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Home Baking: The Artful Mix of Flour and Traditions from Around the World
Home baking may be a humble art, but its roots are deeply planted. On an island in Sweden a grandmother teaches her granddaughter how to make slagbrot , a velvety rye bread, just as she was taught to make it by her grandmother many years before. In Portugal, village women meet once each week to bake at a community oven; while the large stone oven heats up, children come running for sweet, sugary flatbreads made specially for them. In Toronto, Naomi makes her grandmother's recipe for treacle tart and Jeffrey makes the truck-stop cinnamon buns he and his father loved.
From savory pies to sweet buns, from crusty loaves to birthday cake, from old-world apple pie to peanut cookies to custard tarts, these recipes capture the age-old rhythm of turning simple ingredients into something wonderful to eat. HomeBaking rekindles the simple pleasure of working with your hands to feed your family. And it ratchets down the competitive demands we place on ourselves as home cooks. Because in striving for professional results we lose touch with the pleasures of the process, with the homey and imperfect, with the satisfaction of knowing that you can, as a matter of course, prepare something lovely and delicious, and always have a full cookie jar or some homemade cake on hand to offer.
Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid collected the recipes in HomeBaking at their source, from farmhouse kitchens in northern France to bazaars in Fez. They traveled tens of thousands of miles, to six continents, in search of everyday gems such as Taipei Coconut Buns, Welsh Cakes, Moroccan Biscotti, and Tibetan Overnight Skillet Breads. They tasted, interpreted, photographed and captured not just the recipes, but the people who made them as well. Then they took these spot-on flavors of far away and put them side by side with cherished recipes from friends and family closer to home. The result is a collection of cherry strudel from Hungary, stollen from Germany, bread pudding from Vietnam, anise crackers from Barcelona. More than two hundred recipes that resonate with the joys and flavors of everyday baking at home and around the world.
Inexperienced home bakers can confidently pass through the kitchen doors armed with Naomi and Jeffrey's calming and easy-to-follow recipes. A relaxed, easy-handed approach to baking is, they insist, as much a part of home baking traditions as are the recipes themselves. In fact it's often the last-minute recipes―semonlina crackers, a free-form fruit galette, or a banana-coconut loaf―that offer the most unexpected delights. Although many of the sweets and savories included here are the products of age-old oral traditions, the recipes themselves have been carefully developed and tested, designed for the home baker in a home kitchen.
Like the authors' previous books, HomeBaking offers a glorious combination of travel and great tastes, with recipes rich in anecdote, insightful photographs, and an inviting text that explores the diverse baking traditions of the people who share our world. This is a book to have in the kitchen and then again by your bed at night, to revisit over and over.
From savory pies to sweet buns, from crusty loaves to birthday cake, from old-world apple pie to peanut cookies to custard tarts, these recipes capture the age-old rhythm of turning simple ingredients into something wonderful to eat. HomeBaking rekindles the simple pleasure of working with your hands to feed your family. And it ratchets down the competitive demands we place on ourselves as home cooks. Because in striving for professional results we lose touch with the pleasures of the process, with the homey and imperfect, with the satisfaction of knowing that you can, as a matter of course, prepare something lovely and delicious, and always have a full cookie jar or some homemade cake on hand to offer.
Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid collected the recipes in HomeBaking at their source, from farmhouse kitchens in northern France to bazaars in Fez. They traveled tens of thousands of miles, to six continents, in search of everyday gems such as Taipei Coconut Buns, Welsh Cakes, Moroccan Biscotti, and Tibetan Overnight Skillet Breads. They tasted, interpreted, photographed and captured not just the recipes, but the people who made them as well. Then they took these spot-on flavors of far away and put them side by side with cherished recipes from friends and family closer to home. The result is a collection of cherry strudel from Hungary, stollen from Germany, bread pudding from Vietnam, anise crackers from Barcelona. More than two hundred recipes that resonate with the joys and flavors of everyday baking at home and around the world.
Inexperienced home bakers can confidently pass through the kitchen doors armed with Naomi and Jeffrey's calming and easy-to-follow recipes. A relaxed, easy-handed approach to baking is, they insist, as much a part of home baking traditions as are the recipes themselves. In fact it's often the last-minute recipes―semonlina crackers, a free-form fruit galette, or a banana-coconut loaf―that offer the most unexpected delights. Although many of the sweets and savories included here are the products of age-old oral traditions, the recipes themselves have been carefully developed and tested, designed for the home baker in a home kitchen.
Like the authors' previous books, HomeBaking offers a glorious combination of travel and great tastes, with recipes rich in anecdote, insightful photographs, and an inviting text that explores the diverse baking traditions of the people who share our world. This is a book to have in the kitchen and then again by your bed at night, to revisit over and over.
440 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2003
26 people are currently reading
476 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
May 29, 2014
Masterfully crafted & simple recipes from around the world that creatively use flour. From pies, cakes, cookies & breads - not only are the recipes easy to master, but the history makes each one richer in taste. This included one of the best recipes for challah I have ever used, and several mouth-watering treats using phyllo.
January 28, 2008
A whole new world of bread recipes, beyond the same somewhat dense, healthy loaves that I learned to make years ago. I'm into the slow rise loaves from the book, that you can start a few days before actually baking - it's a nice variation from the feeling that "I'm baking bread so I have to stay home all day to tend it in between rises." Made the Vietnamese baguettes recipe but only had wild rice flour rather than standard rice flour - turned out as this unusually creamy tasting, almost purple loaves. Likely not Vietnamese, I'm sure, but tasty.
February 24, 2015
I read about this book in the New Yorker. I'm excited to check it out.... Just got this book from the library. It looks amazing. The narratives and photographs make it the kind of cookbook I can settle in on the couch with before bed. Looking forward to trying out a few recipes this weekend.
October 28, 2022
Overall, a great collection of recipes from various region that really inspired me to get started baking.
The authors are obviously rather well-traveled and have full intention of shoving that into your face a bit - but you can ignore that well enough to get to the interesting part, the recipes. And those are still very inspiring
This would deserve more than 2 stars if I hadn't literally tried making the first recipe (Breton Galettes) and found that its proportions were *completely* off. As in, the amount of flour was off by a factor of 2-3. I later found out via googling that the author had missed a crucial step of adding a large amount of water after preferment, making the recipe practically uncompletable as written.
This blunder obviously now makes me very wary of trusting any of the other recipes as well.
The authors are obviously rather well-traveled and have full intention of shoving that into your face a bit - but you can ignore that well enough to get to the interesting part, the recipes. And those are still very inspiring
This would deserve more than 2 stars if I hadn't literally tried making the first recipe (Breton Galettes) and found that its proportions were *completely* off. As in, the amount of flour was off by a factor of 2-3. I later found out via googling that the author had missed a crucial step of adding a large amount of water after preferment, making the recipe practically uncompletable as written.
This blunder obviously now makes me very wary of trusting any of the other recipes as well.
May 2, 2023
Quite a useful and wide ranging baking book. The stories and vignettes are delightful, the photography delicious and the recipes awesome. The highest praise you can give a book is purchasing it after reading. Recommended.
June 24, 2021
Another masterpiece by Naomi Duguid
March 19, 2019
Apparently, I read this book by Naomi Duguid and Jeffery Alford in 2010. And yet, only six years later, I have no recollection of it, which is surprising. Because the photos are spectacular and there are lovely vignettes to accompany the many wonderful looking recipes.
This cookbook really is wonderful. I particularly liked the parts about visiting the village oven in a small community in Portugal and a bakery in Kabul.
Sometimes the recipes gave us pause though. The cinnamon rolls call for a whopping 13 c flour. This is in a book entitled "HomeBaking". Who makes that many cinnamon buns?
The coconut bun recipe calls for zero eggs - that can't be right for "soft white filled buns"!
And yet their bagel recipe does call for egg. Really???! Since when does bagel dough ever contain eggs?
But the ideas, photos and descriptions make up for any slight strangeness in the ingredients lists or instructions. The lovely memoirs of the cinnamon rolls and dog races with Jeffrey Alford's dad, and of Naomi Duguid's grandmum, who lived to be 107 and when she was old, "the thing she enjoyed most was the freedom not to have to cook". In around 1920, she came from England to live in a one-room log cabin the Northern wilds of BC - no electricity or running water, no telephone. She did "all the cooking, all the washing up and laundry, and Grandad still cut and hauled firewood in winter, then split and stacked it. And they still carried all their water up from the creek." It wasn't until she was widowed in her mid-eighties that she moved to the city to live in her "own small house for many years, eating toast and prunes for breakfast and avoiding the stove as much as possible".
And, of course, to atone for the strangeness, there are brilliant recipes, including those for Oat Cakes, Persian cardamom shortbread and for Kouignaman....
This cookbook really is wonderful. I particularly liked the parts about visiting the village oven in a small community in Portugal and a bakery in Kabul.
The place [in Kabul] I remember most was the local bakery. Most of the time, it looked only like wooden scaffolding abandoned in an empty lot, but then several times each day the bakers would assemble. They'd fire the enormous vertical clay tandoor oven with juniper, the local abundant wood, making the neighborhood smell heavenly.
Then two or three of them would start shaping long rippled snowshoe-shaped nan, and the head baker would slap them onto the hot oven walls, his right arm reaching deep into the fiercely hot tandoor. [...] The bread was some of the best I've ever eaten, flavored by the smoke of the juniper and made with freshly ground wheat flour. -Jeffrey Alford, The Smell of Juniper, Flatbreads and Crackers, p325
Sometimes the recipes gave us pause though. The cinnamon rolls call for a whopping 13 c flour. This is in a book entitled "HomeBaking". Who makes that many cinnamon buns?
The coconut bun recipe calls for zero eggs - that can't be right for "soft white filled buns"!
We have no idea where the Chinese bakery tradition of soft white filled buns comes from, but in Taiwan, in Hong Kong and even here in each of Toronto’s Chinatowns, we can always find a bakery with a dazzling array of them. – Jeffery Alford and Naomi Duguid, Taipei Coconut Buns, p252
And yet their bagel recipe does call for egg. Really???! Since when does bagel dough ever contain eggs?
But the ideas, photos and descriptions make up for any slight strangeness in the ingredients lists or instructions. The lovely memoirs of the cinnamon rolls and dog races with Jeffrey Alford's dad, and of Naomi Duguid's grandmum, who lived to be 107 and when she was old, "the thing she enjoyed most was the freedom not to have to cook". In around 1920, she came from England to live in a one-room log cabin the Northern wilds of BC - no electricity or running water, no telephone. She did "all the cooking, all the washing up and laundry, and Grandad still cut and hauled firewood in winter, then split and stacked it. And they still carried all their water up from the creek." It wasn't until she was widowed in her mid-eighties that she moved to the city to live in her "own small house for many years, eating toast and prunes for breakfast and avoiding the stove as much as possible".
And, of course, to atone for the strangeness, there are brilliant recipes, including those for Oat Cakes, Persian cardamom shortbread and for Kouignaman....
I was so pleased to find a recipe for oatcakes among my mother's papers. It was carefully written out in my grandmother's clear, round hand. She and my mother and my aunt Wendy all made them: thin, mildly sweet cookies that my English-born grandmother called oatmeal biscuits. They mixed the dough by hand, rolled it out in to thin sheets, then cut the sheets with a sharp knife like crackers into squares or diamonds. - Naomi Duguid, Oat Cakes, p395
We keep trying to go to Iran, but we haven’t figured out how to get a visa to travel there independently. [...] From all the Persian baking we have tasted made by Iranians living outside the country, such as these delicate cardamom cookies made entirely from rice flour, we know that what we'd find in Iran would be truly dazzling. – Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford, Persian Cardamm Cookies, p415
Kouignaman is the Breton name of this very traditional cake, made of yeasted bread dough enriched with butter and sugar. The butter is salted, as farm butter traditionally is for longer keeping, rather than the unsalted butter of most baking recipes. [...] You can use a pound of any mostly white bread dough, homemade or store-bought, including pizza dough. - Breton Butter Cake, p363
February 3, 2013
This is not my kind of cookbook. I would guess that about half of the pictures were of places or people rather than food. If you were a close friend of the authors, this would be a very interesting travelogue, but otherwise I'm not sure what some of these personal anecdotes even had to do with baking (why does it matter that the author was just out of high school when he first took a bicycle/backpack trip to Wales?).Although I can see the reference value of cataloging some of these recipes, I would not bake many of them myself.
November 4, 2012
I love all the authors' cookbooks. So beautiful, with authentic recipes, wonderful stories and beautiful photographs. I love the way all the books have a theme but still weave in accents and additions, like including a recipe for Seville marmalade in here. The flatbreads and rice books are my favourites - I'm not much of a baker, though I like to make bread - but all the books are very, very good and worth owning.
January 25, 2008
My husband gave me this cookbook for Chanukkah last year...what's great about it, other than the fabulous recipes, is that it includes the history of baking...the types of baking as well as individual recipes...in a narrative style. Well worth the read as a non-fic book as well as a great recipe book for breads.
September 4, 2007
a unique set of recipes drawing from baking traditions all around the world. my successful attempts include ukrainian honey cake, gingerbread w/ molasses, and brownies. coriander cookies were a little too strange for my tastes, but i like the fact that the recipe is from the 1900s.
August 7, 2008
A cookbook that was a hard to put down read. I found myself drifting through every page and reading the stories of the recipes as well as the stories in between. The pictures reminded me of a National Geographic expedition. There are a couple of recipes I'll probably try.
June 26, 2012
i wish i were the kind of person that baked from this book. great photos, amazing looking recipes, clever stories, and then me - lazy baker. I handed it off to a friend to whom it will be a culinary adventure, and maybe she will share the spoils of her creation...
April 17, 2013
This is the kind of cookbook that inspires me, like everybody's grandmother is cooking for you. Pieces of love & life baked into deliciousness & served with their stories so you can, for a few bites, become part of their traditions, their families.
July 28, 2007
Some great recipes for bread in here. Got this for $2 at a thrift store. Have been using the bread recipes in here weekly for the past 6 months!
July 22, 2008
Beautiful visually and wordwise. And the recipes can make you drool. If you're at all into baking, pick up a copy of this book.
July 25, 2008
a cultural experience, your taste buds will thank you
March 4, 2010
A beautiful book by husband and wife world traveler bakers, stories of place and food of the "people" great pictures and great recipes too.
July 29, 2011
Like Alford and Druid's other books, this one is part cookbook and part travelogue. The recipes are interesting and represent the best baking of the regions covered.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews