52 Loaves (36 page)

I stood back to admire my work. It was a mess, a badly lopsided hemisphere, bringing a flood of emotions and bad memories of elementary school art class. Taking a short piece of a two-by-four, I started whacking it around, pushing in the high spots, adding sand to the low, for about twenty minutes, until I finally had something that resembled a less imperfect hemisphere.

Time to mix clay. I had spurned getting my toes dirty at clay-oven boot camp, but now, on this warm November day, with an aching back, mixing by foot seemed an excellent alternative to using a backbreaking hoe. I changed into shorts, peeled off my shoes and socks, and jumped in. It was in fact quite effective—especially if you occasionally grabbed each side of the tarp and pulled it toward you, rolling over the mix of clay, sand, and water—and just a little bit fun, which I’d always suspected, as long as no one else was stepping on you. It was less fun to actually build the oven, going round and round the sand form, patting on successive inch-high globs of clay, four inches thick, working my way up the igloo, going through bucketfuls of the stuff at an astounding rate.

The sun was disappearing behind the mountains as I patted the last piece of mud into place. I lay back on the grass and closed
my eyes, wondering how I ever got suckered into this lamebrain project. As much as I wanted to blame Kiko, I hadn’t been seduced by him or even the brick oven at Bobolink. I was facing a force far more powerful, one that seemed at times as threatening as it was benevolent, stronger and more enduring than anything I had ever encountered.

I’m speaking, of course, of bread.

Whenever weighty matters are to be transacted in the monastery, let the Abbot call together the whole community, and make known the matter which is to be considered.
—
The Rule of Saint Benedict,
ca. 530

Still no news from the abbey. I stayed in denial as long as I could, reminding myself that an ancient abbey moves slowly, but weeks after the supposed date of the vote, I had to face reality: the abbey would not be reopening the bakery. Most likely, after the initial excitement had worn off, cooler heads had prevailed, and they had realized how difficult it would be for a novice baker to supply three dozen monks with their daily bread. It was, after all, quite a commitment. I tried to be stoic about it. I’d given it my best shot, and that was all I could do.

Then I woke to this e-mail:

It took a moment to sink in. The monks had taken a vote and preferred my bread to the bread of the French
boulangerie
in town.

I soon heard from Bruno as well.

“The father abbot has finally decided to permit the return of bread making. I am very happy,” he wrote in French. I could hear his exasperation in the word
finally.

“The abbey is a novel,” he added, hinting at the intrigue behind the abbey walls, leaving me wanting to hear more. He closed by saying that I was in his prayers.

“I now have two monks praying for me daily,” I joked to Anne. “I’m in clover!”

Bruno’s note also included a request: Did I have recipes for brioche and croissants? Croissants again? What was with the damned croissants?

“Dad, I told you!” Katie cried when I showed her the note.

“Katie, do you have any idea how difficult croissants are to make? All those layers of butter and paper-thin dough? It takes years of practice. I’ve had, like, three good croissants in my entire life, and two of them were in Paris.”

I wrote Bruno, telling him that croissants were quite challenging but that I would try some brioche recipes this weekend and get back to him. You have to give the guy credit. He was nothing if not ambitious.

His request for brioche, a rich (but not sweet) bread made with butter and eggs, baffled me a bit, though. I’ve never understood the attraction of this egg bread. It is, however, a classic French bread, immortalized in Marie Antoinette’s alleged callous response to the starving masses’ demand for bread, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,” or “Let them eat brioche.”

Hang on a second—shouldn’t that be “Let them eat
cake
”? Only in this country, where brioche was long ago mistranslated as “cake,” an error that probably resulted from the fact that brioche was unknown in America two centuries ago. It’s not exactly commonplace even today. You can be quite certain that Marie Antoinette knew her cake from her bread, and had she wanted to say “cake,” she’d have said “gâteau,” not “brioche,” if she ever said any of this to begin with, which is doubtful, since similar remarks (“Let them eat crust”) had been ascribed to various unpopular royalty decades before the queen’s birth.

In any event, with a host of other great breads available, I wondered out loud why Bruno wanted to make brioche. Anne pointed out that I didn’t grow up with brioche, and who knew what kind of hardwired memories it held for Bruno and the other monks: Was it a special bread eaten only on Sundays? Would it remind him of his mother or father? Bread, as I was learning, is a powerful stimulus, capable of probing deep into the subconscious, if not into genetic memory.

I thought about Bruno’s choosing to leave home at just eighteen to live the sequestered life of a monk, making me wonder what kind of home life he’d had up to then. Home . . .
Christ mas . . . I suddenly realized Christmas was approaching. Bruno probably wanted to make brioche for Christmas!

Rather than delay any further, I located two brioche recipes, one that used equal parts flour and butter, and a more modest one with half the butter, mindful that butter was such a luxury at the abbey that it was only served with bread on Sundays. Both came out well, so I sat down with my online French-English dictionary and painstakingly translated as best I could. Then came the really hard part: composing an e-mail. Not only because, with an American keyboard, it takes forever to insert the accents that seem to appear in every other French word, but because I faced a real crisis: Do I use the
vous
form or the
tu
form in addressing Bruno—the formal or the familiar?

The entire time I was at the abbey, I’d been addressing him as “vous.” This was partly out of respect for a monk and partly because this form was easier for me to conjugate, having had more practice. Traveling in a foreign country among strangers, you don’t get many opportunities to use the familiar. On the other hand, I had kissed him. Surely there must be some rule that once you’ve kissed a person of the same sex, you can use the
tu
form. Bruno, however, in his note, had addressed me as “vous.” Yet that might be because in a brief note I’d sent on returning home, I’d used the formal, and he was taking my lead. Argghhh! I pondered this
vous/tu
business for a good half hour, marveling (and frustrated) that the French never seem even to give it a thought; it just comes naturally.

Sticking with
vous
was the safer path, but it just felt wrong. I took a chance and went with the familiar, addressing this young monk as “tu.” I’d find out whether I’d blundered or not when he replied.

Finally I did something I should’ve done earlier, when I sent
my Moroccan friend Petit Ali a richly illustrated English dictionary, but I’d never thought of it. I ordered a French-language bread-making book for Bruno, one written by the great rue Monge baker Eric Kayser, with a card wishing Bruno a
joyeux Noël.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.
—
Voltaire

It was twenty-three degrees and snowing when I went outside to light a fire. I pulled a lawn chair close to steal some warmth, but the clay oven was stingy, absorbing every kilocalorie that the fledgling fire inside generated. I really couldn’t complain—this was the entire point, to transfer heat from burning wood to a large thermal mass of clay and brick, which would in turn transfer it to a mound of dough, transforming it into bread long after the fire itself had died out.

I hadn’t planned on doing this in the middle of winter, and certainly not in snow, but my year of baking was remarkably, suddenly, and almost too soon down to its final weekend. What had started out as an experiment had become routine, then ephemeral. Before it ended, however, I had one last mission to accomplish.

As I sat outside in the snow, tending the fire, I heard a familiar birdcall, one I hadn’t heard in months: “Wheat-eater, wheat-eater, wheat-eater,
wheat
!” He was back. In the middle of winter! Had my conscientious pal returned early for the event? I welcomed him, perched in the tree above me to see his wheat, finally, turned into bread.

I should’ve kept the sheet metal firing door in place, but I needed to see the fire, burning strongly now in its second hour. Watching the orange and yellow flames twist and dance their mesmerizing ballet, it seemed that what I was about to do was a miracle, as much a miracle as fire itself. Seeds of grass, wild micro organisms, and water were about to become bread. This is not anything that could happen in nature. A strike of lightning would turn a primeval swamp of amino acids into Jerry Lewis before wheat seeds left on their own would become bread. Bread happens only through the intervention of humans.

I’d planted seeds of grass, harvested and cleaned them, and crushed the resulting grain into flour. To leaven the bread, I’d nurtured a colony of wild microorganisms that had landed on my apple trees on their way to somewhere else. I’d vigorously worked the flour and water with my hands to coax the long, tangled gluten molecules to unwind. And finally, this oven, this oven that had been such a source of exasperation and pain, was about to perform the final step, providing the heat to transform the grass known as wheat into bread.

Fire, clay, grass. I felt primitive, and I felt good.

And not so good. Sitting in the freezing temperatures aggravated the pain in my back, still aching from building the oven, reminding me of the tribulations of the past year. In addition, I’d reawakened a hernia, broken not one but two ovens, moved out of my marital bed, and suff ered food poisoning in Morocco, from which I had only recently fully recovered. In search of the
perfect loaf, in search of understanding the miracle of bread, I’d driven hundreds of miles to visit yeast factories and flour mills, flown thousands of miles to study in Paris and bake in Africa. Yet my bread, although very good and vastly improved since the first week, never, except for the one mystical moment at the abbey, reached the mantle of perfection that I’d aimed for.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1843 story “The Birthmark,” one small imperfection—a birthmark in the shape of a hand—on the face of Aylmer’s otherwise perfect wife starts to drive him crazy, to the point where he concocts a strong but dangerous potion that he believes will erase the blemish. His wife, Georgiana, to please her obsessed husband, agrees to drink the liquid, and in fact it works. Her birthmark starts to fade. And as the last trace of it vanishes, she reaches for one brief moment the pinnacle of perfection—and dies (though not before getting in a last rebuke at her unappreciative husband). Hawthorne ends the story this way: “He failed to look beyond the shadowy scope of time, and, living once for all in eternity, to find the perfect future in the present.”

Novelists, by convention, aren’t allowed to do this anymore
—
that is, speak directly to the reader and tell him what he’s supposed to have learned.
*
Memoirists, I’m not so sure about. Anyway, what a superb phrase. I think that may be exactly what the monks at Saint-Wandrille are up to, focusing on the perfect future in the present of their shadowy scope of time.

Since returning from the abbey, I’d stopped tinkering with my recipe. Not only had I recognized the futility of trying to reproduce the sublime
boule
I’d made in Normandy, but I’d realized something far more important: it didn’t matter. The goal had yielded to the process. Freed from the shackles of perfection,
I’d spent the past few weeks actually having fun in the kitchen, maybe really for the first time. I made pizzas and baguettes. For breakfast one morning I made
ebelskiver,
a spherical, leavened, stuffed pancake from Denmark. I still baked peasant bread more oft en than not, to have in the house for breakfast or to bring to friends, or simply because fresh bread had become part of our diet and we missed it when it wasn’t there. I’d also switched from a
boule
to a
bâtard
—yes, that was another prejudice I’d left behind in Saint-Wandrille, that peasant bread could only be a
boule.
The
bâtards
were even occasionally dotted with some gas pockets, and they seemed to have more flavor as well, possibly because the proximity of the crust to the interior allowed for greater exchange of those Maillard compounds between crust and crumb. I had also come to appreciate (apologies to Philippe, for he was right all along) the fact that in a
bâtard,
all the slices were the same size.

At high noon, the snow falling heavily now, both the dough and the oven seemed ready, and as my family gathered around the oven, I slipped the
bâtard
—made with my own hand-ground wheat,
levain
from yeast in my orchard, and Hudson Valley water—into an oven fueled by my apple branches.

I could legitimately say I was baking like an Egyptian.

Although Egyptians were no doubt more skilled at building fires. Concerned about generating enough heat on this snowy day, I’d overdone it. We could’ve melted steel ingots in that oven, which by now was more suited to glassblowing than baking. The dough cooked too quickly, charring on the outside. But no matter. I pulled it out, hearing the crust crackle and pop in the cold air, a sound I hadn’t heard since the abbey.