Keeping cool under pressure

Our freezer has a mind of its own. And not always on the job in hand. Tonight as we're sitting watching television in the other room, the warning ding starts up on the freezer.
"You must have left the door open," I say, starting up. The noise immediately stops.
"I don't think so," Herself says, swirling the ice cubes about in her soft drink.
As soon as my bum hits the seat:
"Ding...! Ding...! Ding...!"
We go out and inspect what little there is to inspect.
The digital readout says -16C for the freezer and 1C for the fridge, like it's supposed to do. But the whole thing is ominously quiet.
I poke it. Herself moves bottles from the floor in case the feng shui is being upset. I open and close the fridge door. I open the freezer door. It has a disturbing slick look that speaks of malfunction.
"I think it's defrosting."
Immediately Herself falls back on 100,000 years of female evolution in the face of imminent calamity by asking as many questions within 60 seconds as it is possible to ask.
"What's wrong?
"Is it broken?
"Should we get another?
"Is the fuse gone in the plug?
"Shall I move another bottle?
"Should we start putting things in the other freezer?
"Is it safe to use ice that defrosted?
"Was it the weather?
"Was it the cats?
"Is it broken?
"Shall we buy another?
"Is the fuse gone in the plug?
"Why are you choking me?"
We ferry geriatric cuts of meat in their papyrus wraps to the small freezer in the ultilty room, in turn emptying from it the store of bread Herself squirelled away in there last Christmas when the snow levels meant we would obviously soon have 100 extra guests all eager for toast. In between trips, I press some buttons experimentally on the wonky freezer. It's now reading a balmy 9C in the freezer. I press a button labelled "Turbo Freeze" and a second later the motor starts to run again.

"It's fixed!"

We do a little dance then retrieve all the "we'll never finish that" stores that we just binned, plus Santa Claus's sliced pans, and shove them back onto the empty shelves. In a few moments, the temperature is 8C and we're on the way back to peaceful TV watching.

In ten minutes time, the dial indicates minus figures. Grand. Everything going in the right direction.

Half and hour later, during an ad break, Herself shouts from the kitchen:

"It's minus 25! It'll EXPLODE!"

I rush out and open the freezer door.

The Bird's Eye Polar Bear isn't so fucking chatty about the standard of my fish cakes any more. He's lying very, very still, a look of mild surprise on his clothy white face.

In fact, I didn't know that fish cakes could chatter like comedy false teeth, but the din is rattling all the salad dressing bottles in the fridge next door.

Bela Lugosi appears from the gathering white mist flowing about the kitchen, sinks his teeth into Herself's outstretched neck, then makes like a bat. I ignore the constant thumps of his dashing his head against the closed Velux ceiling windows in the dining room.

I undo the big fat freeze button and we head off to bed, content in the knowledge that the temperature is on its way back up.

I expect a tropical jungle to greet me in the morning.

Turnover Toast, Part 2

This wonderful thing is a turnover loaf.

My friend Joyce read my blog post on not being able to find a picture of one online and about remembering what it was like to eat this bread as a kid. She then trundled into Meath Street, in Dublin, where she bought me a loaf. (She also mentioned gurcake, but that is an entirely different story).

You may use your imagination as to what kind of evening I am about to have, but rest assured it will include bread, butter, and a fruit preserve of my choice.

As there are no photos of turnovers to be had on the Internet, please feel free to use this one in all your bread photo albums.

What?

You don't have bread photo albums?

How strange.

Turnover toast

It's amazing, but I have not been able to find a photo online of a loaf of turnover bread! [But you can now see one here.] For those who don't know it, it's an Irish bread which is not one of the pieces of floor-sweepings and turf sods that the Diaspora earnestly bakes in an earthenware dish and chokes down in the name of ethnic authenticity. Turnover is unashamedly a doughy white bread. The baker takes a long piece of raw dough and folds two-thirds of it back over along its length. The result is a bread which has a distinctive shape -- one end is narrow, the other (the turnover) is rounded. The crust is crispy, and sometimes blackened slightly in the larger end.

I don't know if maybe turnover is confined to the Pale, and perhaps this is why it hasn't made it into the recipe books of other "traditional" Irish breads on the Internet. Whatever the reason, it's a wonderful bread to eat fresh, or, as we used to do as children for fun and for practical reasons if it had become a little old, toasted on a twisted wire coathanger in front of the coals of an open fire.

Toast has become a larger part of my diet recently than I have been used to. My father has now the habit of calling to visit each Saturday mid-morning for an hour or two. I know he tends to rise very early, so I offer him tea and toast to bolster him against the possibility that his breakfast was at 6.00am, or maybe not at all. He has no qualms about scoffing down factory-sliced pan loaf that has taken a trip through the toaster and is dripping with butter and marmalade. He had always complained about the quality of modern convenience bread like this, but I think the necessities of tending to himself and the practicalities involved have educated him to the notion that such foods rarely cause poisoning. There's also a lot to be said for having food handed up to you.

Turnover, sliced from the loaf with an old, almost toothless breadknife, tasted best when piping hot and speckled just a little with coal ash that had accidentally trickled from the hot grate. It was a delicate juggling act to reverse the slice on the prongs of the toasting fork, unless you had managed to skewer the bread in such a way that it could simply be flipped over. I always preferred the simplest two-prong, hanging method, rather than the trickier embedded through the flesh of the bread way of doing things. This latter art, though handy for getting both sides done, could leave the bread untoasted in some small bits, or cause it to warp on toasting. Of course, whatever the method it didn't do to let the mind's eye wander for a mis-spent moment or the toast would blacken and have to have the worst of the burnt bits scraped off with the scratch-scratch-scratching of the edge of the butter knife. And trouble would surely follow from the mother if you let any black bits stray into the butter dish!

It's funny that now I've taken my eye off the toast again, so to speak, the turnover has all but disappeared from the shelves of the local supermarkets. It's true that a factory-sliced version can be got in some places, but it's unhappily wrapped in cellophane and really doesn't give the full satisfaction of sawing off the shorter end and practising the skill of the breadknife slicing sideways through the crumbling white bread. One of my earliest memories is of breadcrumbs left over from an evening meal on the oilskin tablecloth of the kitchen table at home. I associated the word "hungry" with it. Not that we were hungry -- my mother put food on the table every day and followed it with slices of turnover spread with butter and blackberry jam. It's more just the picture I conjure when the word reaches my ears.

When I was very small, I was weaned on warm milk and bread mixed together. And later on I would dip fingers of turnover in my cup of sweetened tea, a habit I grew out of.

We had a good few rounds of toast this morning with Herself home convalescing from her recent hospital tests (all clear, T.G.), the father on his weekly visit, Herself's brother dropping off a birthday present to her, and me, the "toast cook", riffling through the sliced pan and tossing slices into the modern toasting machine. I must find out who still sells the uncut turnover I remember. We don't have an open fire any more in the house, but I can toast slices under the grille -- they wouldn't fit in the square slots of the toaster. And I promise to take a picture when I get one too.

Home baking

"Have you ever eaten one of my sponge cakes?" Herself asks me, the other evening, as we are watching television.
"Nope," I say, swigging my beer.
"Didn't you know me when I used to bake sponge cakes and butterfly buns and flans and maringues?"
"Er... no."
"I shall make us a sponge cake at the weekend."

Come the weekend there was a crisis of ounces verses grams. I was entertaining my father in the other room and so I couldn't help much.

"Look it up on the Internet," I said.

An hour later I was eating.... something.... sponge-like....

"Do you like it?"
"Er... yes...."

I chewed at the lump of fruit-topped, cream-filled yellowish stuff. Having to chew or gnaw at a sponge cake is probably an indication that it hasn't come out right.

"I think I didn't get the measurements right," she said. "And I think there was something about folding the mixture rather than beating it."

I seprated my upper teeth from my lower ones with an effort, long enough to say:

"No, babe. It's fine, really."

There was a definite clunk when a piece of leftover spong hit the bottom of the kitchen bin. I could feel strange protestations starting up in my gut.

Herself Googled for sponge cake recipes.

"I know what went wrong!" she shouted in to the other room. "I'll make you a proper one tomorrow!"

So, today, I'm eating a wafer-thin sponge-cake that hasn't turned out either. But it is lighter than yesterday's.

"I know where I went wrong. I'll make another one tomorrow that will be right this time. I promise."

My gut is thanking Heaven that we're back at work on Tuesday. It might not have survived an extra day of sponge making.

"You can write about it," Herself said. "On condition you write a sequel when it turns out...."

Watch this space.

The staff of life

If milkmen avoided free-range cows, then it was no surprise that breadmen wouldn't set foot in the field at all, possibly for fear of an attack by die-hard cereals. So three times a week my parents placed our green, enamelled breadbin onto a nook on a stone wall half-way up the lane. Coming home after school at 3 o'clock, I'd pause beside it in the laneway, open its lid a crack and gaze in at the beautiful white turnover loaves that would be nestling inside, their newly baked smell wafting out deliciously. Occasionally I'd succumb to the sin of greed and take a large pinch of white bread out of the side and pop it into my mouth. Wonderful!

Then I struggled the breadbin with its far-too-small carrying handles up the lane, through the middle gate, across the field and into my mother's kitchen.

"I think," she said to me one day, "we'll we'll have to stop putting the breadbin down the lane."

"Why?" I asked.

She lowered her voice, conspiratorialy:

"A rat or something is getting into it and eating a hole in the bread."

Oh-oh. I'd been rumbled. Apart from anything else, my suddenly big red face was a dead giveaway. I had to confess. My mother took it well enough, but made sure I knew if I wanted any more bread it would have to be cut with a knife in the kitchen, and not pinched in the lane.

When the priest came round on Wednesday to the school to hear confessions, I went into him in the spare classroom and knelt down.

"Bless me father, for I have sinned. It's two weeks since my last confession. Here are my sins. I was cursing. I was telling lies. I pinched bread from the bin in the lane..."

"You did what, my son?"

"The lane, father."

"What about it?"

"We have our breadbin in the lane, and I took bread out of it."

There was a pause, as the priest considered our domestic arrangements.

"The breadbin is in the lane?"

"Yes, father."

The priest was probably vaguely aware that such things as breadbins existed. Likely in the Augustinian college where he stayed, an underling would appear in the evening with a serving of a thickly-sliced piece of buttered turnover that must have come from somewhere. But probably not a lane. Obviously, he'd have to follow this one up later.

When the rest of the class had filed in and received absolution one by one, he came in to speak with Miss Egan. They whispered away and he nodded towards me. She shook her head. Then they both shrugged. I suppose he was asking her if I lived in a hedge or something. Anything peculiar in the family? Does he ever say strange things in class? Health Board ever involved?

I was in a fancy home-interiors store a couple of weeks ago and I saw a new enamel breadbin for sale. It was almost the same size as our old one (long since lost in a house move, to my regret), but cream in colour rather than green. I'm still trying to decide if maybe a new, cream-coloured one might go well in the kitchen we're building. At the moment, our plastic-packaged supermarket breads are stuck on a shelf in a cupboard. I miss the opening up and peering into an enamel breadbin, the smell of bread, trapped inside, wafting out, and the sound the lid made when it was dropped back on.

Maybe I'll speak with Herself about it.