Julia Child I'm not

We began to meet our neighbors. Joy, who taught in the Achilitibuie school, and Ian, a retired Edinburgh solicitor, had the house just to our east. They had a lovely modern house called "Mullagrach" - named after the small island Ian owned just west of Isle Ristol. They also owned a beautiful, elegant labrador bitch named "Mac" who I thought was the most perfect example of her breed I'd ever seen. She had a sweet and elegant nature too.

Joy became my mentor in the art of bread baking (a necessity if one wanted anything but the wonder-bread type packaged white stuff). I had produced several examples of abstract sculpture using the "plain" flour I thought was closest to our "all purpose" flour in the States. Horrible! Joy invited me over for a bread making session in which she produced several fragrant, nutty loaves that smelled divine and looked a treat. And she used "strong" flour. So it was "strong" flour for bread and rolls, "plain" flour for "pudding" - "pudding" being anything dessertish like cake or pie - or sometimes actual pudding.

Speaking of pudding, I had tried to make my favorite custardy bread pudding in the usual way, baking it in a mold sitting in a shallow pan of water. In the States it took an hour or so to bake to a lovely crusty golden brown.
After 1 1/2 hours the current attempt was still liquid. Two hours. At 2 1/2 I began to worry. Wilf and Wendy were coming for supper and the "pudding" was still in drinkable state. When I asked Wendy what could possibly be wrong she went off into gales of laughter - thought the water bath technique was the daftest thing she'd ever heard. That was when I realized that the elements in my present oven were on the sides instead of on top and bottom as they are in American stoves. No wonder mothers here didn't bake cookies! After I took the poor pudding out of its bath it cooked up beautifully in no time.

Obviously I had a lot to learn.