The Great British Baking Show [my mother had skills] [Media Notes 21]

A couple of weeks ago I started watching The Great British Baking Show – known as the Great British Bake Off, Bake Off, or GBBO in Britain. I learned about it in a tweet by Hollis Robbins, who raved about it, so I figured: Why not? After all, I like a good fruit pie, or a sticky bun, not to mention a loaf of bread – I still remember the bread we ate one morning on Canada’s Gaspé Peninsula during a family vacation over a half a century ago: Heaven. Alas, but only remember, not taste.

I will say that I do find GBBO interesting, but I don’t feel compelled to binge it, and I wonder about the format of these cooking competitions, as this is the only one I’ve even as much as a full episode. I’m currently eight episodes into the second season of the seven available on the Netflix. But mostly I think about the things my mother baked, about her skills, and I wonder how she’d do in such a competition.

If I had to guess, I’d guess that she wouldn’t even have been chosen as a contestant, and yet I believe that, within her range, she could bake as well as anyone on the show, even the esteemed judges. I’ve never had anything that goes by the name of “Danish pastry” that’s as good as hers, made according to a recipe she learned from her Danish mother-in-law (who was of course be my grandmother), and I’ve eaten a lot of Danish over the years. I’ve not made any attempt to scout out the best Danish available on this side of the Hudson River in Jersey City or Hoboken, the two places where I’ve lived for the last twenty years. Possibly it would be as good as my mothers’. Possibly. This are of New Jersey, after all, effectively functions as set of neighborhoods in New York City. I’d be surprised if Manhattan didn’t have Danish that good, though I’m not sure I’d want to pay the price. And should the Big Apple cough up some Danish that’s even better, ah, well, I can’t imagine that possible, it’s a matter of taste, isn’t it? And if it did – but how could I judge as it’s been so long since I’ve eaten my mother’s wienerbrød – wouldn’t that be delightful?

You see my problem, don’t you?

This is supposed to be about GBBO and I’m all tangled up in my mother’s pastry skills. For what she did, she was superb. But her range was circumscribed, something I realized during my teens. Why did she always follow a recipe? Why not make up something of her own? Those questions only had any bite because they implied that she could perfectly well break out if she choose to do so. She certainly had the skills, the talent (whatever that is). But not the will, or is it imagination?

(Could it be that she did so and I didn’t notice?)

That circumscription is what would have kept her off GBBO. If you ask me why her range was circumscribed, why she didn’t exercise her imagination, her will, well, that was long ago and far away and I was young and bound up in my own life challenges. But it’s not as though I haven’t a clue. She was a traditional housewife, willing to live within those boundaries, but how do I begin to write and think about that without getting entangled in the crossings between our family life – mother, father, my sister, and me – which are none of your business, and the psycho-cultural dynamics of men’s and women’s roles (not to mention children) in our society. Those dynamics, of course, are of great interest and importance and are still very much under negotiation and transformation.

Moreover, how can I discuss those dynamics in connection with The Great British Baking Show if I don’t have a broader knowledge of the conventions of the competitive cooking show? GBBO is surely a competition. There are three rounds in each episode; the contestants are judged after each one, with comments. At the end of the episode one contestant is crowned Star Baker and another is dropped from the competition. At the same time it feels like a group of friends getting together to bake for one another, share recipes, and drink some tea – except that we don’t see any onscreen tea drinking. Camaraderie in competition, group hugs for those cast off.

Are all these televised cooking competitions like that? I doubt it, but I don’t know. In order to understand what I’m seeing on the screen don’t I need a sense of the range of conventions and behaviors in which the show operates? For some purposes, definitely. But those aren’t the only purposes, are they? I could report what I see.

And what I see is a lot of baked goods I’d like to be eating, though not all. Some sweet, most of them sweet, but some savory as well. Contestants ranging in age from early twenties well into high middle age edging into old. Both men and women, the ratio is important, but I’ve not been keeping track. I do note, though, that in season two all the men had been dropped by episode eight, or was it seven? Why’s the ratio important? Within the range of cooking disciplines, aren’t breads and pastries coded as female while entrees, sides, and appetizers – the main meal – coded as male? So within the world of cooking competitions that would code a bake off as female while competition over meats, veggies, and the rest would be coded as male.

You see my problem, don’t you?

Well, you see part of it anyhow. There’s also the fact that we’re almost 900 words in and I’ve only discussed my mother’s Danish pastry, and that not very well. Do you have any idea how much work is involved in making it, all the folding? Do you appreciate the tang cardamom seeds give it? They don’t use cardamom seeds in Greek-diner Danish. Nor have I gotten around to the wonders of her pie crust, the variety of cookies she made at Christmas, and the pasty. Do you know what pasty is? It’s a savory meat pie, meat and potatoes. The crust uses suet rather than lard for shortening – makes it chewy. The miners in Cornwall – where my mother’s people are from – would take a couple pasties with them into the mines. It’s peasant food. Nothing fancy about it.

I haven’t seen any pasty so far on this bake off. Do they get around to it in a later episode? Granted, it’s not the sort of thing you’re tempted to craft into a chocolate cow jumping over a lemon merengue moon, a gingerbread approximation to a Quidditch court, or even a spun sugar waterfall tumbling over an angel food cliff into a sea of blueberry jam, but it’s filling and it tastes good. At least when it’s made the way my mother made it.

And of course it’s British. According to Wikipedia “it is regarded as the national dish and accounts for 6% of the Cornish food economy.” Not only that, it has been given Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) status in Europe. What happens to that if Brexit succeeds?

I digress.

By the way, did I mention her jams and jellies? And that Danish rhubarb pudding she made using rhubarb from the back yard and the almond slivers and a name I could never pronounce and hence haven’t a ghost of a chance on a guess at the spelling?

Pssst. I googled. It’s Rabarbergrød.