Dark Rye and Honey Cake: an introduction

Let’s be clear: Regula Ysewijn’s Dark Rye and Honey Cake isn’t really a ‘cookbook’. Not in the way that most cookbooks are cookbooks. Sure, it contains recipes – wonderful recipes that will leave your tables heaving with sweet, savoury and spicy bakes – but this is no more a run-of-the-mill cookbook than the Sistine Chapel ceiling is a nice piece of interior design.

Regula is an old-style polymath: a cook and a writer, but also a historian, a photographer, a broadcaster, and, in her native Belgium where she hosts the Flemish version of Bake Off, something of a celebrity. She is celebrated here at Borough Market, too. For years, Regula took photographs for our much-loved Market Life magazine. Even as her career began to soar, she’d make time to visit with her camera and an empty suitcase, returning to the continent with a memory card full of images and a case full of Northfield Farm meat. To the best of our knowledge, Paul Hollywood isn’t running any similar side gigs in Flanders.

Regula’s affinity for Borough stemmed from a deep-rooted fascination with British food, culture and history. Her infatuation with the UK informed her previous books, including Pride and Pudding and Oats in the North, Wheat from the South, and provided, she says, “an escape route from Belgium”. Hers is a young country riven by tensions of language, geography and class. Rather than confront these historic stresses she chose instead to turn her outsider’s gaze to the island across the Channel. With Dark Rye and Honey Cake, she has finally looked inwards. “I gave the culinary history and also the history of my country a place in my life, and gave it time to grow,” she writes. “It was like a seed I always had stored away in a box, but never wanted to plant. And now that I had planted it, I wanted it to grow slowly and form deep and strong roots.”

As a conduit for all that complex history, Regula chose to focus on festive baking – the celebratory treats enjoyed on major religious holidays. She explains: “Baking traditions are the traditions that survive hard times and manage to remain relevant in a modern day and age.” Rather than look purely at Belgium, a country that has only existed since 1830, she sought to explore the culinary ties that bind the Low Countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and a small corner of France.

Based on years of painstaking research, Dark Rye and Honey Cake brings the history of the region to life through essays and recipes. It’s also a stunning piece of visual art, thanks to Regula’s highly distinctive photography: food shots, but also landscapes, portraits and beautifully composed still-lifes, all redolent of Golden Age oils. There are real historic paintings here too, stunningly reproduced. Hers is a work of impeccable scholarship, made accessible through its charming lyricism and pacy storytelling. There’s a wealth of knowledge packed into this tome, and not a word is wasted. Pages of waffles, but absolutely no waffle.