bones and teeth. The truth of this could be observed nightly in the bar where the villagers played backgammon, a full-time occupation in winter, when the ritual of meeting and greeting provided ample opportunity to display remarkably good teeth.
The bakery's bread, when stored in an unglazed earthenware pot with a wooden lid, never went mouldy but dried out naturally. In this form it could be torn into pieces and soaked in water or broth and eaten as gazpacho. This, a kind of bread-porridge eaten cold in summer and hot in winter, was not, as might be supposed, a sophisticated refreshment in which the main ingredient is tomato-juice, but a robust bowlful of softened bread sharpened with vinegar, enriched with olive oil and seasoned with garlic, with the possible addition of a handful of chopped tomato and/or green or red peppers, and maybe a few scraps from the serrano ham-bone or chopped hard-boiled egg.
As a spin-off from the bakery, the baker's wife kept chickens for eggs and meat, and provided the neighbourhood with their Christmas bird - turkey or goose - delivered live to order (women were expected to deal with birds and rabbits, anything larger was left to the men). Turkeys, relative newcomers arrived from the Spanish main, were known, somewhat mischievously, as Jesuits - because (reason 1) of their scarlet wattles, reputation for greed and habit of gobbling; or (reason 2) the monks, early colonisers in the Americas, held a monopoly on the imported birds and charged exorbitant prices for the chicks.
Addendum: Required reading for anyone settling in Andalusia in the 1960’s, before the region became a mecca for tourists, was Gerald Brenan’s South from Granada, an account of life and people in the Alpujarras, a wild and remote region of Andalucia where the author settled as a young man from the early 1920’s till the outbreak of Spain’s Civil War. Gerald and my husband Nicholas had literary friends in common through a Bloomsbury Group connection, and we often visited him and wife Gamal in the 1960’s and ‘70’s when they’d set up home in Alhaurin, a small pueblo near Malaga.
Gerald, unlike the rest of the Bloomsbury Group, appreciated the importance of food in the social life of any community, rich or poor: “Almost everyone agrees about the excellence of Spanish bread. The loaf is very close textured, but it has a taste and sweetness like no other bread in the world. This, I imagine, is because the grain is entirely ripe before being harvested. Besides loaves we had roscos, or rolls made in the form of rings, and tortas, which are flat cakes made with wheat flour, sugar and oil. The poor, and sometimes the rich too, ate maize bread, and in the mountain farms they atre black bread made of rye: for shepherds it had the advantage of not going stale. Two dishes unknown to Western cooking are made with stale bread, though in more primitive times they were common enough: the first of these is gachas, a porridge of wheat flour simmered in water which used to be known in England as hasty pudding. In the villages it was taken with fried sardines, tomatoes and pimentos. The second is migas, a sort of porridge but fried in olive oil, garlic and water, which could be made either of wheat or maizeflour, or breadcrumbs. The poor eat it with the invariable sardines, while the rich like to pour hot chocolate over it. My landlord took it with both hot chocolate and fish, stirred up well together.”
You’ll find more of my own stories of life and food in southern Spain in The Flavours of Andalucia (in print as a gorgeous fully-illustrated new edition from Grub Street).
Oh my...what a lovely piece. Makes me want to shed tears for the world we have lost.
Fascinating as ever, and I’d read your substack just for the beautiful illustrations