Authors: William Alexander
Instead of using a towel to form the
boule,
I pulled out my linen
couche,
a heavy cloth used for proofing long loaves, floured it thoroughly, and put the gloppy mess on it in a shape as close to a ball as I could muster. Two hours later, the dough had risen and was ready to go into the preheated Dutch oven. Now, how
to flop this wet mass of batter into a 450-degree pot without scorching myself? Bittman’s suggestion was to “slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot.” Which I did. Nothing happened. The dough hung upside down, clinging to the cloth like a sleeping bat. I pulled at it with my fingers, and it started to descend slowly, resembling some kind of otherworldly protoplasm.
Finally the slowly sagging goop reached the hot metal, where it sizzled and hissed and gave off a puff of steam, but the other end of it was still attached to my
couche,
stretching out like Silly Putty. What a mess! Using my metal bench scraper (a handy fiveby-seven-inch metal blade in a wooden handle, used for dividing dough and scraping up flour), I skimmed off as much as I could from the
couche,
giving up the pretense that I was dealing with anything resembling a loaf, and got the damned thing in the oven before it finished frying.
I turned my attention to cleaning up. My new
couche
was virtually ruined, permeated with the batter, the kitchen littered everywhere with little globs of dough: clinging to the coffeemaker, dripping off the countertop, stuck to my jeans. An hour later, I flipped out the bread. To my surprise, it fell out cleanly. The crust—and there was a lot of it, because the dough had spread out to cover the bottom of the pot—was golden and shiny and covered with appealing blisters. It looked appetizing but more resembled pastry crust than bread crust.
The “
boule
” was all of two inches high. Rustic
boule
? Hardly. The crust was crispy and thin as promised, but without the sweetness and depth of my peasant bread crusts. The bread itself lacked flavor, which was surprising, given its eighteen-hour fermentation at room temperature. Yet it wasn’t a total loss: when I sliced into this flat, oval loaf, my suspicions were confirmed: I had made a pretty good
ciabatta,
that flat Italian white bread
with a delicate, crispy crust and an airy interior ideal for dipping into olive oil.
“Are you going to be working with this method again, Dad?” Zach asked, enjoying a slice. “Trying to make your perfect loaf?”
I thought about that for a moment. Making this bread had been about as much fun as doing the dishes. Bittman and Lahey truly seemed to think this method would spark a revolution, creating a nation of new home bread bakers, enabled by this easy, no-knead, no-steam method of baking bread. As with van Over’s hope for a food-processor-bread revolution, I suspect they will be disappointed, for all have missed something essential: when it comes to bread, the end does not necessarily justify the means. Still, I was glad I had done the experiment. It reminded me that there’s more to bread than bread. This isn’t simply about lunch. The process needs to be rewarding.
“No, Zach, I have to give the Dutch oven back to Uncle John,” I said, pulling a hunk of dough out of my hair. Then I went upstairs to take a shower, and as the water ran down my back, I thought about my answer. Why was I so quick to dismiss a promising if imperfect and unsatisfying method after only a single try? What was I in fact after? If I thought we made bread because it took us to another place, what
was
that place for me?
Why bread? Why me? Why now?
I needed a good shrink.
The reptilian always wins.
—Clotaire Rapaille
I’ll say this: Clotaire Rapaille certainly knows how to make an entrance. After keeping me waiting for five minutes in his spacious study, long enough for the opulence of it to fully set in but not long enough to be rude, Dr. Rapaille, in a
très
French sports jacket, his wavy salt-and-pepper hair swept back with a certain je ne sais quoi, descended the sweeping marble staircase of his Tuxedo Park, New York, mansion, built in 1890 by the very architect (Rapaille was quick to point out) who designed Grand Central Station. I nearly had a case of the vapors.
I’d been nervous about this interview all morning, changing clothes twice, and then, when told by Dr. Rapaille’s assistant to make myself comfortable anywhere (as if that were possible!), spending several minutes choosing the right seat.
Faced with over half a dozen options, this was no trifling matter. I didn’t want my back to the entrance, which ruled out several seats. There was a chair facing his desk, but that seemed too formal an arrangement, forcing Rapaille to sit behind his desk, and besides, I didn’t want to feel like a delinquent third grader waiting for the teacher to arrive. Other chairs in a grouping around
the large fireplace were blocked in by the furniture arrangement, which would make getting up to shake hands awkward.
Hoping to dodge the issue entirely, I remained standing while I examined the paintings on the wall and the books on the table, so carefully arranged, his own book prominently displayed among the French-language classics that were stacked perfectly askew, each book rotated at a twenty-degree angle from the one below it, like the treads of a spiral staircase.
Finally I settled into a richly padded leather chair with a fur thrown over it. That is, a
mink
fur, thrown carelessly over the chair the way I throw my underwear onto the bed. I hoped I’d chosen the right chair. With a man who is a marketing psychologist (and from the looks of his digs, a fabulously successful one at that), who has made a career of picking up on people’s subconscious actions and hidden codes, you can’t be too careful.
Dr. Rapaille is known for taking a novel approach to market research, not listening to what focus groups
say,
but getting to what he calls the “structure” behind their words, the emotional connections to the object. A former clinical psychologist, Rapaille does this partly by wearing down his groups in lengthy, three-hour sessions, for the last hour putting his subjects on the floor with pillows, under dimmed lights, while subtly conducting a kind of group analysis session. The third hour is when the truth comes out. For example, Rapaille writes, when you ask people what they want in a car, they’ll rattle off practical things like fuel efficiency, comfort, and safety. But that’s the brain’s cortex speaking, and the cortex doesn’t buy the car. The brain stem does. Ask people about their fondest memory of a car when their guard is down, and you’ll more likely hear about sex in the back-seat or the freedom of the road or that family trip to Grandma’s. Tap into these primitive, subconscious feelings—the reptilian brain, Rapaille calls it—and you’ll sell the car. Which is why
Chrysler’s “gangsta” PT Cruiser (Rapaille advised on it) was so successful that there was a long waiting list, despite its having been dismissed by reviewers as, technologically speaking, a piece of junk. Same with another Rapaille project, the resurrected Jeep Wrangler, whose round headlights subtly suggest a horse, an image Jeep played up in their Wild West advertising for a car more likely to be driven on the Jersey Turnpike than in a Texas cattle roundup.
——————————————
“What is it about bread?” I asked Rapaille after he’d finished the theatrical descent down a staircase that made the one at Tara look like a fire escape. “Why do people have such strong emotional attachment to it? Why do the French line up every day to buy their baguettes? Why do we buy so much of the stuff, even when it’s not very good?” I knew he had done market research into bread and had consulted for at least one commercial bakery. If anyone would know, Rapaille was the man.
“You have this smell,” he began, in his seductive Yves Montand accent, “this very special smell that triggers a lot of references, like home and safety, and mother, and ‘I’m going to be fed.’ It’s a very safe place.”
That was precisely the kind of answer I might’ve expected from a psychologist—“mother” in the first sentence! Although his beginning with smell, not taste, was interesting and hinted at the very reason grocery chains oft en have in-store bakeries. The next sentence, though, surprised me. “If you have water and bread, then that’s enough.”
“Enough?”
“You know
The Count of Monte Cristo
? It is a novel. The
compte
was put in this fortress, a jail, for, like, fift een years and given nothing but bread and water. For fift een years. But he developed
so much muscle that he was able to dig a tunnel to escape. Which means if you have the right water, and the right bread—the old-time bread—you have total survival. There is something very archetypal and basic in bread. It is the number one thing you need for survival. I was born during the war, you know, in France, and sometimes we had nothing else besides bread. And we were happy. The bread was good.
“There is a very special definition of bread in France,” he continued. “You should have a crust, and it should be hard. And the center should be”
—
he groped for the word in English
—
“
molle.
”
“Soft ?” I guessed.
“
Oui,
soft. So you need this opposition there. This is very important. When you have this opposition, this is a great bread. We don’t say that about other foods, vegetables, whatever. Only about bread, which is a category of its own. Bread and water. If you have good bread and water, you can survive.”
And the reptilian brain, at some level, knows that.
We talked a bit about the rituals surrounding bread, and Rapaille noted that in France, bread at the table is not sliced but broken, a powerful, communal act that begins a meal. (In America, of course, most of us would recoil if a dining partner handled food in such an intimate and unsanitary manner. We prefer our bread neatly sliced, ready to be plucked out of the basket with antiseptic hands.)
“When French people come to America, they say there is no bread,” Rapaille mused. “There is no distinction between the crust and the center. It is all just like plastic. The symbolism is that you should . . .
keech
”—he made a crackling sound to accompany his hand motion—“break the bread. When you cannot do that, this American bread is not really bread.”
A knock at the door interrupted us. A young man—a servant, not an aide, not a secretary, but a real, live, honest-to-God
servant—dressed in a tie and dark suit,
*
entered with a silver tray, on which sat a silver pot of coffee. I briefly wondered what country—and what century—I was in.
I took advantage of the distraction to reflect on what I really expected to learn from Rapaille, why I was even here. But I couldn’t quite get it out.
“What type of bread are you making?” he asked after the servant had silently closed the door behind him. I explained my single-minded, year-long quest for the perfect
pain de campagne.
“Just one type?” he said, raising an eyebrow.
Here we go again. Why did everyone (especially shrinks) have such a problem with this? If I were baking a different kind of bread each week, no one would blink an eyelash, but somehow this pursuit of trying to do one thing very well made me eccentric.
Rapaille talked more about rituals, the difference between sharing a baguette and sharing a
boule
(with a baguette, someone always gets the end piece—the
croûton—
but with a round loaf, as with the Knights of the Round Table, all the slices are egalitarian). He displayed a surprising degree of bread knowledge when he discussed how the shape of the loaf also affects the ratio of crust to crumb, and therefore the flavor as well, and he kept returning to the smell.
And I kept returning to, “What is it about bread?” I’m not sure what I was looking for, but I didn’t feel I was finding it. If the aroma was such an important factor, that made my obsession with bread all the more mysterious. I’m pretty sure that as a child, I never experienced the smell of fresh-baked bread in my house, not even once. Yet that could be important in itself. Was
I subconsciously trying, not to re-create something primal from my childhood, but to create something that had been
missing
?
Finally, after more than three-quarters of an hour, a little worn down, slumped in my chair, the lights in my brain dimming a bit, my cortex relaxed and my brain stem blurted out the true, reptilian reason for my visit.
“Dr. Rapaille, why am
I
obsessed with bread?”
The doctor glanced at his watch. The fift y-minute hour was over. Our time was up.
This is Fair Week and everybody is going to enjoy it if I have to follow them with a shotgun.
—Phil Strong,
State Fair,
1932
Looking up at the dead-of-night sky, I was relieved to see stars. I was half-asleep, but at least I’d have good weather for my pre-dawn, four-hour drive to Syracuse.
Thirty minutes later, still a good hour from daybreak—if day could break through at all—I found myself closed in by a fog so dense I could barely see the shoulder of the road. The speed limit was sixty-five; the sensible limit in these conditions, thirty. Yet I didn’t know how long this fog would last, and if I drove all the way to Syracuse at thirty miles an hour, I’d miss the competition.
I eased the cruise control back to sixty and hoped for the best, praying that this was a local phenomenon that would soon clear.
Two hours later, still in darkness, the fog had become so thick it was condensing on the windshield, requiring me to give the wipers a kick now and then, which mainly had the effect of smearing the accumulation of splattered bugs on the glass, further reducing my visibility and making the car feel small and isolated, with no signposts to follow and no reliable gauge of direction or progress.
In other words, the perfect metaphor for my journey to bread perfection. Just past the halfway point of my fift y-two-week odyssey, I needed a sign, a validation of the six months I’d devoted to this single-minded passion. Yes, it was high time for an independent evaluation of my bread, by people who weren’t family or friends, who didn’t know of me or my quest, and who would be totally objective and bluntly honest, no matter how much it hurt. We call such people judges, and within a few hours, a half dozen of them would be comparing my peasant loaf to the other entries in Category 02, the Yeast Breads class at the oldest state fair in the nation, the New York State Fair.