Anna Higham: My career in Five Dishes

During the few hours I spend at Quince bakery on a mild Monday in May, with the shutter halfway down and the smell of brown butter curling out into the street, no fewer than six people attempt to enter. Each time, owner Anna Higham reminds them that, as the sign on the door says, they’re only open from Wednesday to Saturday. “We get this all the time when we’re baking on Tuesdays,” she laughs. “People will literally crawl under the shutter to check if we’re open.”

It’s a familiar sight in London, where bakery tourism has quietly overtaken the bar crawl. Lamination is the new lager. But while the capital is now stuffed to the crust with picture-perfect pain suisse, Quince is doing something altogether different. There are no croissants here, no viennoiserie at all. Quince specialises in British baking. “We’ve got such a rich history of British baking, but no one’s really drawing from it because we’re all looking to France, Denmark, the States,” says Higham. “There are already people doing lamination brilliantly – Helen Evans at Eric’s makes beautiful pastries, as do the guys at Toad. But I started to think: what can I actually add to the culinary canon?”. At Quince, that means fruit-studded teacakes, scones, ice fingers, custard buns and porridge loaves.

Higham didn’t start out in food. She was two and a half years into an architecture degree in Edinburgh when she took a year off, working front of house in bakeries and delis – covering bread shifts and filling in on cake duty when staff went on holiday. When she went back to visit her degree show, she felt absolutely no desire whatsoever to be an architect. “It was one of the few times in my life I had a proper epiphany,” she says. “I knew I wanted to be a cook.”

We’ve got such a rich history of baking in Britain, but no one’s really drawing from it

Her first few years in pastry kitchens were spent at Gordon Ramsay’s Bread Street Kitchen, a formative experience, if not only for confirming the sort of environment she didn’t want to work in. The turning point came when she moved to New York and joined the team at the Gramercy Tavern. “For an entire month, everyone who worked there was like, ‘The strawberries are coming! The strawberries are coming!’” she laughs. “I didn’t get the hype at first. But when they arrived, I understood that good produce is everything.”

Back in London, she joined Lyle’s and subsequently Flor, with the mental clarity she wanted to make ingredient-led desserts, which was relatively avant-garde at a time when mousses, crumbs and gels were king. “I’ve been thinking about Lyle’s a lot because it just closed, and I can’t underestimate its impact on me,” says Higham. “The relationships I made at Lyle’s are really foundational to Quince’s suppliers today – they are everything in this business.” Her final role before opening Quince was a two-year stint as the River Café’s first executive pastry chef. “I miss service,” she admits. “I miss seeing people eat what you’ve made. That little shoulder shimmy they do that you see from the back when they tuck in.”

Higham has since discovered that running a bakery is a different kind of pressure. The past week alone brought a flood, a broken freezer and the sort of logistical chaos that would precipitate a nervous breakdown in the average person. “The mental load of it is huge, managing a team and your emotions can be tough,” says Higham. Then she shrugs. “But at the same time, I can say ‘I want to make a strawberry party ring jammy dodger hybrid today’ – and that is exactly what we do.