Inside the World of "The Great British Bake Off"

Summary

One evening in the autumn of 2012, I got a somewhat urgent phone call from my mom. I was living in a quasi-legal student sublet at the time—the landlord had hooked the electricity up to the street lights outside—and she wanted to recommend a baking show that might distract me from the rats under the floor. Think “MasterChef” but with the pacing of an afternoon spent punting on the Thames. The bakers were normal people: a shop worker, a vicar’s wife, a searingly competitive sixty-three-year-old Buddhist whose coup de grâce was a flock of choux-pastry cygnets. “There’s a Scottish boy on it,” my mom added, offering some enticement. “He wears knitted jumpers.”The Culture Industry: A Centenary IssueSubscribers get full access. Read the issue »In the U.K., if you so much as bring a beat-up homemade carrot cake into the office, you can count on somebody telling you to apply for “The Great British Bake Off.” I was twenty and already had a signature apricot-tart recipe, so I was bound to get the call eventually. My mom would, I’m sure, argue that she meant only for me to watch “Bake Off.” But you can’t watch people doing the thing you love, only worse, and just sit by. Or, at least, I couldn’t.Within a few weeks, I had not only seen every episode but obsessively studied the format. I took notes when the bakers were challenged to make “hand-raised” meat pies: a topsy-turvy process in which you make the pastry with hot water instead of cold, and press the dough not into a pie dish but around the outside of a wooden mold. I acquainted myself with the judges’ predilections: the delicate Mary Berry favored the classics, whereas Paul Hollywood—a thoroughly suntanned man with the alpha saunter of a prison guard—seemed to have a weakness for piña-colada-flavored bakes. I wasn’t interested in the backstory montages showing the bakers’ home towns, or in the wholesome conversational patter—that was filler. I wanted the uncensored baking, those sweet shots of gelatine leaking from badly...