More than five million of us will gather round our televisions tonight for the final of The Great British Bake Off – a show that, in its third series, seems to have captivated viewers more than ever. Critics applaud its power to unite and comfort in an uncertain world; meanwhile, a passion for baking has crept like a heaven-sent squatter into millions of kitchens.
It is good television – kind and honest and moderately celebrity-free. There is Mary Berry’s modesty and the courage of the competitors; there is the tasteful baking marquee, which could be the setting for a rural produce show; and those nicely educational bits stuck like jelly diamonds between the bake-off rounds – did you not know that St Honoré was the patron saint of baking? You do now, and you never know when that nugget will win you the pub quiz.
By some exquisite serendipity, the three finalists this year are men, which lends a new dynamic to the competition. Is this the moment the stereotypical yummy-mummy baker is whipped off her pedestal?
The days are past when housewives baked because they had hours to fill and home-baking skills helped to balance the budget. Women lead more complex lives and paradoxically, baking is now quite an expensive interest with the price of butter, flour and eggs having soared. The fabulous baker boys are today’s everymen who have put emasculation into reverse and become winners at a girls’ hobby. The disgruntled face of the losing female semi-finalist Danny, she whose crème patissiere oozed incontinently out of her genoise, will surely be a post-modern pin-up.
All of us have a John, James or Brendan in our lives. Brendan’s unbending classicism has had him criticised for being stuck in the Seventies, but there’s more flair than flares to this talented, if somewhat desperate-to-win technician. James is the geek in your upstairs bedroom who never quite gave up Lego, and John an angel with ambition (on good days he works miracles).
I welcome the bonus of a gender debate in this third final. There may be many men who cook often for friends and family, but there is a recognisable divide between the jobs they do as chores and those they truly enjoy.
Researching a book about “feminine” cooking two years ago, I spent time discussing and studying the tendencies of both men and women as they cooked and found that men definitely enjoyed cooking more if they could see the process.
Cooking quickly in a pan, throwing ingredients in one by one is what they liked (very Jamie Oliver), and if we must drag up the barbecue cliché, on a grill. Control is the male trait I identified. “Taking away his spatula and tongs is like losing the steering on a car,” I wrote, praying my husband would never read that line and take offence. The last thing any of our household wants is for him to suffer a fit of pique and stop producing those fabulous fried breakfasts on Saturdays.
As I worked on my book, Kitchenella, it became clear that relinquishing a tin containing cake batter to the hidden powers of the oven, where the alchemy happens behind a closed door, did not inspire or build my male interviewees’ confidence. They were less likely than female bakers to try again if the cake sank or the biscuits were dry and over-baked.
One way to put it is that men are slightly less forensic and patient. Another is to suggest that they are uncomfortable with baking’s prescriptiveness, which inhibits impulsive behaviour and involves surrendering a dish to the oven, the mother of kitchen tools, to be nurtured in its womb-like warmth.
Oh, help. I am setting myself up to be told how many exceptions there are. The James and Johns, the Brendans – and yet whose idea was it to put a window in the oven door? I bet it was a bloke.
Hot on the heels of the TGBBO semi-final last week came the results of a study carried out by Neff, the oven specialists. Surveying 2,000 men and women in the UK, they found that men have “begun to channel their inner baker”, which suggests the interest was dormant rather than dead.
Of the men questioned, 48 per cent said that they could bake without any help while 63 per cent of women admitted they were less confident and would benefit from lessons. You could pin many other classic gender traits on this finding, but let’s steer clear. I was riveted instead by the admission that more men than women like to make cupcakes – or fairy cakes as I was brought up to know them.
That seems to me yet another harmless development of the recent baking mania. I meet more and more fathers who bake with their children at weekends. National statistics have too often shown that parents’ playtime interaction with their children follows dreary stereotypes: Dad takes Hugo to football while Mum bakes with Melissa. It is a change for the better and we have much to thank TGBBO for.
But we should not ignore that other non-domestic baker, the professional pastry chef. The excitement over the trio of bakers taking part in tonight’s final may obscure the fact that a high proportion of people who bake for a living and are awarded the highest accolades are men. The sheer technical difficulty of their art makes the goings on in the TGBBO tent look like Play-Doh sessions in comparison.
Professionals such as Pierre Hermé bring out seasonal collections, just like a couturier, in which whimsical combinations of choux, crème patissiere, fresh fruit and snappy caramel are constructed with the same attention to detail as a Dior gown. The physical and mental strain of their efforts is famously onerous. Hermé is the only chef I have met who, having been grafting in his atelier all night, fell fast asleep during the interview, exhausted.
Men of his calibre would find the British fever for baking quaint. His sort seek golden gongs held round their throats with tri-colour ribbons announcing their status as a Meilleur Ouvrier de France, a title that is to artisans what a professorship is to an academic.
These men are St Honoré’s deputies on earth, you could say, but the stress involved in their work is often, I feel, manifest in the food they produce. We should cut cake for conviviality and feel guilty only about the sugar content, not for having destroyed a work of art. It is good to know, then, that just as British men are raiding the bakeware cupboards of their womenfolk, the girls are gaining ground in the male-dominated professional world and winning respect in bakeries of international repute.
Tonight the boys will bake their hearts out and will have the country behind them. Baking is a unique spectator sport in this respect – only a cynical minority will watch hoping to see one of the contestants’ creations implode.
Baking simply makes us very happy. It tickles each sense, from eyes to nose to palate and lives on in the memory as one of life’s good bits. It becomes synonymous with places and people who have long since gone, and does not discriminate. Frankly, I couldn’t care less who takes it upon themselves to make me a perfect Victoria Sandwich – a husband, children or the family dog. It will be a love letter all the same.
Rose Prince’s Baking Club appears in the Telegraph Weekend section each Saturday
