This is book is so special to me in ways that I can’t really describe. In it Olivia Potts describes the pain of losing her mother, but also finding hope through baking.
It’s no surprise that death changes you. It happens in glaringly obvious ways, like weight change or ill health… For others, death brings a manic embrace of life, a desire to make hay while the sun shines. These people run ultra-marathons and travel the world. Others find their faith, or lose it.
…My world had been thrown into uncertainty, and that had established in me a new feeling that was both paralysing and exciting: my future was in my hands.
A Half-Baked Idea
After her mother’s death, Potts decides to leave her job as a lawyer to train in patisserie at the Cordon Bleu cookery school. The book talks about grief but also contains some truly mouth-watering descriptions of desserts, pastry, meringues, crème brûlée… I could go on.
Being in the kitchen made me feel grounded and calm. But I wanted so much more. I wanted to learn how to make perfect éclairs and beautiful brioche; I wanted to understand chocolate, and be able to put something on a plate in a way that suggested something other than ‘compost heap.’
A Half-Baked Idea
The first time I read through the book I stopped and started with it. I would read a few chapters, have a break and read something else, and then come back to it. It was too much for me and made me think of losing my mum. I needed the pauses to gather myself. But I always came back to it and the second time I read it straight through.
I’d spoken to my mother earlier that day on the phone… She’d yawned and we’d said goodbye to each other.
I didn’t know then what I would know sixteen hours later: that that yawn was a death knell, a swan song; a yawn – so commonplace, so trivial – that meant she wasn’t getting enough oxygen. A yawn that said she was dying. Later, I would replay that conversation, that yawn, over and over again. Her body was already preparing itself for what would happen over the next few hours.
A Half-Baked Idea
I read that, put the book down, and cried. Even typing that quote out now has made me feel emotional. I’m an only child and incredibly close to both my parents and I speak to my mum every day.
Maybe it was the warmth and the humour in the book that always brought me back to it and you do get a great sense of what it is like at the Cordon Bleu. Anyone who has ever turned up to something on their first day and felt completely out of their depth will relate to it. I loved the moment Potts recalls looking at a banana she’s been asked to cut up for a fruit salad and wondering if they are even real.
The descriptions of things she makes at cookery school are also to die for. There’s a description of buttercream as “bonkers… richer than Rockefeller, and less subtle than Liberace in its sweetness” that made me smile. Do not read this book unless you have something sweet ready; trust me, there is nothing worse than reading four pages on making genoise à la confiture de framboise (which contains the bonkers buttercream), to find out that you don’t even have one little biscuit in the house to ease the sugar cravings.
Each chapter of the book also ends with a recipe, including shepherd’s pie, crème caramel and a passionfruit and milk chocolate pavlova. In the name of research, I tried making a couple of them. I was going to do a sweet and a savoury recipe but my sweet tooth is way too strong when it comes to making food-based decisions, and I ended up making the banana and rolo loaf cake (yum) and cantuccini. I hadn’t heard of cantuccini before but they are a kind of Tuscan biscotti usually made with Vin Santo (a pudding wine that I subbed with amaretto, as Potts suggests to do if you can’t get Vin Santo, this is all sounding very lovely and almondy, isn’t it?).
I wasn’t brave enough to try the chocolate fondants… we’ve all seen Masterchef.
For the banana cake, the first challenge was sourcing rolos: I didn’t realise how popular they are! Is it a lockdown craving? Are there queues in the morning that I am unaware about, people dashing in ready to pick up their rolos. I tried all my local shops and supermarkets, until finally some were sourced in the big city by my boyfriend.
The recipe for the loaf cake was very simple to follow and it was all going really well until I took out of the oven. Now I’m sure, certain in fact, that when I prodded it with a knife to check it was cooked all the way through, the knife came out clean each time. However, once I sliced into it, I realised there was a bit right in the middle, just under the surface, that was maybe just definitely a bit raw. But, so long as you ate around that, it was lovely!
The cantuccini were also a delight to make (part from horrible flashbacks I got upon opening the Disaronno to a hen party where I drank a lot of the stuff and had to take myself to bed embarrassingly early…).
For the cantuccini, you mix together the ingredients to form a dough which you then separate and roll out into three sausage shapes. These then bake in the oven and fill your home with the most gorgeous citrusy smells. You then take them out and, once cool enough to handle, you slice them diagonally into the individual biscuits. This is where I made a few errors as the biscuits crumbled and cracked as I tried to slice (I don’t know if this means they were also under-baked, maybe I’m just a serial under-baker), anyway, I picked up the pace and tried to slice them so fast they didn’t know what was happening and therefore didn’t have time to crumble. They then return to the oven and finish baking and harden up. They were monsters in size and had the potential to crack a tooth but, my goodness, there were lovely.
The book is an emotional read, so moving and tender from having to choose the music at the funeral to deciding what to do with her mother’s belongings, but at the same time Potts writes it in an uplifting way that is full of love and warmth. I also defy anyone to read this book and not want to enrol immediately at the Cordon Bleu to learn about patisserie (you get to learn about wine and cheese too, people!)
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