Dan Lepard, What Are You Reading?

Dan Lepard is known for how well he knows bread and his artisanal approach to baking. I’ve baked from and mentioned the books Exceptional Breads and Exceptional Cakes which he co-wrote, and his other books include Baking with Passion and The Handmade Loaf. Most recently, Dan has written the British chapter in the French language Dictionnaire Universel du Pain to be published by Laffont Paris in October 2010. He also has two new books that will be published next year including a collection of recipes from his Guardian newspaper column, and the long-awaited book on traditional British baking. And, you'll find great information about baking and recipes on his site. He’s an incredible baker, writer, and photographer, and I knew he’d have an interesting answer when I asked him what are you reading?

Dan:
Most of my time out of the kitchen is spent studying old baking methods in cookbooks and manuscripts, even though my regular work is about trying to write recipes that have a modern, inventive edge to them. Dipping into the past is a reminder of all the ideas that have been stirred into our baking soup over the centuries. Yep, for all the tweeting, blogging, and general web stuff I do, I’m still sat reading old books.

I’m always on the hunt for things to eat with bread, so I’ve been working my way through a series from the 1960s called The Compleat Imbiber, filled with essays on food and drink, edited by Cyril Ray. The design and typography has a good boldness to it, and just looking at volume five on my desk here, there are essays by Elizabeth David on first eating pork cooked with prunes at the Rôtisserie Tourangelle, in Tours, France, and how she came to write her own recipe for it. Another by Isak Dinesen on wine drinking by soldiers in biblical Palestine. It’s all stirring and fascinating.

The other book here is a reprint by Persephone Books, in Bloomsbury, London of Florence White’s Good Things in England, first published in 1932. It’s a collection of recipes and thoughts on cooking and local traditions around England, most of them lost and forgotten. It’s a book I reread often, and this summer it’s on my desk again. Simple recipes for a North Yorkshire fruit bread rich with allspice, pork lard, and raisins, another for a raised red gooseberry pie from Sussex.