As a day girl, I was intrigued and terrified by the boarding houses at my senior school. I felt both envious of and sorry for my friends whose beds were at the top of the staircase above an office.
Envy triumphed at tea time. While two thirds of us stuffed text books and damp, smelly games kit into school bags, the boarding third, liberated from their green uniform and slouching in jeans and sweatshirts, were already in the dining room eating toast, cake and buns with a rug of white icing. Occasionally, a rehearsal or match meant we, too, could go into tea, pull a long bun from the tray of 25, hopefully with some of its neighbour’s icing. The buns were usually slightly underdone, as much dough as bread, which I loved, despite the mild indigestion. They not only filled you up, but acted as a sort of cork on hunger that lasted the entire match/rehearsal.
It is nostalgia that makes the Roman yeasted buns, or maritozzi, from our local bakery so appealing; they remind me of the sticky buns from school. Their plain cake, too – the size of a small tyre and sold by the slice – is just the right side of sweetness, as are the fennel-seed biscuits: part delicious, part hard work.
“All food is inevitably linked with home or place, with our nearest and dearest,” says Florence White’s introduction to her joyous and pioneering 1931 book, Good Things in England, a 1968 edition of which I found at Bridport Book Shop a month ago. It is a book that celebrates traditional English food, and one that has made me think about how much traditional English and Italian cooking have in common, especially when it comes to the breads, buns, biscuits and cakes, and the uses of spices and seeds.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
