January, named after the Roman god Janus who had two heads: one for looking forward, one for looking back. It’s a good time for reflection and planning and I habitually use this slow, dark month for taking stock and making plans for the year ahead.
I would love to say these plans are profound but usually it’s far more prosaic, less ‘let’s travel around Mexico for a year!’ and more ‘what variety of kale to attempt on the allotment?’. With the weather cold and wet, there are worse things than taking refuge in my notebooks and catalogues and putting in orders for seeds, seedlings and tubers. As usual I have over-extended myself (do I really need 8 more 1.2m tall dahlia plants, given that the slugs usually eat them anyway?) and I will have to recruit parental support to get all these seeds going…memories of last spring’s seedling-apocalypse linger. In just a few weeks I’ll get the snapdragons going, and then the new season will definitely be up and running.
Given the quiet outside, one of the great luxuries of this time of year is finding the time and space for reading, thinking and learning. I bought myself Regula Ysewijn’s Dark Rye and Honey Cake as a late Christmas present; it was released several months ago but I don’t tend to buy so many books these days, particularly cookery books, which tend so often to be style over substance. Curiosity eventually won me over and thank goodness that it did. The beauty of this extraordinary, brilliant work is that it has substance in spades – but delivers that substance with the greatest style.
I’ve written and cooked from Regula’s books before; an anglophile (Regula is Belgian), she has published extensively about British baking and food culture and history. This new work takes her back to her roots in the Low Countries, and takes us on a tour of festival baking culture from the last four hundred years or so. There are recipes, of course, but most interesting are the essays explaining how sweet treats work their symbolic meaning into the high points of the year, from St Nicholas to Christmas to Lent, and the legacy that lives on into the everyday lives of today.
As well as a baker and food historian, Regula is a photographer (I’d describe her as an artist really) and the book is dense with considered, thoughtful photography. It would be easy to dismiss this with the brush of ‘style-above-substance’ mentioned earlier but look closer: the images are lit as if by a 16th century Dutch master; the styling references that of the Dutch still life tradition; the ceramics are Belgian or Dutch…every tiny detail is executed with care, precision and intelligence. Paintings from the 1500s sit alongside these new images, centring pies, fruits and breads as part of the visual culture of the age.
I came to this book knowing very little about the food culture of the Low Countries, save that they like a waffle or two. Well, Regula has made me a convert. From the tradition of frying dough at the kermis (fair), to the multi-day method of preserving pears by slow cooking and transforming them into vlaai (pie), to the influence of the Dutch and Belgian immigrants to the food culture of Minnesota, there is revelation after revelation. As is usual with Regula she bears witness to the truth that so much of contemporary Western wealth arose from the shoulders of enslaved people, via the trades in sugar and spice. And from that I learn about how the sugar processing industry led to the rise and fall of cities within what is now Belgium and Holland, and how the switch to domestically-grown beet sugar (rather than imported cane) changed the nature of the cakes, pies and breads that we cook today.
If that all sounds a little niche then the recipes also look enticing. There are 13 (13!) different ways of making waffles, all of them rooted in places across Belgian and intended for different occasions. I love that there is an entire page dedicated to discussing which waffle iron is best for which type of waffle; food geekery at its best. There is, of course, much discussion of spekulaas (spiced biscuits) and peperkoek (gingerbread), including the wonderful but sadly increasingly rare art of printing the dough with handmade wooden moulds, literally stamping biscuits with festive symbolism.
Occasionally a book that comes along that, when you finally reach the end of it, you feel sad, as if it’s a bereavement. That’s exactly how I feel of reaching the end of Dark Rye and Honey Cake (apart from the bit at the end where Regula introduces tenets of the Dutch language through the medium of pies, which made me laugh. If only all language lessons used baked goods as a reference point in explaining singular vs plural).
It’s a wonderful book and if you have any interest in food, art, baking, festivity, history, photography, there’s something here for you. I in awe, and in slight envy, of Regula’s brilliance.
Also this month:
Harvesting: Chard, rosemary
In the garden and allotment: Replaced the ancient redcurrant. Matt has attacked the wilderness area with his rough neck mattock (seriously), many further weeks of work lie ahead in shoring up the bank by the stream, clearing roots and bagging up rubbish. Ordered seeds and tubers for 2024.
Cooking: Panettone bread pudding, roast beef and yorkshires, turkey chilli, pear and chocolate pudding, gingerbread, waffles, coconut porridge, massaman curry. Making full use of the summer’s soft fruit harvest with compotes stirred into porridge, cakes and yoghurt.
Also: Winter colds, easing back to school/life, hot baths, big jumpers, TV, Wonka.