How a village show, a loaf of bread and half a dozen eggs became rather more important than we’d care to admit.
It’s Official
There is now an official red first-prize card attached to the little wooden honesty egg box on the back wall at Town End Farm. It wasn’t our idea. After the eggs won first prize at this year’s village flower and produce show, Meg decided that the card was far too good to sit gathering dust on her mantelpiece. Meg is a friend and neighbour whose land the hens live on, and she shares looking after them with us. So the red card appeared on the box, complete with a note for our customers.
The egg box itself is nothing grand. It is wooden, weatherproofed against the North Yorkshire rain, with a tin inside for the money. Villagers and people passing through stop to buy eggs, and messages regularly arrive asking whether there are any in the box. We try to hold a few back for some of our older regulars, including Barbara, who walks up from her house to collect them on her way to the post box.
A few people commented when the prize card appeared, which naturally led to some discussion about whether prize-winning status meant the price should go up. It won’t (we live in Yorkshire…) although the card is being displayed with a certain amount of pride.
The Fiercely Serious Business of the Village Show
Every year we negotiate our village-show entries. First comes an agreement about how many each is allowed, then the decision about what they will be. Ian usually enters bread and photographs, while Jackie tends towards jams and baking. This year we capped ourselves at five entries each because we had been particularly busy at the Long Barn in the run-up to the show, but we still wanted to take part. Individual entries also count towards each village’s total, and this year Lastingham beat Appleton and Hutton Le Hole.
We both maintain that none of this matters very much, a position that becomes increasingly difficult to defend in the days beforehand when Jackie is baking, Ian is scrutinising photographs and we are taking a suspicious amount of interest in what the other one is entering.
It wasn’t always like this. When we first moved to Appleton, entering the show felt genuinely nerve-racking. In Jackie’s first year she carefully entered a Victoria sponge, only to have it disqualified because she had dusted it with icing sugar rather than caster sugar. A rookie error, but also an early lesson that village-show baking has rules and those rules matter.
Ten years ago, neither of us could have imagined that any of this would become part of our lives.
Bread, Eggs and Bragging Rights
Ian has been making his loaf for years. He first started baking bread during a particularly stressful period at work when he had a difficult boss, and kneading dough turned out to be an effective way of getting rid of some of the tension at the end of the day. These days he makes the dough largely by feel, because the locally milled Yorkshire Organic Millers flour we buy can vary in how much liquid it needs.
Bread making in our house also comes with its own soundtrack. Ian sets timers on his phone for the different stages of kneading, proving and baking, and his chosen alarm is a duck quacking. We have heard it so often that whenever somebody else’s phone makes a remotely similar noise, we both twitch. Since going on his French bread-making course, Ian has become slightly more sophisticated and now uses a proper proving basket bought there, but otherwise the winning loaf was the same bread he has been making for years.
This year there was another reason the result mattered. Edmund is 12 and a formidable village-show competitor, and last year he beat Ian in the bread class. Everybody knew Ian wanted to reverse the result. People were actually coming up to Ian at the show asking how his bread had done, so there was very little opportunity to pretend indifference.
When Ian discovered he had won first prize, his reaction could fairly be described as unbridled joy. As you can see from the photograph of above, looking considerably more delighted than a man who has just won £1.50 might reasonably be expected to look. He had finally beaten Edmund. Edmund, meanwhile, went on to win the prize for the highest number of points of any competitor in the entire show. So Ian won the bread battle, but Edmund comprehensively won the war.
The prize money has also acquired an importance of its own in our household. Each award comes home in a separate little brown envelope and, once we are back at Town End Farm, the winnings are counted to establish who has actually won the day. Last year Jackie came out ahead. This year Ian avenged the defeat by 50p.
The other first prize belonged to the hens. They live on Meg’s land, and she shares their care with us, usually taking responsibility for a week or two before swapping over again. The hens produce an extraordinary range of colours, shapes and sizes, so Meg chose the show eggs by looking for some that were very fresh but also reasonably similar to one another.
There weren’t many to choose from this year because the Long Barn had been particularly busy and guests had been getting through plenty of eggs, so nobody was especially confident about their chances. But the brown eggs Meg selected were good enough on the day. There is no special difference between a show egg and one bought from the honesty box or eaten for breakfast at the Long Barn. And once their moment of glory was over, the actual prize-winning eggs had a very ordinary ending. Meg took them home for tea.
Not Quite What We Imagined
The bread Ian entered is exactly the same bread that goes into the welcome hamper for guests arriving at the Long Barn. Guests are told that he bakes it, although quite a few still assume Jackie does all the baking, much to his disappointment. The eggs come from the hens we help look after, and guests often ask whether they can come down to meet them, feed them and collect the eggs.
That connection matters because making the welcome ourselves was always part of our idea for the Long Barn. Most of what goes into the hamper comes directly from our kitchen or life here, while the things we buy, such as the Roost coffee beans and Yorkshire rapeseed oil, come from local producers. We originally imagined we might vary the hamper for returning guests, but soon discovered that people wanted the things they remembered: Ian’s bread, the eggs, the brownies, the granola and, above all, the lemon drizzle cake.
Over time the hamper has become a small edible version of life at Town End Farm.
When we first moved to Appleton, we could not have predicted that village shows, hens and honesty boxes would become so woven into our everyday lives. We certainly did not expect to become competitive about bread and eggs, or for friends and neighbours to know enough about Ian’s rivalry with a 12-year-old baker to ask for the result.
Yet that is perhaps the part of the story we value most. The things that once seemed wonderfully eccentric are now entirely normal: entering the show, sharing the hens with Meg, people calling round for eggs, Barbara walking up on her way to the post box, and a red prize card attached to a wooden box on the wall.
The Long Barn benefits from that life too. Guests eat Ian’s bread, collect eggs from the hens, meet local people and experience small parts of the community we have gradually become part of.
Which is why the red card feels like the right place to end the story. It could have spent the next few years sitting on a mantelpiece. Instead it is attached to the honesty egg box where neighbours, customers and anyone passing by can see it.
The eggs are officially prize winning now.
The price, however, remains exactly the same.
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