Give Us This Day
Introducing the Vittles London Bakery Project, by Adam Coghlan
Good afternoon and welcome back to Vittles.
This week and next we’ll be taking a pause from the normal publishing schedule and instead rolling out the Vittles London Bakery Project. Below you’ll find an introduction to the project, which today is published alongside Branca Lessa de Sà’s essay on London’s Brazilian home bakers saving expats from homesickness.
Give Us This Day
A Vittles London Bakery Project, by Adam Coghlan
It was when I was cycling home one evening about five years ago that the idea of covering the plurality of London’s bakeries and baking traditions first came to me. I was at the junction of Lea Bridge Road and Orient Way, which, if the wind is blowing in the right direction, is the best place to catch the billowing bready scent emanating from the smelled-but-never-seen Kingsmill factory further down Argall Avenue. It’s the same smell that the owner of the village shop where I worked my first job would pump out with frozen rolls and assorted pastries to draw in customers as a ‘loss leader’; the one that supermarkets use to lure people in to buy everything but the bread that inevitably tastes much worse than it had promised on the forecourt.
This is the thing – the smell of baking stops us in our tracks, makes us think stuff, do things, eat, and move. It was at this point on my bike at a red light that my my mind danced – through thoughts of Kingsmill adverts, Warburtons crisp sandwiches, and all the different types of bakeries in London, the ones that I knew and loved, and the many others that I didn’t, all of which were nothing like the industrial ‘bakery’ that I was smelling at this moment. Implausibly, it conjured the heritage rolls and ciabatta from E5 in the mid-2010s, kouign-amanns, doubles from Roti Joupa, pide at Mangal 2, doughnuts from Raabs, Pret bakewells, and a kind of borrowed nostalgia and stolen grief for Percy Ingle’s closure (also less so its racist past). Almost instantly, the idea for ‘Give Us This Day’ was born: a collection of essays, histories and guides that would cover the city’s many baking traditions in all their diversity.
Bread is not elemental, but made by combining water, fire, and crop, it is perhaps the closest thing humans have to an elemental food. Therefore, it is uniquely positioned to tell the story of London’s various communities. Many of the first diaspora food businesses in London were bakeries – you do not need to import any special ingredients to make bread – and it was the bakery that often became the centre of a neighbourhood, as Adrienne Katz Kennedy writes in her profile of Rinkoff Bakery, one of the last surviving Jewish food businesses in the East End. Bread straddles the public and the private, inside and outside: many of London’s bakeries were started in the home before they opened their doors to everyone, which is the case for the lauded bakeries in Riaz Phillips’s history of London’s Caribbean bread, patties and roti; and in today’s essay from Branca Lessa de Sá’, which pays tribute to the role of Brazilian home bakers in London, and their efforts to kill longing and homesickness through their cakes.
In the last decade particularly, bakeries and certain types of baked goods have become more pronounced cultural signifiers of taste and class. In her potted timeline, Hester van Hensbergen looks at the cultural history of sandwiches in London, from 18th century private members clubs to the 2010s sourdough boom, while Isaac Rangaswami examines the many uses of sourdough’s polar opposite, shite white bread (first perfected on the fringes of the Metropolitan Line in Chorleywood). Social media has helped shift and accelerate these signifiers, and, in recent years, London has seen the emergence of a certain style of bakery informed by the dominant aesthetics of Instagram and TikTok, which Angela Hui looks at in her essay on the colourful pandan and ube boom among London’s new wave of east Asian bakeries.
The name of this project refers to how ubiquitous and ordinary baked products are in the lives of Londoners, and the guides we have compiled reflect the way we all eat: a bakery guide, obviously, which maps London in fifty distinct bakes, from Tottenham cake to agege bread, but also a comprehensive everyday sandwich guide, compiled by sandwich maven Ed Fenwick. These will be released over the next two Fridays and will be paywalled for subscribers only – so do sign up if you would like to read them.
‘Give Us This Day’ has been a long time coming – years in the making – and would not have been possible without the immense contributions and formidable eating abilities of all those listed below. This day is now yours and we hope you enjoy reading the stories and using the guides over the course of the next fortnight and beyond! And be nice when you tell us which of your daily breads we’ve missed.
Give Us This Day: A Vittles London Bakery Project
1. Matar a saudade by Branca Lessa de Sá
In London, the Brazilian home bakers satisfying our longing
2. Pandan, Ube, and the Visual Consumption of Asian Baked Goods in the Viral Age, by Angela Hui
The sweet and colourful curse of Instagram and TikTok in London’s Chinatowns
PUBLISHES WEDNESDAY 24th JULY
3. The Vittles Sandwich Guide, by Ed Fenwick (with Jonathan Nunn, Kelly Pochyba, and Isaac Rangaswami)
Fifty sandwiches you will like
PUBLISHES FRIDAY 26th JULY
4. Who Are We Serving Today?, by Adrienne Katz-Kennedy
The ever-changing role of a Jewish community’s bakery in London’s East End
PUBLISHES MONDAY 29th JULY
5. London Sandwiches: 1762-2024, by Hester van Hensbergen
A cultural history of London’s iconic sandwich moments
PUBLISHES TUESDAY 30th JULY
6. Far Beyond These Things, by Isaac Rangaswami
The many shades of shite white bread
PUBLISHES TUESDAY 30th JULY
7. By Them, For Them, by Riaz Phillips
The vital history of and uncertain future of three generational Caribbean bakeries
PUBLISHES WEDNESDAY 31st JULY
8. The Vittles London Bakery Guide, by Jessica Wang, James Hansen and others
Around the city in fifty bakes
PUBLISHES FRIDAY 2nd AUGUST
Credits
Give Us This Day is written by Branca Lessa de Sá, Angela Hui, Ed Fenwick, Adrienne Katz-Kennedy, Hester van Hensbergen, Isaac Rangsaswami, Riaz Phillips, Jessica Wang, James Hansen, Jonathan Nunn, Adam Coghlan, Kelly Pochyba, Harry Lambous, Zayneb Al Asaadi, Isobel Lewis, Vindhya Buthpitiya, Zahra Al Asaadi, Mark Corbyn, Melek Erdal, Marie Mitchell, Christian Theodorou and Ruby Tandoh.
Many thanks to Alex Brenchley, Isadora Machado, and Sinjin Li for the illustrations and to Michaël Protin, Riaz Phillips, and Isaac Rangaswami for the photographs.
This project was edited by Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn, and sub-edited by Sophie Whitehead and Liz Tray. All Give Us This Day illustrations in this post are by Alex Brenchley.