Authors: William Alexander
I could not perpetuate a major fraud on a one-thousand-three-hundred-year-old abbey that had stood for two-thirds of Christendom. Painfully I started to compose a reply, admitting
my deceptions, confessing that I’d overstated my qualifications, spoke French on a first-grade level, and was sorry for the trouble. Left unsaid was the fact that if there was a hell, I sure as hell didn’t want to spend eternity in it.
I wrote the note, but I never sent it.
I stared at the computer screen for a long time, reading the prior’s note over and over, and started to see the request in a new light. I wasn’t just being asked to train a monk or to bake some bread; I was being asked to repair a broken thirteen-hundred-year-old chain, to return fresh bread to this abbey, to reignite a tradition that had tragically been extinguished. It was an opportunity to repay a debt, to do for this abbey what the abbeys of Europe once did for the rest of us—keep knowledge alive during dark times.
In return, the abbey offered me something as well: a chance for repentance. For nine months I’d been imposing myself on others, barging into their bakeries and homes, asking favors and a million questions, and now I’d been suddenly and unexpectedly offered a chance to give something back.
L’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille, founded in 649, with a broken thirteen-hundred-year tradition of baking bread, had entrusted the reestablishment of that tradition to a New York nonbeliever.
Good Lord!
Vespers, celebrated at day’s end, takes on the character of evening. The day is almost over, our work is done. This is the hour of wise age, of resting in thanksgiving and humility after the struggles, successes and failures of the day of one’s productive life.
Tip on flying . . . Book an afternoon flight. The airport security personnel has warmed their hands already on other passengers.
— Jay Leno
Weight: 201 pounds
Bread bookshelf weight: 60 pounds
I’d like to briefly interrupt the narrative to sing the praises of an oft -maligned group, the TSA Officials who guard our nation’s airplanes. After all, they don’t make the rules, and they, even more than we griping passengers, constantly have to adapt to the changing, oft en-silly regulations those geniuses in Washington keep dreaming up: Tweezers are out; cigarette lighters in. This week, liquids are banned; the next, you can bring all the liquids—in three-ounce bottles—that you can fit into a single ziplock bag. Shoes are off; shoes are on; shoes are off.
And what do these underappreciated, beleaguered workers get for their troubles? Passengers like me.
In my defense, I was on a mission from God.
As I approached the X-ray machine with my precious cargo, I decided honesty was the best policy. Thus after I’d pulled out my laptop and Baggie of toiletries, I displayed the half-gallon plastic container with a locking lid and said, as casually as if I were declaring chewing gum, “Sourdough.”
I might just as well have said, “Gun!”
Hedging my bets, I had also put a quart of my starter into a small gym bag and checked it along with my suitcase, but I figured there was a fift y-fifty chance it would get tossed when the bag was inspected, even though I’d written “sourdough” in large block letters on it. (I figured “levain” wouldn’t help much.) Plus, if it did make it through, I wasn’t sure what eight hours at forty thousand feet in the cargo hold would do to it. Thus my hopes were pinned on the
levain
I was carrying with me. Not only had it become indispensable to my bread, but I was hoping that this twelve-year-old starter—
my
starter, now—might become part of the tradition of the thirteen-hundred-year-old abbey.
Every TSA worker in the terminal chimed in on the discussion while the line built up behind me. Apparently there was no precedent on sourdough. Finally I was rather impatiently waved through the metal detector and asked to wait on the other side. Anne was relieved to see me.
“What’s happening?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you should go on without me. I may be here awhile. You have the address?” Bags continued exiting the X-ray machine on the conveyor belt, but none of them was mine. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. We waited a few minutes more.
A loud male voice rang out from in front of the monitor at the X-ray machine. “What is this stuff,
dough
? Who’s got the dough?” Jeez, where had this guy been?
“It’s mine,” I called, and I started to head back toward the machine, which, with passengers streaming toward me, created even more chaos.
“Stay right there!” he barked. I froze, then sheepishly headed back to Anne. All this commotion had apparently attracted the
notice of a supervisor, who thankfully took charge. “What do we have here?” he asked politely but wearily.
“Sourdough. A medieval abbey in France is expecting it.” I tried to read his reaction, but his trained poker face remained flat. He started to run a wand around the container of
levain,
which had stiffened into a plastique look-alike. I told him the abbey had kept the flame of civilization alive during the darkest of the Dark Ages but, after thirteen centuries, had forgotten how to make bread. This
levain
was the link to repair the chain.
Still no reaction. Trying to straddle the line between pressure and humor, I added, “The future of Western civilization is in your hands.”
Just then, Anne, to my horror, opened her mouth to speak before I could stop her. The last time she’d done that in an airport, voluntarily reciting to U.S. Customs,
unsolicited,
every item we’d purchased and whom it was for, she sounded so forced and nervous that I expected to be strip-searched.
“Bill’s bread won second prize at the New York State Fair!”
“Keep quiet and show some leg,” I wanted to hiss. She was wearing jeans.
Still expressionless, he put down the container. Something else in my bag had caught his attention, something I hadn’t even considered.
“What’s this?”
He held up my small digital kitchen scale. Which, under the circumstances, did a more-than-passable impersonation of a timing and ignition mechanism for the plastique accompanying it. At least I wasn’t carrying any wire. Or razor blades.
“It’s a scale, for baking bread.”
“You need a scale for bread? My mother never used a scale.”
“More accurate than measuring by volume.” I couldn’t believe
I was having this conversation with a TSA Official at Kennedy Airport.
“Hmm.” He took the top off the scale—I’d never even known it came off—and wanded underneath before replacing it.
“Well, you get the prize,” he said, breaking into a smile. “Strangest carry-on of the month. Have a nice trip.”
I slumped into the first seat I saw in the terminal, drained and sweaty.
“That was close!” Anne exhaled.
“Not really.” I pulled out my ziplock bag filled with small, colored plastic bottles labeled “Shampoo,” “Conditioner,” “Lotion,” and so on.
“Did you wonder why I was bringing so much hair conditioner to France?” I asked. “In my carry-on?”
Her mouth fell open. I could see she was a little hurt at being kept in the dark.
“Some things it’s better not to know,” I explained.
Anne, aware of the limits of her own poker face, agreed. “Well, I’m glad that’s over with, anyway.”
“Not quite. We still have to get it past French customs. Come, let’s find the gate. We’re going to Paris!”
I felt a twinge in my back as I stood. Oh well, it was nothing that eight hours in a coach-class seat with my knees jammed into my chest couldn’t cure.
If you’re blue and you don’t know Where to go to, why don’t you go
Where fashion sits,
Puttin’ on the Ritz.
—
Irving Berlin
I didn’t expect the service entrance to the Hotel Ritz to be completely unmanned, but neither did I anticipate five hundred armed antiterrorist police, including two hundred members of the elite French CRS riot squad, dressed up the wazoo in body armor.
“Guess they heard I was coming,” I quipped to Anne as I presented my confirmation documents for the bread class to the Ritz security guard at the rue Cambon entrance. “Wait here for a sec. Let me see what time I’ll be done tonight.” She looked around nervously at all the rifles. “Don’t worry,” I reassured her. “You’re well protected.”
When I returned five minutes later, Anne had vanished without a trace. My first instinct was to call her, but we’d left our cell phones, incompatible with Europe’s cellular network, back at our hotel. I asked some Ritz staff on cigarette break if anyone had seen her, but she’s hard enough to describe in English, let alone in my primitive French. It wasn’t like her to just up and leave, but,
hoping she had given up on me and wandered off, I went back inside to start the first day of my
cours de boulangerie,
feeling a touch unsettled. Why all the security? The hotel felt more like a military encampment than the famous Ritz, whose very name is synonymous with (After crackers) luxury, service, fine dining, and expense, the hotel that has for a hundred years been the Paris home to kings and princesses, writers, and actors.
Ernest Hemingway claimed to have personally liberated the Ritz in 1944, but the hotel’s Hemingway Bar was more likely named in honor of his bar tab. Other luminaries whose celebrated stays helped fuel the legend include F. Scott Fitzgerald (who wrote “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”), Marcel Proust, King Edward VII, Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, and Coco Chanel, who made the Ritz her permanent home for thirty years. Some say the place has lost a bit of its luster, but thanks to continuing cameos in such movies as
The Devil Wears Prada,
the Ritz continues to loom slightly larger than life.
This week, however, it was mainly a reminder of death. In class, rumors about the heavy security were swirling: Bill Clinton was staying there; a prominent Arab head of state was visiting. The truth, however, turned out to be a shocking and unwelcome reminder of the last time the Ritz had been in the news.
That was August 31, 1997. Dodi Al Fayed and his girlfriend, Diana, Princess of Wales, were at the hotel because (a) she was a princess, and as I said, princesses stay at the Ritz; and (b) his father owns the joint. The half-royal couple, in an attempt to elude the ever-present paparazzi, had departed the Ritz via the rue Cambon service entrance, where I’d just left Anne. The paparazzi weren’t fooled, however, and the high-speed car chase that ensued ended with a horrific fatal crash in a tunnel under the Seine. Now, ten years later, a British jury conducting an inquest had come across the channel to reconstruct the events
leading up to Diana’s death, and the French police, still smarting from the stigma of losing the princess on their watch, didn’t want any more trouble. And that included trouble from my wife, who, she’d later explain, had been first interrogated, then shooed away while I was inside. Whether she protested that her husband had won second prize in a bread contest is not known.
With that somber backdrop, I began class in the subterranean bakery of the Ritz. After some formalities, a young Vietnamese woman, who held the dual (and largely incompatible) roles of chef’s assistant and translator, took the eight of us down the elevator even deeper into the basement, to the laundry, where we received our uniforms: from top to bottom, a towering paper
toque
that turned me into a seven-footer; a
tour de cou
(a white cloth napkin worn knotted around the neck); a
veste de cuisine
(a sharp-looking white double-breasted jacket), over which I wore a
tablier,
or apron, into which I tucked my
torchon
(dish towel); and last but not least, striped, blue gray
pantalon
, or pants.
It was this last item of apparel that created what you might call a crisis of confidence among one of my classmates, a Canadian (thank goodness he wasn’t American) I’ll call Nebbish. You know Nebbish. Everyone knows Nebbish. If you’re a guy, he’s the kid you went to high school with who always forgot his gym clothes, who refused to wear a jockstrap, who was forever losing the combination to his locker, and who regularly broke his eyeglasses. To women, he’s the kid about whom you whispered to friends, “He’s so
annoying
!”
Now, some four decades later, Nebbish was back in my home-ec class, and naturally, he had a question: “Do we have to wear the pants?”
Stares all around: from a Californian veterinarian whose husband had been transferred to Paris, two giggly Japanese girls with video cameras permanently affixed to their hands, a young
Brazilian woman of Chinese ancestry, a very cool Australian chef at the Ritz who was taking this as an in-service course, and Nebbish’s eighty-year-old father.
Yes, Nebbish had brought his father to class.
“Whaddya mean, do you have to wear the pants?” Pop growled. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Of course, you have to wear the pants,” the Vietnamese assistant said.
“I can’t.”
“But you have to. It is part of the uniform.”
“I can’t.”
“You can’t.”
“No, I can’t.”
“Why?”
A pregnant pause.
“I don’t have any underwear on. I didn’t know we’d be taking off our pants.”
——————————————
French chefs, as anyone who grew up on Looney Tunes knows, come in only two sizes: short and fat, and tall and skinny. Chef Didier, our instructor and a baker at the Ritz, was in the latter group. He was a pleasant enough fellow who sported a broad grin and didn’t at all fit the stereotype of the ill-tempered chef. He even told us to call him just plain “Didier,” but, trained by watching reality chef shows on TV, I found myself involuntarily answering him with a snappy and militaristic, “Oui, chef !” every time. He didn’t seem to mind.
Becoming a professional baker in France is only slightly less difficult and time-consuming than becoming, say, a nuclear physicist in the United States. In the States, if you want to become a baker, you have a couple of options. You can find a bakery that
will hire and train you. Or if you prefer formal training, you can attend a professional school like the San Francisco Baking Institute, where they turn you into a baker in eighteen weeks.