patisserie

on spontaneity

hello! savour members can now access these posts in audio form - just scroll down to listen (I apologise in advance for my French pronunciation).

There are some friends you can text in the early hours. Not, necessarily, the twilight ones - the out-late texts, or the up-with-the-baby texts - but the weekend morning ones. That precious quiet time when people are sitting or snoozing or slowly thinking about starting the day. There are some friends you can text in the early hours and they are usually the same ones you will message with a photograph of a passage of text in a book that reminds you of them.

This was how that day began. The page was from Harriet Baker’s Rural Hours (I’ve mentioned it before) and it was devoted to ingenuity and seasonal cooking: “marmalade on steaming midwinter mornings; jams from the glut of summer fruits; and, in the autumn, her mother’s marrow chutney, gooseberry vinegar and chestnut sauce for the store cupboard.” Within seconds, she replied in kind, telling short stories of merguez sausages and the “very very last of the celeriac”, the lightest of remoulades and the small tragedy that befell our favourite lovage plant. After decades living in the city, she told me, she had found the best bakery in London (“opens insanely early and everyone is just chatting French there”). And so, almost by accident, we fell into a plan to go, then and there.