Not worth the calories

Anyone who loves the Great British BakeOff will be tempted by this novel, set around a baking show with amateur contestants in a large tent.

In this novel the baking show is set in America, but it is as English an America as possible. The location of the bake-off is Vermont, with English-y green hills, in a large isolated manor house that is repeatedly described as Victorian. The owners, the Graftons, behave as though they were in Downton Abbey, sneering at the help and expecting the cook to stay out of sight.

The novel makes it clear that this baking show is akin to the GBBO rather than those other cut-throat competitions:

The show was gentle, with a focus on the craft, not on a bunch of runaway egos.
Bake Week’s massive success was due to the way it treats people. No yelling, no scolding, just good natured competition and respectful defeat.
”For our first baking challenge, the bakers are asked to make two kinds of bread. We are looking for one sweet bread and one savory, and at least one must be made using yeast.”

You get the picture.

The author has not slavishly followed the GBBO formula, however. There are only 6 contestants in this novel’s Bake Week, and the novel’s Bake-Off is filmed over a single week with each day devoted to a different type of bake — bread, pies, tarts etc. The contestants are selected for the usual variety of ages, gender and backgrounds: there is one very young but astonishingly proficient young woman, one middle-aged woman, one meticulous and precise engineer, and one gay man. The remaining two contestants are a bit more unusual: an Indian-origin tech millionaire who bakes for fun, and a journalist who has only been baking for a year.

Each day of the competition sees one contestant dropped until the last two battle it out for the finale. The show has been hosted and judged for 5 years by Betsy Martin, the owner of the Victorian manor, and a famous cook in her own right. She is neither Prue Leith nor the comforting Mary Berry, but:

swathed in a pink cashmere sweater, her earlobes punctuated with pearls, she has the kind of glow that at our age comes only with very subtle, very expensive plastic surgery.

The producers think Betsy is getting boring, though, and this year have foisted a co-host upon the show — Archie Morris, a fit and good looking fifty three with blindingly white teeth who used to host a macho cutthroat cooking show.

The novel proceeds in linear time, with chapter titles like ‘Bread’ and ‘Pie’, and sub-sections from the viewpoint of each contestant. The familiar structure is soothing in the GBBO TV series, but gets a bit dully predictable in a book.

Almost immediately, suspicious events ensue. One contestant’s pastry does not chill as expected — did he forget to close the fridge door, or was he sabotaged? Likewise, another’s whipped cream has salt instead of sugar — did someone switch the containers? The contestants remain largely unsuspicious during and after these incidents. But worse is to come ! As you might expect from a mystery novel, a body eventually appears.

Beyond the fun of correlating real life GBBO events with the plot, the novel is not very imaginative. The open refrigerator is much like the GBBO Baked Alaska scandal. The secret door at the back of a wardrobe is straight from CS Lewis’ Narnia. In a rather obvious plot device, all the supporting camerapeople and producers stay many miles from the house for dubious reasons (but I suppose a convenient snowstorm would have been worse). The mysterious secret becomes clear to the reader about halfway through the book, but the characters are shocked! shocked! when it is revealed.

As for the writing, some voices are better than others. Hannah, the precociously capable young baker, is particularly poorly written: she has little personality and her ambition is never very convincing. Her thoughts are both cliched and repetitive:

When I am in the process of baking, I go to another place. [..] When I’m baking something, I get so involved in whatever it is that I’m making that I disappear into it.

Pradyumna, the tech millionaire, seems astonished that the small attic rooms are intended for the servants — surely something anyone who’s watched BBC or Masterpiece Theater would expect.

The author has an odd turn of phrase at times:

I stack my spine and return his gaze evenly.

Betsy’s spine is stacked primly.

Sad to say, there are no recipes of Gerald’s cheddar-pepper babka or Lottie’s stupendous Blueberry Buckle. Those would have improved the book, but instead it is both underproved and has a soggy bottom.

~ The Golden Spoon, by Jessa Maxwell ~ Atria Books, 2023.