Damper is the bread of people who carried flour and nothing else. Writing home from New South Wales in the 1820s, the surgeon Peter Cunningham described the men working the farms, many of them convicts assigned as labour: “The farm-men usually bake their flour into flat cakes, which they call dampers, and cook these in the ashes”. Flour, water, salt, a fire. Stockmen droving cattle for weeks made it the same way.
The settlers did not invent baking in coals. Aboriginal Australians ground seeds into flour long before, and as SBS Food’s account of Indigenous baking puts it, “other cakes and breads were cooked in coals”.
This version is leavened, which most modern damper is, and baked in a lidded pot sitting in the embers rather than in the ashes themselves. It follows the method in Paul West’s recipe for SBS, halved, with the milk and self-raising flour turned into things that keep. He serves it with butter, golden syrup and billy tea, which is the right answer.
The whole technique is heat from above. A pot on coals is a frying pan. Put coals on the lid as well and it becomes an oven. Lodge, who make the classic camp oven, recommend “a 3:1 ratio of coals on the top and bottom” for baking. Bread burns from underneath long before it burns from above.
- Get the fire down to a bed of glowing embers, which takes the best part of an hour from lighting. Flames scorch the outside of a loaf and leave the middle raw; embers bake it. Set the empty pot and its lid in the edge of the embers to warm.
- Mix the flour, baking powder, milk powder and salt. Add about 280 ml of water and mix with a knife, then your hand, into a soft dough that is not sticky. Add a splash more water, or a little flour, to get there.
- Knead it for a minute on a floured board, only until smooth. Pat it into a round about 4 cm thick, cut a deep cross in the top and dust it with flour.
- Flour the bottom of the hot pot, put the loaf in and put the lid on. Rake a thin layer of embers under the pot and shovel about three times as many onto the lid.
- Bake 30 to 35 minutes. Every ten minutes, lift and turn the pot a quarter turn one way and the lid a quarter turn the other, so no single hot coal burns a patch.
- It is done when the crust is deep golden and the base sounds hollow when you knock it. Leave it ten minutes before breaking it open.
The old way, in the ashes: make the round flatter, about 3 cm, rake the embers aside, lay it on the hot ash, then cover it with hot ash and embers. Twenty-five to thirty minutes, then brush it off and knock the base. Messier, and how Cunningham’s farm-men did it.
On one burner: make two rounds 2 cm thick and cook them in a heavy frying pan with a lid on the lowest flame, 12 to 15 minutes a side, as for pan soda bread.
Eat it warm, torn, with golden syrup.
Serves 6.