Yes, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. I am here. I am ready. Today is the day that I finally get off my lazy butt and tell you all about our visit to the local artisan baker, the boulanger de Cucugnan.
But first, a long and winding and somewhat off-topic sidebar (my favorite kind) that comes in the form of a confession: this may come to a shock to the foodie community, but I have yet to see Julie and Julia.
It’s not for lack of wanting to–I have a perfectly valid excuse, what with being in the middle of nowhere for the past five weeks. What I’ve had a hard time admitting is the fact that I may not have seen it anyway. Why?
Well.
Ahem.
I’m jealous.
OK? I said it. Stop hounding me.
Yes, I wish Julie Powell well, and yes, I think it was a great blog, and yes, I’m sure it made a great movie. But nowadays, with food blogs popping up left and right, it’s getting even harder to get noticed and followed, and when I think about the fact that her blog has become so popular they made a movie out of it, well… the little green devil inside of me pops out.
But this blog was not started as a popularity contest, and I don’t intend to make it one. I write because I love to… and I also write because every once in awhile, I get another interesting perk, one of which appeared last year, when the boulanger de Cucugnan (see? Not entirely off-topic) started reading my other blog, Bordeaux and Palmiers.
I outlined our chanced meeting with him on the aforementioned blog last year. What I have yet to outline anywhere is the in-depth day-long lesson he gave to our group, not only about artisanal breadmaking, but about bread as a way of life, something that would never cross the mind of most of the Americans who watched and listened wide-eyed as he spoke.
We started by learning about the grains themselves: there is a sort of tearoom that served quite well as a classroom, and I translated as best I could as he waxed on about the history of specific grains, some dating to Roman times, other to the medieval period, and still others, all the way back to the Egyptians. As he explained the various health benefits of different grains, it was apparent that this, his work, is his love. It’s sometimes disheartening to do translation work: you end up delivering less than stellar words, not of your own will, but because you’re trying to do a sub-par text justice by translating instead of rewriting. With this translation, I felt disheartened, but only because I felt as though I couldn’t do his words, his thoughts, justice.
We moved on up the hill to the mill, where we had met the year before. Luckily, we were blessed with wind on that day, and he let out the sails so that we could crush the grains to flour.
His assistant climbed up onto one of the arms of the mill, and the American girls swooned.
We all crowded into the dark room to watch the antiquated process.
The baker climbed up onto the apparatus and reached for my camera to take this picture for me: the grains in the funnel, right before they would pass through the machinery.
Milling the giant sack of flour took 20 minutes, and we all amused ourselves in different ways, running around outside in the gusts of wind, watching as the flour came pulsing out of the chute, bit by bit, or even asking questions about the mill itself, a medieval mill that the boulanger himself restored from the abandoned pile of stones it had been just a few years before.
I spent my time, as I’ve grown famous for here, dans ma tête–in my head. I looked around and watched and listened, absently translating if need be, but mostly just imagining the history of such a place, the stories it must have witnessed, the hundreds and thousands of people it must have fed. For bread, in France, is more than just an extra complex carbohydrate to snack on before a meal.
Bread is still daily bread here–the main form of sustenance with an importance that surpasses anything similar in the States: there are no adequate comparisons to make. Bread is the one thing that you buy every day. In a country where Sunday closures of all business are taken all too seriously, small towns like Paziols ensure that there is always one place that stays opened on Sundays just so that the villagers can buy their daily bread.
When the grains of wheat had been ground into a mix called mouture in French, it was time to head back to the pseudo-classroom, the sack full of milled grain hoisted over the shoulder of the boulanger.
We took refuge inside the small cabin: Paziols in the summertime is usually unbearably hot, but the wind that day had given us all a chill.
Each of the children had a chance to try sifting the mix with a wooden apparatus, separating fluffy white flour that begged to have fingers raked through it from the rough and tough outer husk of the grain.
As the others waited their turns, they snuck snacks of kernels of wheat that had been set out in bowls as visual aids–grains that were soft enough to chew and lightly sweet.
Luckily for them, the boulanger had something else in mind for lunch.
I admired his old-fashioned stove, allowing me to plunge myself even further into the past as the wind rattled the windows and we allowed the steam from boiling pasta water to warm us. I lent a hand, mixing and seasoning a sauce he had made from tomato confit and zucchini. For the kids, he added shredded cheese, and for us, truffle paste.
The pasta itself was made from the discarded husks of the kernels of wheat that had been milled–a variety of wheat that dated back to the middle ages, just like the mill itself. The pasta was sweet and flavorful–nothing like dried storebought pasta that always seems to be just a vehicle for sauce, although this one would have been worth eating with a spoon… I plan on recreating it myself immediately if not sooner.
He served his creation in biodegradable bowls made from sugarcane pulp–an interesting quirk that I greatly appreciated.
When we had eaten our fill of pasta, he surprised us with another treat: brandade de Nimes, a tartine of salt cod and melted cheese seasoned with cracked black pepper. We were stuffed, but we all dove on the platter he served, and we ate contentedly as we sat, talked and sang together.
I admired the style and rhythm of the day… we could have gotten straight up from lunch and run to the next activity, but instead we were given time to to digest, to discuss with one another and enjoy the company. The boulanger himself is a wealth of information on a myriad of topics, and just sitting around and enjoying a meal with him would have been a pleasant end to what had already been an informative day.
Translation: Know what you know and like what you like.
But without warning or explanation, he arose, and we were back to work, this time heading down to the bakery, at the bottom of the hill we had spent so much time right in the middle of, between the bakery at the bottom and the mill at the top.
We were each given a homemade chocolate chip cookie, and then we set to work making the flour we had spent the morning grinding into our very own loaf of bread.
Daily bread in France today is most commonly associated with the baguette, but, as we know here (mostly from watching old Marcel Pagnol movies about people living here, in the garrigue), daily bread for a family used to be a gros pain, a huge loaf that is heavy and dense and dark. This is what we made.
We started by combining flour, salt, a starter that had been brought from another bakery and was more than fifty years old, live yeast and the ever-important (at least in this region): water.
The baker kneaded by hand to start, slowly bringing the dough together. He later transferred it to an electric mixer, where it was mixed for two minutes before being turned out on the work table. The anachronism of the machinery frankly startled me, juxtaposed against the baker himself, in his white apron and canvas shoes, and the brick oven with wooden peels.
He worked and shaped the dough easily into the shape of a gros pain, and I admired how easy it was for him to make the finished piece: obviously slightly different from any other bread he had made, but still the standard shape and size. I admired the way that he had brought this craft back to life.
We said goodbye to our bread for the day: it would rest all night before being baked at six o’clock the following morning.
We picked it up the next day, wrapped in paper. Its heft was surprising, its taste even moreso: in the same way that the boulanger’s pasta had been pasta squared–a sort of sharpened and intensified version of what we were used to, this bread was exactly the same as and yet completely different from the baguettes we had gotten used to, slathered with Nutella every morning.
This bread was better with just a bit of butter, so you could appreciate the taste: slightly sour, slightly sweet. Dense and heavy, chewy. Everything that bread should be, everything that bread used to be and isn’t anymore.
Except that now it is.
It all comes full-circle: bringing back an old art that had been taken for granted reminds us of what we give up when we forget, when we allow something as simple as daily bread to be lost. But instead of mourning it, instead of waxing on about what used to be and is no longer, in Cucugnan, we can have it–back the way it once was, the way it now is for the people who know, who are able to come to this old-fashioned mill and eat their daily bread the way it was meant to be eaten.
