The need of the immaterial is the most deeply rooted of all needs.
One must have bread; but before bread, one must have the ideal.
Victor Hugo
Kate Taylor Beale is an artist-baker originally from Chichester in England. After a round-Europe tour experimenting with cooking and baking, she joined us to set up a new venture that brings art, baking and heritage together through a new enterprise.
The processes and heritage of bread and bakeries have played an important role in rural towns like Huntly. But is there still an interest within the community for hand-made bread? And if so, how can we discover what knowledge people have of bakeries in the past?
Heritage Bakery is driven by the principle that socially engaged arts can rejuvenate a place with a meaningful purpose, by supporting the ethos that 'everyone is an artist'. The overall vision of the project is to create a bakehouse local to Huntly, where the loaves baked can be used to create a sustainable and ultimately self-funding heritage bakery. A key aspect of the project is to create opportunities that encourage local participation in the process of bread-making. Kate began the project by gathering local information about growing grain, milling, and baking, and is still welcoming people to get in touch with stories or histories that they would like to tell. Kate was later joined by Christine Sell and together they were baking sourdough bread made from local organic wheat growers Coldwells and Mungoswells.
