52 Loaves (7 page)

They were confusing famine with malnutrition.

Goldberger had had enough of these attacks. He devised a desperate experiment to shut up these “blind, selfish, jealous, prejudiced asses,” as he described them, once and for all. If pellagra was infectious, then he would do everything in his power to contract it. First he gave himself a blood transfusion from a pellagrin. Then he ingested scrapings taken from several victims’ open sores. Not dead yet, he and fourteen other volunteers (including his wife, who insisted on joining him) made up dough “capsules,” flour balls mixed with festering skin lesions, nasal secretions, blood, and even diarrhea from active pellagrins—worse, even, than eating at, say, your local fast food joint—and washed it all down with bicarbonate of soda. Goldberger hosted five of what
they called their “filth parties” (what else they did at these parties was not documented).

This is beyond remarkable—even putting aside the volunteers’ enormous faith in Goldberger’s pellagra theory, consider the diseases they
could
have contracted from these weakened, immune-suppressed pellagrins! Yet not one of the sixteen party-goers displayed any pellagra symptoms. After the final gathering, Goldberger wrote in his journal, “Never again.”

The experiment had its intended effect. The infectionists were quelled (for the most part; some clung to their beliefs into the late 1930s). Now Goldberger could turn his attention to the real mystery: What substance—vitamin or mineral—was lacking in the pellagrins’ diet? What was the elusive PP factor? More dietary experiments determined it was present in great quantities in dried yeast, a food that could be manufactured cheaply, and by persuading the Red Cross to distribute yeast as a food supplement after a 1927 flood devastated impoverished areas of coastal Mississippi, a tragic pellagra epidemic was avoided.

Still, even though a preventative was known, the disease continued its rampage, peaking in the Depression years of 1929 and 1930, when pellagra, no longer confined to the rural South, claimed two hundred thousand victims. Unfortunately, Goldberger would never live to learn the identity of his PP factor, for he died young, not of typhus or diphtheria or yellow fever or dengue or any of the other dangerous tropical diseases he exposed himself to in the service of this nation’s health, but of cancer, at the age of fift y-four. Precisely my age as I faced this group of South Carolinians. And like Goldberger, a New Yorker among Southerners.

I was still working out the connection between pellagra and bread, but I would’ve loved to tell this story of an unsung American hero to the seven hundred people seated in front of me. Some of
them might well have had living relatives who remembered when South Carolina became the first state in the nation to mandate the enrichment of bread and flour, but I knew this group was hoping for a lighthearted talk on gardening. I heard my name spoken, followed by polite applause (naturally—Charleston has been named the most polite city in the United States), and I walked to the lectern. I had never found a satisfactory opening, so I decided to just speak the truth and tell them what had been troubling me about the talk I had to give.

“Yesterday I had a chance to walk through your beautiful city for a few hours,” I began nervously, my New York accent hanging heavy over the enormous hall. “And do you know, I counted
approximately
one thousand three hundred and thirty-seven gardens?” I paused. “Each one nicer than mine.”

They roared in appreciation. The rest was easy.

When asked, “What does it take to be a good baker?” Brother Boniface has a ready answer: “You’ve godt to have
gute
recipes.”
—
Baking with Brother Boniface,
1997

A twentieth-century American monastery ranks, on my own list of 1,000 Places to See Before I Croak, somewhere in the high nine hundreds, nestled between Graceland and the World’s
Largest Ball of Twine, but the cover of the book in my hands was about to challenge that prejudice.

The book in question, a slim paperback titled
Baking with Brother Boniface,
had arrived in the mail while I was in Charleston. Monasteries have a long tradition of bread making, and I thought this book, written by a ninety-year-old monk, might have some traditional recipes for honest bread. I had trouble, however, getting past its cover, dominated by an arresting black-and-white photograph. Brother Boniface stands to one side in the foreground, stooped over, smiling benevolently, his arthritic hands clasped together, but ceding the stage to an enormous twisting tree behind him. The tree is thrusting from the ground, spiraling heavenward in great agony, trying to loose the bonds of earth.

I opened the book tentatively, expecting recipes accompanied by spiritual inspiration and biblical allusions, but this paperback was all business. Just “gute recipes.” Plus one biographical detail that caught my attention: Boniface had not started baking until he was fifty, just about the age I was when I’d baked my first loaf of bread. I felt a weird connection to the tree and the baker and suddenly wanted to meet both. Now, where was Mepkin Abbey?

South Carolina. An hour from Charleston. Next time I mail-order a book, I’ll spring for first-class postage. Although it turns out that even if I’d known about the abbey a week earlier, I wouldn’t have met the baker. Brother Boniface Schnitzbauer had recently passed away at the age of ninety-six. The tree, presumably, lives on.

You got to make it by yourself.
—The 1970s pop band Bread

It was a matter of life and death, and every second counted. Having planned my steps beforehand with the precision of an organ transplant team, I moved quickly and efficiently, racing to the car, gingerly placing the parcel in the waiting cooler, and surrounding it with towels and ice packs.

Securing the ice chest next to me with a seat belt, I pulled out of the driveway, leaving pebbles and dust flying in my wake. If traffic was light, I figured I could make the trip in just under an hour. But if it took much longer—well, I didn’t want to think about that. The living, breathing organ in my cooler was a kilogram of peasant bread dough. The recipient was a ten-ton wood-fired brick oven located at Bobolink Dairy, a New Jersey dairy farm and bakery.

I was on my way to test a new theory: that the solution to my missing gas hole problem (if a hole can be missing) lay in baking my bread in a wood-fired brick oven. I had stumbled across this suggestion when, while flipping through a book called
The Bread Builders,
I was struck by a grainy photograph of a slice of bread. One look, and I knew this was it: the perfect slice from the perfect loaf, full of irregular cells and possessing such an open crumb
that the sunlight behind the slice streamed through in biblical fashion, revealing the rich, netted structure of the bread.

How could I create this slice of bread? Easy. All I had to do was build a twenty-thousand-pound wood-fired brick oven in my backyard. I liked the concept in an abstract fashion, and it did fit into my notion of baking a loaf of bread from scratch, removed from the industrial supply chain, but this seemed a little extreme, the lunatic fringe of home bread making. Still, I didn’t want to dismiss it out of hand, so I figured I’d let Anne veto the project for me. I told her of my findings.

“We can do pizza!” she squealed. “And chicken! Where are you going to put it?”

That was unexpected.

“I don’t know. It’s ten tons. I put that much mass in one spot, I may affect the rotation of the earth. I can just see the headline now:
BACKYARD BAKER THROWS EARTH OFF AXIS.
”

“Actually,” Anne mused, “I’d rather have a hearth in the kitchen,” reviving an old fantasy we had dismissed years ago as too impractical and expensive.

I tried not to show my alarm. Things were escalating rapidly. Anne was supposed to be my brake, reining in my harebrained schemes, not feeding them! Of course, the idea of a kitchen hearth, a waist-height wood-fired oven, was appealing. We love our living room fireplace but hardly get to use it, since, like most Americans, we practically live in the kitchen. As she dreamily spoke of a hearth, its glowing embers warming a chill snowy morning, I searched hard for an antidote.

“I think those are more for pizza than bread.”

Anne frowned.

“And I don’t think our hundred-year-old house can handle a ten-ton oven.”

Truth was, neither could my half-century-old body, but it
seemed that the project was now on the table. Before I laid the first brick, however, I figured I’d better try one out first, and a little digging had uncovered the fact that one of the coauthors of
The Bread Builders,
Alan Scott, who was also considered the nation’s premier outdoor wood-fired masonry bread oven expert, proselytizer, and apostle for baking bread in outdoor wood-fired masonry ovens, had built one at a farm less than a dough-proofing away.

The oven’s owner was at first understandably cautious upon hearing my request. After all, she was running a production bakery.

“How many loaves do you want to bake?” Nina asked.

“Oh, just one two-pound loaf. I’m baking a loaf a week for a year.”

I heard her giggle through the phone.

“You’re only baking one loaf at a time?” She could barely contain herself. “How cute.”

Cute?
I was having an existential crisis a week over this single loaf. Producing each loaf was like giving birth, every weekend, over and over, except that Mama was disappointed with every newborn, and Nina was treating this as if it were a mere dalliance, a trifle!

“You can bake five or six loaves and freeze them, you know.”

What did she think I had at home—a commercial Hobart mixer? I was having a hard enough time with one loaf, thank you very much. Plus, we could barely consume the bread I was baking now. If I baked a half-dozen loaves every weekend, we’d each be eating nearly a loaf of bread a day, like medieval monks.

In any event, once she stopped laughing, she agreed to let me bring my dough to her oven—and, by extension, her baker—the following week. I prepared for the big day by doing an overnight
poolish
in the refrigerator, then taking it out at six o’clock the
next morning and letting it ferment a few more hours at room temperature. At ten thirty I kneaded and started the first rise. I was aiming for the loaf to go into the oven around two o’clock, with the second rise taking place at the bakery. After an hour of driving, though, I seemed to be lost. I had expected to be in the country, but this was new, dreary suburbia, sixty miles from the nearest city, a hodgepodge of luxury homes built on dead-end streets without sidewalks, all with names ending in
Lane
or
Court.
Where in this neighborhood could there possibly be a two-hundred-acre dairy farm?

I dialed the farm’s number on my cell phone. No answer. As I was considering turning back and abandoning the mission, I rounded a corner, and looming before me, as incongruous as a skyscraper, rose a single silo, filling the windshield with its silent majesty, its strength, its courage standing tall in the midst of development, taking my breath away.

I had arrived.

——————————————

I’d been looking forward to meeting the baker as much as meeting the oven. This would be my first encounter with a professional baker, and what better way to start than with an old-world, wood-fired hearth-oven baker, someone whom I imagined to be a heavyset man in a soiled, sweat-stained T-shirt, cigarette dangling out of his mouth, a real veteran of the flour wars. Or perhaps Nicolas Cage. As we’d be spending several hours together, I anticipated being regaled with tales of his baker’s life and pumping him for information. I’d even rehearsed how to ask him to be my teacher, my mentor, my very savior.

Nina led me into the bakery. “This is our baker,” she said cheerfully.

Where? The only person here was a wisp of a girl with a
smudge of flour on her nose, a twenty-two-year-old whose face radiated the earnest openness and innocence of a farm girl from Indiana. Which is exactly what she was. Surely she wasn’t the only baker.

“Oh, no,” the young woman, whose name was Lindsay, said when I asked if she worked alone. She introduced me to another woman of about the same age, an intern, who was loading the oven. Their combined ages were a decade less than mine. Lindsay had been an intern herself until four weeks earlier, when the baker quit and she inherited the job. She’d been baking for all of a month. “Let’s see how it looks,” she said, taking my loaf into the proofing room, a chilled room full of trays of dough, buckets of sourdough, and racks of proofing loaves.

I shivered. “I didn’t know to bring a sweater.” Like most home bakers, I’d been following the conventional wisdom by proofing in a warm area (the classic instruction is to proof in an oven with the pilot light on).

“It’s actually a little warm in here today,” Lindsay said, looking at the thermometer, which read sixty-seven. “We like to keep the temperature in the low sixties so we can do a long, slow fermentation and proofing. It gives you more flavor.” She poked my dough. “I think you can form the loaf now.”

Swallowing my pride and putting aside the thought that I’d been married longer than she’d been alive, I asked her to watch and critique. She wasn’t impressed with my
boule
-forming technique.

“I usually do this,” she said, half dragging, half rolling the dough across the table in a circular motion to develop surface tension and keep the loaf together. Her hands moved naturally and skillfully across the table. My dough was a little dry, she noted politely, but it was too late to do anything about it.

I dropped the
boule
into my colander and watched Lindsay
work, struggling to stay out of her way in the tight quarters. Whatever disappointment I’d initially felt at the fact that my tutor wasn’t a seasoned baker melted away as I watched this kid moving confidently and quickly through the trays of dough, all in different stages of development, dividing, weighing, forming loaves, and loading the oven, keeping up a line of chatter and cheerfully answering my dopey questions all the while. I asked her about a couple of techniques I’d read about. One, known by its French name,
autolyse,
involves resting the dough for anywhere from ten to thirty minutes before kneading it. This method, developed a quarter century ago by the French bread scientist Raymond Calvel, was reputed to produce a superior crumb and better flavor by essentially “conditioning” the gluten before kneading. Such a dough requires less kneading, which results in less oxygen being incorporated, which makes better bread, say proponents.