Bread, Bread, Bread

Leo Espinosa's illustration for Bill Buford's "Good Bread"

Reading Bill Buford’s “Good Bread” (April 13, 2020), I recalled two other excellent New Yorker “bread” pieces: Lauren Collins’ “Bread Winner” (December 3, 2012) and Adam Gopnik’s “Bread and Women” (November 4, 2013). It’s interesting to compare them.

Buford’s “Good Bread” is about his apprenticeship to a Lyon bread maker identified simply as “Bob.” Here’s his description of Bob’s boulangerie:

By nine, a line extended down the street, and the shop, when you finally got inside, was loud from people and from music being played at high volume. Everyone shouted to be heard—the cacophonous hustle, oven doors banging, people waving and trying to get noticed, too-hot-to-touch baguettes arriving in baskets, money changing hands. Everyone left with an armful and with the same look, suspended between appetite and the prospect of an appetite satisfied. It was a lesson in the appeal of good bread—handmade, aromatically yeasty, with a just-out-of-the-oven texture of crunchy air. This was their breakfast. It completed the week. This was Sunday in Lyon.

Collins’ “Bread Winner” profiles Apollonia Poilâne, “C.E.O. of the company that for eight decades has made Paris’s most celebrated bread.” Collins says of Poilâne,

Thin, pale, and refined, Apollonia—more of a baguette of a woman than a miche—is a formidable presence. She dispenses her opinions with the peremptory air of a mother-in-law giving child-care advice. She makes recommendations with the efficient gravity of a doctor writing a prescription. Still, she projects a mixture of innocence and experience. Her eyes are often hooded, from fatigue, but so are her sweatshirts. “I have a very instinctive and simple approach to bread,” she told me. “My philosophy is a small array of breads, each with its own use. I do not believe in making one bread with hazelnuts, one with almonds, and one with cumin, just for the hell of it.” Her other prejudices include breads that contain meats (“doughy and nasty”), breads that contain cheeses (“frivolous”), breads that contain novelty ingredients, such as algae (“not very relevant”), “organic” breads (“I don’t believe in paying money to some guy sitting behind a desk to certify something, when my father and grandfather before me were working very closely with their suppliers to make sure there were as few pesticides as possible”), panini (“pointless”), bakeries that sell soda (“drives me nuts”), and the French habit of eating foie gras with gingerbread (“fucking disgusting”).

Gopnik’s “Bread and Women” tells about a weekend he spent with his mother, learning how to bake bread. He says,

As we mixed and kneaded, the comforting sounds of my childhood reasserted themselves: the steady hum of the powerful electric mixer my mother uses, the dough hook humming and coughing as it turned, and, in harmony with it, the sound of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the background, offering its perpetual mixture of grave-sounding news and bright-sounding Baroque music. (A certain kind of Canadian keeps the CBC on from early morning to bedtime, indiscriminately.)

All three of these pieces are wonderfully evocative. For example, here’s Buford’s account of accompanying Bob on one of his delivery rounds:

Bob drove fast, he talked fast, he parked badly. The first stop was L’Harmonie des Vins, on the Presqu’île, a wine bar with food (“But good food,” Bob said). Two owners were in the back, busy preparing for the lunch service but delighted by the sight of their bread guy, even though he came by every day at exactly this time. I was introduced, Bob’s new student, quick-quick, bag drop, kisses, out. Next: La Quintessence, a new restaurant (“Really good food,” Bob said, pumping his fist), husband and wife, one prep cook, frantic, but spontaneous smiles, the introduction, the bag drop, kisses, out. We crossed the Rhône, rolled up onto a sidewalk, and rushed out, Bob with one sack of bread, me with another, trying to keep up: Les Oliviers (“Exceptional food”—a double pump—“Michelin-listed but not pretentious”), young chef, tough-guy shoulders, an affectionate face, bag drop, high-fives, out.

Here’s Collins’ description of Poilâne’s manufactory:

A baker was sliding a batch of pale miches into the oven with a wooden paddle the length of an oar. He and his apprentice wore canvas shoes, white shorts, and white T-shirts. They looked like tennis pros. The air was warm, with a breakfasty smell. The oven roared. To make the loaves, the bakers had churned flour, water, and salt in a mechanical mixer. (It’s like a KitchenAid, but many times larger.) After letting the dough rise in a wooden box, they shaped it by hand, then let it rest a second time. Finally, the master baker used a razor blade to score the top of each loaf with the signature “P.” (The practice, known as “docking,” insures that the loaf doesn’t burst while it’s baking.)

And here’s Gopnik’s description of bread dough's feel:

I was taken by the plasticity of every sort of dough, its way of being pliable to your touch and then springy—first merging into your hands and then stretching and resisting, oddly alive, as though it had a mind of its own, the collective intelligence of all those little bugs. Bread dough isn’t like dinner food, which usually rests inert under the knife and waits for you to do something to it: bread dough sits there, respiring and rising, thinking things over.

You can tell from the sensuousness of their descriptions that all three of these writers love bread. Buford says of a roll he’s served at Boulangerie Vincent in Le Bourget-du-Lac:

It had the flavors that I had tasted at breakfast. I asked for another roll, broke it open, and stuck my nose into la mie, the crumb—Frederick’s routine. It smelled of yeast and oven-caramelized aromas, and of something else, an evocative fruitiness. I closed my eyes. Bob.

Collins says of Poilâne’s signature loaf: 

A Poilâne miche brings to mind something with which a troubadour might have sopped up broth at a medieval tavern. It reverberates in the mouth for a few seconds after you’ve swallowed it, as though the taste buds were strings.

Gopnik describes the smell of baking bread:

Then, there are the smells. There’s the beery, yeast-release aroma that spreads around the kitchen, the slowly exuding I’m-on-my-way smell of the rising loaf, and the intensifying fresh-bread smell that comes from the oven as it bakes. The deepest sensual pleasure of bread occurs not when tasting but when slicing, cutting into softness that has suddenly gained structure: the pile of yeasty dough, after its time in the hot oven, turned into a little house, with a crisp solid roof and a yielding interior of inner space. 

Mmm, so good! These three “bread” pieces are double bliss: the subject is delicious; the writing is divine.