52 Loaves

by William Alexander

  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.

  WEEK

  40

  Feeling Like Manure

  “Wheat is life, boy. Don’t let no silly bugger tell you different.”

  —Christopher Ketteridge and Spike Mays,

  Five Miles from 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.

  WEEK

  41

  “Nous Acceptons Votre Proposition”

  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 m
e 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 frères.”

  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.

  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!

  VI.

  Vespers

  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.

  WEEK

  42

  God Bless the TSA

  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, often-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 fifty-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.