52 Loaves

by William Alexander

  Then I woke to this e-mail:

  Dear William,

  The news came yesterday evening in the chapter room after Vesper. The father Abbot announce that a great majority of the community prefer our own bread. So we will re-make our own bread but progressively that means for breakfast at the beginning and a bit more after. The Abbot want to take care of father Bruno who is nominate officially baker!

  So you succeeded in your mission. Thank you very much!!! I think it would be a good day for you, isn’t it!

  I still keep you in my prayers with all your family.

  —Fr. Philippe

  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 . . . Christmas . . . 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.

  WEEK

  52

  The Perfect Future in the Present

  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
suffered 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 often 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.

  “Listen, it’s singing!” I cried, delighted, echoing Lindsay’s words at Bobolink Dairy.

  “Is that a good thing?” Katie asked.

  “Oh, yes. That’s a very good thing.”

  There was one other “very good thing,” also a very big surprise. My backyard wheat, so low in gluten that it appeared to be soft wheat to the technicians at Bay State Milling who’d analyzed it, made fine bread, especially the half I’d stone-ground, whether in the clay oven or the electric. So much so that Anne, whose memory was apparently growing even shorter than mine, asked if I was going to grow wheat again this year!

  “Only if you buy me a combine for Christmas,” I answered.

  After the bread had cooled, I opened a bottle of wine (French, of course) and proposed a toast, which came out sounding more like a benediction than I’d intended. “To our ancestors, and their ancestors, and their ancestors before them, who for six thousand years survived on this bread that we’re about to eat.”

  As I sliced the loaf, I was acutely aware that across the Atlantic Ocean, the monks at Saint-Wandrille were also just sitting down to break bread for their evening meal—it was Sunday, so they’d have butter—and I added a silent toast to Bruno. While we ate bread and drank wine, a ritual nearly as old as civilization itself, Anne asked, “So, dear, what have you learned over the past year?”

  Let’s see . . .

  Bread in a healthy diet doesn’t make you fat.

  Too much bread, washed down with wine, does.

  The only thing more unsettling than having your faith shaken is having your lack of faith shaken.

  Use a levain.

  Do not undertake any project that promises it can be completed “in a weekend.”

  Do not drink the water in Morocco. Or the tea, or the coffee. In fact, you might think about skipping Morocco altogether. I hear Barbados is nice this time of year.

  Trust strangers. Well, some. Only those that you can trust.

  Choose one thing you care about and resolve to do it well. Whether you succeed or not, you will be the better for the effort.

  Bread is life.

  ——————————————

  I should’ve added, “Monks use e-mail.” Just before Christmas I’d received a note from Bruno:

  I do not know how to thank you for your kindness! I had not received a Christmas present since entering the monastery. I found a bit of the joy of my childhood! I do not know how to say thank you, I have nothing else to offer you except my friendship and my prayers.

  His first Christmas present since entering the monastery . . . I’d read those words over and over again. Poor soul. Poor blessed, fortunate soul. He had, by the way, used the tu form.

  I was even less prepared for Katie’s question. “So, Dad, are you going to bake bread next week?”

  What was I going to do next week? And the week after that, and the week after that? The year that had started so slowly had gone by so quickly. So much seemed unanswered, undone. I had only scratched the crust of bread, only begun to understand the possibilities in bread and in the baker. It didn’t feel like the end of anything. It felt like a middle, or maybe even a beginning.

  On the other hand, I was greatly looking forward to some freedom on weekends, to not having to plan a Saturday or Sunday around a five-hour fermentation and a two-hour rise, followed by a one-hour bake, to being able to work in the garden, or go to the market, or, yes, even have afternoon sex without scheduling it around the anaerobic respiration of a one-celled organism. I was ready to have my old aerobic life back.

  “Dad?”

  “Gee, I don’t know, Katie,” I finally answered. “I guess I’ll see how I feel.”

  She and Anne both tried to hide their disappointment, but my answer had left the kitchen as deflated, dense, and cheerless as one of my early loaves.

  “But I was wondering,” I continued. “Do you think you might like some croissants?”

  Recipes

  A Note about the Recipes

  The recipes that follow specify measurements in grams. If you have to ask why, you skipped week 14 (“Metric Madness”). Go ahead, read it now; I’ll wait . . . I suppose I could buckle under to convention and provide (shudder) imperial volume equivalents, but trust me, you’re far better off investing in a twenty-five-dollar digital kitchen scale. While you’re at it, pick up a pizza stone, and you’ll be ready to make the best bread you’ve ever tasted. Bon appétit!

  Building aLevain

  To paraphrase the baker and author Daniel Leader: if I could convince you of
one thing, it’s to bake with a levain. Further-more, if you want to use any of the following recipes, you’ll have no choice. Here’s how I made mine. Other methods can be found in several of the bread cookbooks listed in the bibliography.

  2 apples

  1 quart water

  350 grams all-purpose or bread flower

  50 grams whole wheat flour

  Prepare the apple water:

  1. Let 1 quart of tap water sit out overnight to remove any chlorine.

  2. Look for a hazy apple, preferably from a farm stand (the haze is wild yeast). Cut the apple into 1-inch chunks and place, along with the peel of a second apple, into a container with 1 cup of the water. (Cover and reserve the remaining water for later.)

  3. Let the apple and water sit covered, at room temperature, for 3 days, stirring daily. The mixture should be foaming a bit and should smell somewhat like cider by the third day.

  Build the levain:

  DAY 1

  4. Combine 50 grams of whole wheat flour with 350 grams un-bleached all-purpose or bread flour (the additional protein in bread flour may be beneficial for the early starter).

  5. Measure out 150 grams of the apple water through a fine strainer and add 150 grams of the flour mixture (you’ll use the rest of the flour later). Whip vigorously with a whisk, scrape down the sides, and cover with a screen (a frying pan spatter screen is ideal) or cheesecloth.

  6. Leave the levain at room temperature, whipping every few hours to incorporate air. It is important to keep the starter aerated during the first few days.

  DAY 2

  Add 75 grams of the reserved tap water and 75 grams of the flour mixture, whip, and leave at room temperature, covered as before, for another 24 hours, again whisking occasionally. You should see bubbles starting to form and the mixture increasing in bulk.