153 Quotes About Baking

After a few millennia of inspiration, the primitive clay oven gave rise to the gleaming modern steel version. A high-tech oven alone does not, however, turn a bake-mete into a pie as we know it. One more important development was necessary. Pastry had to be invented.

Dough becomes pastry when fat is added.

Wheat is the only grain with a significant amount of gluten, so we have our first clue to the origins of pastry. Superb pastry could only have developed where wheat was grown: rye, barley and oats do not make good pastry, nor do rice or maize or potato starch.

As far as a time-frame for these developments goes, we can probably reasonably deduce that the pie began its life some time before the fourteenth century in those areas of Europe where wheat was grown and pigs and cattle reared.

The importance of the pie - once the 'meat and potatoes' of the English - began to slip with the increased cultivation of the actual potato in the nineteenth century. As the nineteenth became the twentieth century, social changes pushed the pie further into decline. The 'great pies' had their last glorious days in the English manor houses of the Edwardian era, before the domestic classes left to fight the First World War.

The strangely marvellous thing is that, we refuse to relinquish the pie. We cling to the idea of it with some fervour, in spite of its fading reality on our tables. Why is it so? What is it about pies?

And Mrs McClusky was delighted to have an excuse to make her delicious scones.

Baking calms me; it's stabilizing. It's what I do when I don't want to think about anything hard. It is an activity that requires very little from you- you just follow the directions, and then at the end you have created something. From ingredients to an actual dessert. It's like magic. Poof, deliciousness.

There is, I must admit, something very satisfying about making things from scratch, to know every dish in a meal was made by your own hands. As a lazy person, I'm a fan of premade things, but it was a lot of fun and deeply relaxing to make, for example, my own dough and my own cherry filling for a beautiful cherry pie. I felt productive and capable.