52 Loaves (23 page)

“It was Julia’s idea,” I said clumsily.

“Julia?”

As Ricky Ricardo used to say, “Lu-ceee, you got a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.”

Let’s start with Julia.

I’m referring, of course, to the late Julia Child.

I had been reading her memoir and had learned that Julia and her husband went through an astounding 284 pounds of flour in order to perfect the baguette recipe for volume 2 of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Like me, she’d struggled with the crust. Like me, she’d tried all kinds of ways to create steam in the oven before finally finding a solution: dropping a hot metal ax head into a pan of cold water! (You can just picture Julia, wearing a welder’s helmet and asbestos gloves, holding a pair of tongs with a red-hot, glowing ax head at the other end.) Also like me, she had eventually discovered slow, cool fermentations,
autolyse,
and even Raymond Calvel. In fact, she’d returned to France to meet the professor when she’d reached a dead end in her baking. After a single afternoon in which Calvel revolutionized her approach to bread, Julia returned home “euphoric” and redoubled her efforts to bake the perfect baguette.

Why? In her own words, because “I was simply fascinated by bread and determined to learn how to bake it for myself. You have to do it and do it, until you get it right.” I’d found a soul mate. I’ve always adored Julia Child—at least her television persona,
which is all I know—and now I felt as if I had a companion on my journey. With the benevolent spirits of Beard and Child smiling down on me, how could I fail? I resolved to soldier on.

Soldiers need sleep, however, which is why I had my pillows tucked under my arm. Julia had also given me the courage to do something I’d been thinking about for some time: moving into a room of my own. I’m a finicky and featherlight sleeper, and an early riser. Anne, meanwhile, was oft en writing up her patient charts late into the night and coming to bed after I was asleep, and no matter how quietly she tiptoed, I’d wake up. On the other hand, how Anne slept in the same room as me was a mystery, as age had brought a third companion into our bedroom, my increasingly heavy snoring.

With Zach back at college, we had a bedroom with a desk available for my home Office. Why not move in? I’d broached the subject once before—we also had a tiny guest room—but Anne had vetoed it out of hand, using silly words like “intimacy” and “marriage.” This time, though, I showed her Julia Child’s passing reference to the house she and her husband had built in France, with “my bedroom on the left . . . and Paul’s bedroom on the right. (He was a sometimes insomniac, and I was known to snore. We decided it was best to spend nights apart . . . ).” Anne raised her eyebrows but didn’t argue. Not only was she as much a fan of Julia’s as I was, but apparently she was ready for a good night’s sleep as well.

Sleeping arrangements out of the way, I faced the next problem: taking my bread—and its baker—to the next level.

“Wheat is life, boy. Don’t let no silly bugger tell you different.”
—Christopher Ketteridge and Spike Mays,
Five Miles fr om Bunkum,
1972

“I’m thinking I need to get some hands-on instruction,” I confessed to Anne after another so-so loaf of peasant bread. “I need to make myself a better baker.”

“Didn’t you learn anything at the kneading conference?”

Oh, did I ever. I learned that if you want to learn to bake the best bread, you go to where the best bread is. Half the bakers I’d met in Maine, both amateur and professional, had been to France, to bake bread, taste bread, or both. Not to mention Julia Child, Steven “the Professor” Kaplan, Charlie van Over—everyone who was interested in bread went to France. And here I was, trying to bake breads with French names in New York. Well, if I was going to take a bread-making course, why not take it in Paris?

I broached my idea with Anne, who, after a millisecond of thought, agreed to a week of sightseeing in the City of Light while I studied baking. Thus before you could say “pain de campagne” I was enrolled in the week-long
boulangerie
class at the École Ritz Escoffier, the cooking school at the Hotel Ritz.

First, however, I had some unfinished business here in my own
backyard. The clay “oven” at this point consisted of no more than a round brick base surrounded by mounds of clayey earth, rocks, bricks, plastic buckets, and a wheelbarrow filled with rainwater. I’d stepped out of last week’s bath convinced I should give it up, but the allure of baking bread made from my own wheat in an oven raised like Adam from the dust of my garden was still powerful. Besides, I was so close, only a “Kiko weekend” away now.

The next step was to construct the oven floor, firebrick set into a mixture of clay and coarse sand. It so happened that I had some sand left over from an old project. I grabbed a bucket and shovel and headed down the hill to the compost heap, where I’d left it, thinking Kiko would be proud that I was scavenging it.

After clearing away the weeds that obscured the sand, I easily filled the bucket and brought it back up, then shoveled some clay through a homemade sieve—similar to the one I’d used to thresh the wheat—to remove the pebbles and rocks. It was enjoyable work on this perfect late-summer morning, the Catskills clearly visible in the distance, the work easy, the pace pleasant. In fact, I couldn’t think of a better way to spend the day. As the sun warmed the morning air, I peeled off my layers down to a T-shirt. In two short weeks, I’d be baking at the Hotel Ritz.

Autumn in Paris, a city with more bakeries than New York has delis. France, a country that has twenty words for bread, the way that Eskimos have dozens of words for snow. Not only to study bread in one of the world’s most famous kitchens but also to be surrounded by great bread? The prospect was breathtaking.

Not as breathtaking as what happened next, though. Afraid I might be a little short of sand—I didn’t want to start mixing and have to run back for more—I went down for one last bucketful. Bending at the waist, I plunged the shovel into the soft mound of sand. Simultaneously, the tip of another shovel was plunged deep into my lower back.

At least that’s what it felt like. I gasped in agony and stayed bent over, afraid to try to straighten up, as waves of pain radiated from my sacroiliac up my back. “This is nothing,” I muttered out loud. “You just twisted funny.” I figured that if I gave it a moment, it would pass.

It didn’t. I thought it best to go back to the house. I should be able to walk, I reasoned. After all, I was still standing.

And then I wasn’t. I didn’t exactly lose consciousness, but I didn’t exactly keep it, either, and I didn’t so much fall as crumple backward onto the soft compost heap, joining the other discarded refuse of the yard: rotting peaches, decaying grass clippings, decomposing weeds, and composting manure. The heap was surprisingly soft and warm and comforting. I let my body relax, closed my eyes, and settled in.

I know a bloke who knows a bloke who knows a bloke . . .
—Ben Kingsley in
Sexy Beast

I studied the e-mail that had come in overnight.

“Nous acceptons votre proposition,” it read. Oh, good, they accept my proposition.

What
proposition? And who was “nous”? I didn’t recognize the name or the e-mail address, and the sender hadn’t included
my original text in his reply. Or had this e-mail been in response to a fax?

I had no idea, because I’d sent out dozens of e-mails and faxes over the past few weeks, all with the same request in the same bad French. The seed planted by the cover photograph of
Baking with Brother Boniface
had grown as mightily within me as the ancient, twisted tree on the book’s cover, and the more I’d thought about baking in an ancient abbey, the more the idea seized me. I wanted to bake bread in a place that was really old, a place that could put me in touch with a
real
tradition of baking (not the Johnny-come-lately, mere hundred-year-old Ritz).

I had zeroed in first on monasteries because they’re old and steeped in tradition, then on European monasteries because Europe is older than America, and finally on French monasteries, once it turned out that I was going to be in France, anyway.

Anne laughed when she heard of my quest. “You? In a monastery?”

It did seem a bit incongruous, especially since you couldn’t get me into a church these days, much less a monastery. Still, the mocking hurt a little, perhaps because of my own queasiness with the idea. “It’s not a religious pilgrimage,” I said a little too defensively. “I just think it would be neat. And all the monasteries accept guests for spiritual retreats.”

My utterance of the word “spiritual” shocked her even more.

“I’m spiritual. In my own way.” Although exactly what way that was, I couldn’t say.

She dropped the subject, seeing how uncomfortable she was making me, but in fact I thought staying in a French abbey might be quite atmospheric and even a little—for lack of a better word—romantic. And if there was anything I needed after an increasingly frantic three-quarters of a year of baking, threshing, and oven building, it was a retreat, spiritual or otherwise.

Yet finding such a place had proved to be far more elusive than I’d expected in a country known for both bread and monasteries. Surely the two must intersect somewhere. Charlie van Over had been right, though: it seemed that these days, baking monks were rarer than singing nuns. The difficulty was compounded by my third requirement, which proved to be my undoing on several occasions—it had to be an abbey that would allow me into the kitchen as a participant, not just a paying guest in the dining room. I had contacted noted bread-book author and teacher Peter Reinhart, as Charlie had suggested (Peter was enthusiastic but unable to offer any leads); I had struck out with an equally enthusiastic Brother Garramone, a monk who’d had a bread-making show on PBS for a few seasons; and now I was down to my last lead, the author of a book called
Europe’s Monastery and Convent Guesthouses.
Kevin Wright, despite having visited just about every monastery in France, didn’t know of any that baked their own bread, but he did provide me the e-mail address of an American monk in France who might be able to help.

E-mail
and
monk
in the same sentence? That didn’t seem kosher, but when you think about it, e-mail (if you happen to be a monk) has got to be about the best thing since sliced bread. Although few monasteries impose a strict vow of silence these days, unnecessary talking is frowned upon. But no one said anything about e-mail. Or Web sites, which I found many monasteries have set up.

Wright’s contact in France e-mailed me back, telling me that they certainly didn’t bake bread at his abbey, but that he did know the name of a monk who was baking at a medieval abbey in Normandy. I contacted that abbey immediately. Alas, they reported, this baker had left two years earlier, and as a result they no longer baked bread, but there was a monk in Provence who baked. I contacted the abbey in Provence. Not true. But they knew of a monk . . .

At one point I found myself five deep in monks! I’d spent
weeks getting nowhere, going through Wright’s book, e-mailing every ancient abbey that had an e-mail address and faxing the ones that didn’t, spending entire days on this task as my departure date for France neared. With my prospects dimming and my trip fast approaching, I had apparently (for I had totally forgotten about it), out of desperation, tried a long shot with the Benedictine abbey in Normandy, the one whose guest master had lamented that they hadn’t had fresh bread since their
boulanger
had left.

“I have a proposition,” I’d written in French, spending hours digging through my French-English dictionary to write a ten-line e-mail. “You need some good bread. I need a spiritual retreat and would like to bake in an ancient abbey. I’ll come for a few days to make bread for
les fr ères.
”

Who could resist? For good measure I added that my bread had just won second place in a New York competition (note, I didn’t say New York
City
), and I included a photograph of one of my better-looking
boules,
glowing warmly under the incandescent kitchen lights.

I didn’t expect anything to come of this—After all, the notion of a seventh-century abbey inviting a lay American (non-Catholic at that) into their brotherhood to bake bread was absurd—so I didn’t give any thought at all to the two misleading notions I’d recklessly advanced: one, that I was an actual baker (reading that I’d nearly won a “New York” competition must’ve had them thinking I’d defeated the likes of Sullivan Street Bakery and Amy’s Bread, not a handful of Syracuse housewives); and two, that I could actually communicate with a live person in French.

The fact that the abbey’s guest master didn’t even respond to my ridiculous proposition didn’t surprise me. I had now revealed myself as a crackpot. So when the following e-mail from Prior Jean
Charles popped into my in-box several weeks later, I used two translation tools and read it three times to make sure I understood.

Nous acceptons très volontiers votre proposition de venir passer quelques jours à l’Abbaye et de faire un peu de pain pour la communauté. Nous achèterons un peu de farine . . . Peut-être serait-il aussi envisageable que vous puissiez montrer à un frère comment on fait le pain . . .

They had accepted my offer to spend a few days at the abbey to “make a little bread for the community.” The delay, the note explained, was due to the absence of the abbot himself, who had to approve such an unusual (if not unprecedented) arrangement. But wait, what was that “peut-être” part at the end? “Would it perhaps also be possible for you to show a brother how to make bread?”

My God! That’s why they’d accepted my offer—I was to train a new baker! Train a baker?
I
was the trainee. The situation was absurd and terrifying. I would be taking a class, learning how to bake my first week in France, then teaching a novice the next. Anne, I should point out, wasn’t the least bit fazed by this; in medical school they have a saying, “See one, do one, teach one,” but I was freaking out. Apparently I was to be the head
boulanger
myself, baking for an entire monastery—in essence running a small bakery! The largest batch of bread I’d ever made in my entire life consisted of exactly two loaves. How could I have made such a reckless proposition? A follow-up e-mail mentioned that they hadn’t used their bread oven in years and hoped it would still work. Bread oven? With, like, steam injectors? I had no idea how to work a commercial bread oven.