When I was a child I had chores. We had a rota with things like washing up, sweeping the floor after supper, feeding the cats, hoovering the sitting room with the giant wheezing hoover that had lights on the front like a sinister demon. I once hoovered up one of my Dad’s ties and became totally distraught, having no idea that it could be reclaimed from the dust bag - I thought all the floor detritus went into some cosmic abyss.
At weekends we had to help in the garden. This mostly involved weeding. My mother was very canny in the way she got us to help, giving us corners of the garden for ourselves as a reward - I had a small vegetable patch on which I grew a lettuce and some tulips, flowers I still adore today. I mostly weeded the rockery because I was the youngest (for a while anyway) and it was fairly easy going, while the older ones had to deal with the much bigger vegetable garden.
I have written before of my mother’s gardening skills and our garden in Yorkshire was the first of her kitchen gardens. I don’t remember all the varieties she grew, certainly potatoes, cabbages, carrots, broccoli - we were well fed from it, including one year some sweet corn that was very exotic to me. In my mind it was a huge garden although I can’t say now exactly how big or how productive it really was, and sadly of course she can’t now tell me, but it it was the ground work for her future gardens one of which is still in existence today feeding the therapeutic community of Lothlorien in Galloway, Scotland. So I knew from a very early age where food came from and the importance of soil.
“Collectively the Earth's body of soil is called the pedosphere. The pedosphere interfaces with the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, and the biosphere.
Looking at the definitions of all those spheres makes my head spin but I encourage you click on those links nonetheless. Pedosphere sounds deeply suspect but isn’t. The point is everything is linked. I know that. You know that. Corporations know that. And yet, here we are. “All of these functions, in their turn, modify the soil and its properties” - it bears repeating. It’s a circular thing, and the only thing breaking that beautiful circle is us. Without soil we, as a species, will die. With ever more degraded soil we will die, just more slowly.
My mother was a major fan of Lady Eve Balfour who in 1946, with a group of people worried abut the implications of increasingly intensive farming systems following the Second World War, started the Soil Association. I grew up in the 70s with Soil Association magazines lying around, which needless to say I ignored because they were printed on bad paper and had no fashion in them (they are a lot sexier these days). They were worthy magazines, all about, well, soil. I was used to soil and getting grubby in the mud but I had no intention of reading about it.
It turns out that something I’d scrape off my wellies without a thought is actually what is going to save us. Maybe with a few other things thrown in like massive reduction in fossil fuel usage, but fundamentally the regeneration of the soil that the world and Monsanto has degraded with over mechanised and chemically driven farming practices over decades, is vital for humanity’s future. I say humanity although of course this involves every other species on the planet, but most humans put themselves first so their, our, survival goes to the top of the priority list.
Between us and our extinction lies six inches of soil, and some rain. God knows here in Wales we have rain a-plenty, but the condition of the soil world wide is increasingly bad.
I spent the weekend working with my brother Barny (founder and CEO of Square Food Foundation), helping him and a team of other fantastic humans cook for around 150 people all weekend at Patrick and Becky Holden’s farm in the rolling hills of mid Wales. He also took some workshops with small people who made some very interesting bread.
In my last post I suggested no one knew what was going on but that it would all come together because it was organic and all that, and I was right, it did. The event was the first Beacon Farms gathering, designed to bring like minded regenerative farmers, growers and teachers together to share resources, stories, support, ideas, solutions, worries and of course some really, really good food, most of it sourced very locally or brought over from Ireland by the redoubtable Darina Allen of Ballymaloe Farm School, and cooked by us.
I worked on Wednesday (see my previous post) to help set up the kitchen and get lots of prep done, then returned on the Saturday to a weekend in full swing with breakfast, elevenses, lunch, tea and dinner being produced from Thursday night to Sunday afternoon. These were hungry people, but then they are farmers, or at the very least rather outdoorsy types.
In the catering lark you can get some awful customers, real moaners who don’t know or care anything about food, they just want it pretty to impress their nasty friends, and very cheap because after all ‘I could buy it in Waitrose/Sainsburys/Aldi for less so why are you charging me so much?’. Any reader from the world of hospitality will have blood boiling in their ears right now in recognition. Luckily for me in all my years doing this I had very few of that type, just enough to know what boiling blood sounds like, up close and personal.
The attendees of last weekend’s event were the polar opposite. They love food, they get food, they care about food - what it tastes like, looks like, where it comes from, how it was produced, who grew it, who cooked it and who was serving it. To be able to cook for and feed people like that is a real joy, and so despite being a bit broken I went back on Sunday to help some more (and also because my brother is ten years older than me and had done a week of this and was heading off to Bristol afterwards to do another marathon week - life isn’t a competition I know and we are all made differently but sometimes you have to hobble up and be counted).
There was a lot of soil about the farm, some of it runny mud due to quantities of Welsh rain being poured from a great height over it, some of it dry as the sun deigned to come out and dry it, some of it in the fields under the cows’ feet, some of it being truffled by pig’s snouts, some of it under crops, some of it fallow. I don’t really know anything about farming, or soil, or growing food. Our cherry tree had one cherry on it and now that’s gone. But last weekend over 150 people got together who do know about all of that and next time there will be more, and/or different people there to share knowledge and food, and in the meantime letters will be exchanged, lobbying of government will be done, this knowledge will get into schools and so it will grow - it must grow and the word must be spread, like seeds on the wind. There is hope for us and I believe it will begin in Wales.
Barabrith or Speckled Bread
I have had quite a lot of barabrith (auto spell wants to make it ‘barbarity’ - make of that what you will) since moving to Wales and frankly it’s not been a favourite, usually dry and dull and I really dislike tea, so I wasn’t very excited about even Hazel-the-wonderful’s batch of loaves, lined up all shiny with a honey glaze and heavy with juicy fruit. But then I tried some and the penny dropped; home made is a very different beast to shop bought, no matter the shop - it was really, really good. That batch of six loaves got hoovered up pretty quickly, still warm with butter melting enticingly on each little piece, and someone, no one knows who or precisely when, measured out an amount of dried fruit and added the tea to soak it in for a new batch, and then left.
I was handed this bowl of tea-soaked fruit and it was suggested I make some for the last lunch on Sunday. Hazel hadn’t left her recipe and we couldn’t get hold of her. Ann (the most diligent and cheerful washer-upper on the planet who has a bull called Philip who sits very sweetly on his haunches like a dog), offered her beautifully simple version. There was also a version in The New Ballymaloe Bread Book, Irish of course, which calls for whisky to be added, but we were fresh out so tea it was.
I gauged the amount of tea soaked fruit in the bowl and measured out other ingredients accordingly, converting Ann’s pounds and ounces to grams and multiplying it by seven and hoping my maths was good enough. I also used wholemeal flour, partly because that’s all there was and partly because I think it makes it more toothsome (lovely word that). It was, though I say so myself, really good.
What you need :
180g self raising wholemeal flour
120g soft brown sugar (or dark if you want to make it more molassesey)
1 egg, whisked
360g dried fruit - I used sultanas and would stick with that even if other fruits were on offer
1 tsp mixed spice (you could just use cinnamon)
1 mug of well brewed black tea (I am guessing a bit here because as you know I didn’t have to add the tea in this instance)
1 loaf tin, greased and lined with baking parchment.
How to :
Soak the fruit in the tea for over an hour - overnight also good.
Pre heat the oven to 160oC/150oC fan/gas 3/325F
When the fruit is all plump and lovely mix with the other ingredients - if the mix feels too dry add more brewed tea, if too wet a little more flour. You want a mix that needs a little nudging out of the bowl into the loaf tin, not a pour nor a struggle.
Bake for about an hour and test with a skewer - it must come out clean.
Glaze when warm using either apricot jam or honey - optional.
Serve warm with an almost equal measure of butter (I jest, but only just).
It will keep well in an airtight container
This recipe is for Chris who is writing the most beautiful and heart rending story about growing up in and out of foster care in America - ‘Don’t Make Me Stop This Car’ - I highly recommend signing up.
The Welsh Dirt conference was superb as was the barbarity. .I mean the bara brith. I had a close encounter with the slurry pond and it was a lovely Sunday. And Liz very much takes after her mum in the gardening department!
I agree with all you say except the last bit!