Toast & Marmalade: and Other Stories

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Now it does have big holes through it, and the marmalade can fall through. But the holes in our sourdough are not too big. Some sourdoughs have huge holes but ours are just right I believe. We try to keep a balance because we have some customers who love the holes and others who say they can’t butter their toast, “there’s not enough butter-to-bread ration because of the holes”, hehehe. Things like this. But I think we’ve found the balance. Jeremy Lee, guest judge on the Great British Menu, head chef at one of London’s oldest restaurants, Quo Vadis in Soho, and author of the upcoming Cooking: Simply and Well for One or Many (4th Estate, Sep 2022). Put the lemon zest and juice into a bowl and pour on the warm syrupy mixture. Lightly beat the eggs, then stir them in too, along with the cream and the toasted breadcrumbs, and give everything a thorough mix to combine. The universal balm: tea. Everything else, from coffee to fruit juice to champagne, creates a barbed-wire conflict of flavours and/or heartburn. First, crumbs in the butter. Why? The historical solution was using a dedicated butter knife to transfer butter to your plate. But that is unnecessary faff. By simply wiping your knife* on the crust-edge of your toast between approaches, you will minimise the transference of crumbs. If some debris does end up in the butter, then, using a clean section of the knife’s edge, tidy up the pat by lightly scraping off the crumbs (and use that crumby butter on your toast).

Yes I do eat marmalade. I have a neighbour at our shop named Paul who’d make marmalade every January and give me a pot. And then, only about a year and a half ago, I added it to my butter pound cake recipe and it was delicious, I loved it. But the best bread to eat with marmalade has got to be sourdough. It’s light – well, mine is, our “Brixton Sour”– it’s full of flavour, and I think it carries marmalade really well. I make our sourdough with a mix of white, wholemeal, rye and spelt, so it’s got a wholesome flavour but it’s a high-hydration, so it’s really light and makes great toast. Line the chilled pastry shell with a circle of baking paper (scrunch it up and open it out again so it fits nicely) and some ceramic baking beans (uncooked rice works well too). Bake the pastry shell, on a baking tray, for 20 minutes, then take the paper and beans out and bake for a further 10 minutes, until lightly golden. Scatter the breadcrumbs on a baking tray and toast in the oven for 10-12 minutes, until pale golden, turning them a few times with a spoon. Leave to cool.

On The Go

Buttering knife, large plate (unless eating directly over the worktop, by the toaster, hoovering up that hot toasty goodness). People have a tendency to serve a single slice of toast on a side-plate, as if it will look depressingly lonely against the white expanse of a dinner plate. But this is an explosively fragmentary food – to contain the fallout, you need to think big. When I frequently make and use marmalade, when we get the bitter oranges in from (Australia’s) Yarra Valley: I’ll make a batch of marmalade and use it for puddings in the baker, or make a cake with it. Say a Courgette & Seville orange teacake. And always put some in our Christmas puddings each year. People who leave such mess in their wake are the same people who decorate trees with bags of dog poo, ride bikes on the pavement or leave half-eaten food on bus seats. They are self-absorbed individuals who, when questioned, are always ready with a spurious justification, oblivious to how their self-interest erodes our common enjoyment of the public realm.

Think of jam not as a topping, but as a seasoning for bread and butter. Like a croupier shuffling cards, an elaborate mosaic or two lovers’ interlinked fingers, the aim is to weave elements together in a way that is elegant, balanced and mutually reinforcing. It is not a fruit-forward assault on the senses. If you like jam that much, eat it straight from the jar. Michael James, Cornwall-born Australian artisan baker, author of The Tivoli Road Baker, and All-Day Baking (Hardie-Grant) Preheat the oven to 200°C, fan 180°C, gas 6. Line a 23cm round and 4.5cm deep fluted tin with the pastry and chill for 20 minutes. Emma Bridgewater's captivating recipe for a happy family life: food, passion, work, love.' Meg Rosoff As a child I probably did need to learn to like marmalade, like many children. I probably did find it a bit bitter but I don’t remember ever having actively disliked marmalade, but I probably began to like it more and more as I got older. And my father introduced me to having marmalade with bacon for breakfast, and that’s probably how I first got to really like it. My father always like to have a spoonful of marmalade on his plate when he was having bacon. So my father would definitely have approved of a bacon and marmalade sandwich.I still get very misty-eyed about mums marmalade, one of my great regrets is that I’ll never be able to eat that again as sadly she is no longer with us. So I try to emulate her one which was just a wash with Seville oranges. But the one we make now at Quo Vadis, we’ve started putting blood oranges in as well. It gives it the most beautiful colour and it slightly tempers the Sevilles which is rather lovely. Do not misunderstand HTE. It is not particularly fussy. It does not rule HTE Towers like an aged dowager aunt, forever banging its angry palm on a copy of Debrett’s. But the chaos that occurs on the toast-butter-jam axis is infuriating precisely because it is so avoidable. You need not run your domestic kitchen like a hotel (individual butters, jams in ramekins) to avoid it. People simply have to be better. Thinking of others, not just their own convenience. BakeryBits baker and GBBO winner David Atherton is a huge marmalade fan, and this year judging Rathbone’s Next Generation category at The World Marmalade Awards in Cumbria. As bakers we get very focused on what goes in our bread, wanting the best flour ( BakeryBits probably has the best selection of great flour online), the finest sea salt ( yes BakeryBits sells a range of salt too), but often we are less interested in what goes on it. Well, confession time: as a card-carrying patron of The World’s Original Marmalade Awards, now in its 17th year attracting thousands of entries from all over the world (yes, even Peru), I will be insisting that for this month you do your bit to help the British economy and eat as much marmalade as you possibly can.

In 2014, HTE had a funny turn. Maybe it just needed a better toaster. In retrospect, its insistence on using the grill to make toast was perverse. Grilling toast requires an untenable hawk-like attentiveness to catch it at its optimum doneness in that infinitesimal window between “still bread” and “carbonised Pompeii relic”. HTE is reconciled to the toaster as the realistic compromise: the Keir Starmer of kitchen appliances. The song's distinct "wobbled" piano melody was discovered accidentally when an engineer leaned on a tape machine creating the sound. [3] "Manhattan Woman" was chosen as the B-side. [4] Tin Tin obtained their recording deal with the help of Gibb, who also produced their debut self-titled album. Karen Jankel, lifelong friend to the marmalade-sandwich loving Paddington Bear, and daughter of his creator Michael Bond.It's toast-time at BakeryBits and we want you to get adventurous about the flours you use for the bread you bake: so many possibilities... Toast and marmalade, Dan. I’ll tell you something: Every country has their use for old bread. Italian cooks have their breadcrumbs sprinkled on pasta, or make panzanella. In Ireland, my mam would make her soda bread, and after a few days it would go quite hard. At that point we’d always toast it, and the marmalade put on it softens it. Give me the crunchiness of the biscuity soda bread, with a cup of good English breakfast tea. I’ll tell you what Dan, there are few better things to have for breakfast in life.