Fresh bread for breakfast

A friend asked me the other day about Roman bread. He’d heard that the Romans made flat, unleavened slabs of bread on the open hearth. It would have been a kind of hard-tack or biscuit (English biscuit, I mean!)  Poor people with no space at home for cooking, and armies on the march, ate this sort of tough but easy-to-prepare fare.

But the Romans liked their luxuries. Didn’t they have bread leavened with yeast, like ours?

They certainly did. It was usually made of wheat flour, or wheat and barley mixed; barley alone is low in gluten and produced a dry loaf that the Romans didn’t rate highly. In comfortably off homes, and inns like the Oak Tree run by my sleuth Aurelia Marcella, they ate wheat bread, baked fresh most mornings, so Aurelia’s guests got new bread for breakfast, accompanied by honey or cheese or perhaps olives. I’m feeling hungry now just thinking about it…

My friend gently interrupted my flow to ask, “How did they actually make the bread?”

That stumped me, I confess. I’ve seen modern recipes for reproducing Roman-type bread, but they all use commercial yeast to make the dough rise, and instinct told me that wouldn’t be possible two thousand years ago. Time for a little research.

I turned to my favourite present-day book on ancient dishes, The Classical Cookbook by Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger. This has many delicious-looking ancient recipes that you can cook in a modern kitchen, plus a lot of useful information. I learned that bakeries in Roman towns used big dome-shaped ovens to produce bread in quantity, and many householders bought their daily bread, as they’ve done ever since.

Fine if you lived in a town with bakeries handy, like Pompeii, where a lot of the evidence comes from. If not, you could have your own small bakehouse and oven (as the Oak Tree does,) or you could  bake in your home kitchen  on the hearth, under a dome-shaped cover with a small hole in the top. This could be made of metal or coarse earthenware; it had to be strong because it was first heated in the fire, then the hearth was cleared, the loaves were placed on it, and the cover put on top and surrounded with piles of hot coals to get a good temperature.

But Dalby and Grainger’s recipe uses modern cultivated yeast as a raising agent, and I was sure the Romans didn’t have that convenience. I looked on the Internet, and I was right. Roman bakers used what now we know as the sourdough method. Each batch of dough has to include a portion of “starter dough”, saved from the previous batch, which contains a culture including yeast. Mix the starter with new flour, water, other ingredients if you want; allow time for it to rise…and you’ll get bread that we’d recognise and enjoy today.

Well I assume we’d enjoy it. Truth to tell I haven’t ever tasted sourdough bread. So I’m hoping someone out there can enlighten me about this ancient-and-modern food. …is it tastier than bread raised with yeast, or not as good, or just different?

Enquiring minds want to know…and enquiring taste-buds are feeling hungry again.

Valentine’s Day Bah Humbug

I’ve never been really keen on Valentine’s Day pseudo-romance myself. Real romance, yes, I love it, but in my own time, not just because of some date on the calendar. And, being from Yorkshire, I’m aware how much more expensive it is to buy the one you love a drink or a meal or some goodies today than, say, in a couple of weeks’ time. So we’ll just stay home, cook a favourite meal, wash it down with something good…and maybe do a romantic splurge later.

But I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, or as my Roman sleuth would say, on anyone’s triumph. Have a great time if you’re that way minded. Love still makes the world go round, even if it also makes the cash registers of the world ring out.

And remember Ogden Nash’s wise words on the subject of making your mark with the opposite gender:

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker

Danger in the wind

Here I am at last. So much for my New Year resolution about blogging regularly in 2011. It went the way of all New Year resolutions; and if you know differently, because you’ve managed to stick to yours, well good for you, but don’t write in and gloat, OK?

I’ve been busy with non-writing stuff which has taken up far too much time, but I’ve found a bit of space to work on my fourth Aurelia novel, which now has a firm publication date: it comes out this December, published like its predecessors by Poisoned Pen Press.

It also has a new title, replacing the working one it’s been carrying since I began it all those months ago. It’s called DANGER IN THE WIND. Good, eh? Yes, very good. I like it.

What’s that? Do I hear someone chiding me for immodesty? Nonsense, it’s just that if I don’t believe in my work, how can I expect anyone else to? And who, I ask you, would put their very best efforts into a novel and then lumber it with a title they didn’t think was good?

Seriously, choosing a title isn’t easy. It’s all very well people saying you can’t judge a book by its cover…but very often you can, or readers think you can, so the title is a crucial part of the message that says “Read me.”

So what sort of title should you go for? Simple and direct, like DEATH ON THE NILE? Clever word-play, like Dolores Gordon-Smith’s A FETE WORSE THAN DEATH? Something intriguing, like Amy Myers’ TOM WASP AND THE NEWGATE KNOCKER?

Or if you’re writing a series, how about a linked sequences, such as Sue Grafton’s alphabet sequence, beginning with A IS FOR ALIBI…I think she’s reached U now. Very clever, something like that, and pretty hard work to sustain it, I’d guess.

Probably most writers, even of series, end up with one-off titles that don’t have an obvious inter-connection. That’s so with my books, more by accident than design, I may say. I just picked the best title I could for each individual book, and hoped for the best.

I want my titles to evoke the flavour of the books, which for a mystery means conveying a sense of menace, uneasiness, a lurking peril. And also, a particular foible of mine, I want my title words to appear somewhere in the text.

The words “danger in the wind” appear very near the start of the story, in a letter which Aurelia receives and finds extremely disquieting. The previous title words, “arrows in the dark” occur later on, when Aurelia describes a rather hopeless search for someone who’s gone missing. She says it’s “like shooting arrows in the dark.”

She’s right, and that seemed to work well for a while, but as I’ve written the book, the search episode has become a smaller part of the plot, not quite as overwhelmingly important as I originally expected. I’m not one of the organised folk who carefully maps out a synopsis before starting to write, and sticks to it. Oh, of course I carefully map out a synopsis…but as I write, I’m liable to change the story. And now the title has changed to match.

As I say, I like DANGER IN THE WIND. I hope everyone else does too. And the book, of course…