The baker’s shop. A memoir.

Almost all the happy memories I have of my childhood revolve around food. My mum enjoyed cooking and my dad enjoyed eating. Not only was my mother an excellent cook, but she was an extrovert, sociable hostess and, in the early sixties, these were admirable qualities.
Memory is fickle and changes with family stories and perception, but there’s something life affirming about rooting out the best things and allowing those memories to breathe and grow and give the less happy stuff a bit of balance.
Visits to the bakery are amongst my earliest recollections. Going to the market was a weekly event with a ritual attached. My sister rode in a large pram, and I wore my best coat in anticipation of a visit to a cafe afterwards. The bakery came between the market and the cafe.

We joined the queue, which wound along the street by the marketplace.
“Hold tight to the pram, and I’ll buy you a chocolate milkshake,” whispered Mum.
This was the worst part of the day. The prodding, poking and height measuring of the other women in the line. My long pigtails admired and my pale cheeks pinched.
“You look like your grandmother.” Is a refrain with no response, belonging as it did to the nonsense phrases that my mother’s friends used all the time.

Soon, I tire of that agony, and I dive under the big pram wheel and press my nose against the window of the shop next door. It sells model trains, and the window is full of tiny houses, pieces of track and miniature signal boxes. I long to go inside, but know better than to ask.
We reach the bowed window of the bakers at last, with its shelves of loaves and plates of cake and the unmistakable aroma of baking bread. We park my sister in front with the other prams, our shopping neatly tucked under the pram cover, and the hood up ‘In case of rain’.
Mum then yanks me through the door into the tiny, crowded interior. She is soon chatting, and I begin the job of avoiding shopping bags full of hard vegetables. I wriggle into gaps to find a spot to avoid getting trampled on. The combinations of legs, umbrellas, shopping bags and endless talking terrifies me still.

Sometimes I found the gap beside the glass cases full of fancy cakes, and pressed my face close to see the vanilla slices, meringues, and cream cakes. The swirls of cream and pastel coloured icing fascinated me.

If I close my eyes now, and I can touch the glass and see the cake ensconced inside.

My favourite place was under the big wooden counter where I see into the bakery itself. Men in white trousers putting trays of loaves into a giant oven, with long poles. Or stood at a table shaping pies and pasties, crimping edges at lighting speed. A machine in one corner rattled constantly, and every so often someone lifted mounds of dough onto another table to be shaped and put on racks ready for the oven. Being too young to understand the process never dimmed the fascination. The warm yeasty smell, glimpses of flame at the back of the oven, and constant movement was enough.
Mum always bought a curd tart and an egg custard tart. They came in a brown paper bag warm from the oven with the scent of nutmeg leaking from the opening. They were for my dad, his favourites, and the presentation came after tea, as though he had won an important award. It was all part of the ritual.

Living in Spain as I do, I haven’t seen a Yorkshire curd tart for years. Custard Tarts, I make when the hens are laying, or buy the Portuguese variety from the supermarket.
I made one with homemade farmer’s cheese, knowing at once that the taste would be different. Fresh cheese curds are a byproduct of the cheese-making process and all together richer. Next time I’ll buy fresh cheese from the market and crumble it, rather than turning UHT milk into something it can never be.
Despite the lack of authentic curds, the result was a delight, lighter and less sweet that a modern cheese cake. Plain rather than a fancy desert.
Cakes and tarts like this were part of life then, women cooked and baked as a part of life, not as a hobby. I realised much later when I started going for tea at the houses of friends, how lucky I was that mum was a skilled baker.

Shop bought cakes, rather than homemade, were special and bought from the bakery, but we ate pudding or cake every day as part of a meal. I didn’t taste the mass-produced stuff till I left home years later.

In the following decades, cakes became frowned upon for dietary reasons, but simultaneously became richer and sweeter. Baking has become a hobby and they can therefore be more elaborate.
I make no judgement. Eating habits have changed over the years, along with the number of calories we need to get through the day. I admit I have a nostalgic fondness for old-fashioned teatime time cakes free of cream or mounds of icing, just hints of nutmeg, vanilla, lemon or caraway.