Barges & Bread:

UK Winner of the 2018 'Culinary History' Category of the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards

Di Murrell knows the waterways of Britain back to front as well as being an award winning food writer. The author and her husband, Tam Murrell, spent many years afloat on barges all-the-while bringing up their sons. They worked a pair of canal boats, loading up with barrels of lime pulp which they transported from the London docks to the wharf in Hemel Hempstead belonging to Rose & Sons, for Rose’s Lime Cordial or carrying heavy cargoes of grain from Tilbury Docks on the river Thames to Coxes mill on the river Wey and moving equally heavy loads of sand or coal back to London. Barges thus laden do not move fast, providing ample opportunities for baking and experimenting with slow cooking.

The book is both a social history of watermen, lightermen and dockers as well as a recipe book for bread — from parched grain and flatbreads to Ezekiel bread, and the bread we eat today.