Home baking

Baking at home is a modest craft with deep roots. A Swedish grandmother passes on her method for slagbrot, a smooth rye loaf, to her granddaughter on an island off Sweden, the way her own grandmother once taught her. In Portugal, women from a village gather weekly at a shared stone oven, and while it warms, children arrive hoping for the sugary flatbreads baked just for them. Closer to home in Toronto, one cook makes her grandmother's treacle tart, while another makes the cinnamon buns that he and his father enjoyed at a truck stop.

The book gathers more than two hundred recipes, from savory pies and crusty loaves to birthday cakes, apple pie, peanut cookies and custard tarts. Its authors, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, travelled to six continents to record recipes at their source, from farmhouse kitchens in northern France to the bazaars of Fez. They documented the cooks as well as the food, including Taipei coconut buns, Welsh cakes, Moroccan biscotti and Tibetan overnight skillet breads. These were then set beside family and friends' favourite recipes, such as Hungarian cherry strudel, German stollen, Vietnamese bread pudding and anise crackers from Barcelona.

The recipes are written for beginners as well as experienced bakers, with calm, straightforward instructions designed for a regular home kitchen. The authors also encourage a relaxed attitude toward baking, which they see as part of the tradition itself. Quick recipes such as semolina crackers, a free-form fruit galette and a banana-coconut loaf are among the most rewarding in the book. Anecdotes, photographs and text about the baking customs of different peoples accompany the recipes throughout.

The book is intended for anyone who enjoys baking, cooks at home or likes to learn about food from other cultures. It suits both the kitchen and the bedside, for reading and returning to again and again.