Best Food Writing 2014 (24 page)

An hour later, out it came. It was—bread! It wasn't
good
bread—it didn't have many of those nice, irregular bread bubbles, and I must have put in too much yeast. It was oddly bitter. But it was bread, and I can't explain how weird and pleasing this was. It was as if you had put a slosh of stuff in a bowl and it had come out a
car
, with a gleaming front and a good smell inside.

For the next couple of days, I became, for the first time in my life, acutely bread-conscious.
So many breads!
I marveled as I stared at the bread counter at Dean & DeLuca. I thought of the bread I loved to eat. There was the big, round
pain Poilâne
at the bakery in Paris, sour and stiff and yet yielding to the bite; Montreal bagels, sweet and sesame-rich; and real croissants, feathery and not too buttery. Could you really
make
these things?

“If you're so interested in bread-making, you should apprentice with someone big,” said Martha, who had declared herself
hors de combat
, waiting for her wood. “Someone who yells at you a lot and teaches you what's what. You know. Every writer does that now.”

I wouldn't want to learn just one thing, though, I mused. “It would have to be someone who had range, so I could learn how to bake
pain Poilâne
and Montreal bagels and croissants, and—”

I stopped in mid-sentence. The larger implication of what I had been saying hit us both. We looked at each other balefully, as those on whom the implacable hand of fate has fallen.

“I'll call her,” I said.

When I got my mother on the phone a few hours later—you often have to leave a message, because she and my father are always out in their fields, building things—she was delighted at the idea of a bread-baking-master-class weekend. “Yes, yes, dear,” she said. “It's so funny you called. I'm just working on a new series of water-buffalo-milk ice creams. You'd love trying them. Do come for a visit as soon as you can. I'll show you how to bake anything in the world you like.”

A week later, I found myself once again in the back seat of my parents' all-purpose child-mover and S.U.V. My parents live these days on a farm in what their six children think of as remote rural Ontario—a
designation my parents emphatically reject, pointing out that it is only a three-hour drive from the Toronto airport, not seeing that a three-hour drive from the Toronto airport is
exactly
what their six children mean by “remote rural Ontario.” They retired a decade ago to these rather Berkshire-like hills, after a lifetime as college professors.

The vibe of their property, one of their kids has pointed out, is somewhere between “A Midsummer Night's Dream” and “The Island of Dr. Moreau.” Bosky though their woods are, within them are a host of strange new buildings that my mother has designed and she and my father built, laboriously, with local lumber, responding to their own unaltered eccentricities and the changing passions of their grandchildren. There is a Japanese tea house, complete with a little Hiroshige-style arched bridge; an Elizabethan theatre, with a thrust stage and a “dressing house” above; a garden-size chess board, with life-size pieces, made when my own son was in the midst of a chess mania, now long past; a Tempietto, modeled on Bramante's High Renaissance design; and a Pantheon, a domed building lined with niches, in which sit portraits, with quotations, of my mother's heroes—Galileo, Shakespeare, Darwin, Emily Dickinson, and Bach among them.

My parents, you might gather, are unusual people, although, to be honest, “unusual” is not really an unusual enough word to describe my mother. One of the first women in North America to earn a Ph.D. in mathematical logic, she became a notable linguist and (as she would be the first to tell you) also reared six kids, for whom she cooked a big French-ish dinner every night. We have a complex relationship. I know that I am more like her than I am like anyone else on earth, for good and ill. Like her, I cook every night. Like her, I offer hyper-emotional editorials to the television at moments of public outrage. Like her, I look accusingly at my children when they fail to devour some dish that, backed into a corner, they had acceded to at seven in the morning. (“What do you want tonight, salmon or capon?” “Uh, whatever. Salmon.”)

I even inherited some minute portion of her creative energy, which once launched a thousand shapes—from doll house to linguistic theory—so that, coming home after an eight-hour family trip (during which I, like her, will have left all the driving to my spouse), I can actually enjoy whipping together a big meal, with a hot dessert, for
the gang. I once realized, with a sense of fatality, that I have written long essays in praise of nearly every hero in her pantheon up there on the Ontario hill—only Bach and Emily Dickinson had escaped my attention, or her gravitational pull. Into one of her areas of particular mastery I didn't even try to follow her: baking bread. As a kid, I never left for school without being equipped with croissants or pain au chocolat or cinnamon babka or sticky buns, often in combination; on the morning before a big holiday, the kitchen always looked like a Left Bank bakery.

As we pulled up onto the property, my mother turned around. “Did you see our new building, dear?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Last visit I saw it.” I thought she meant the Pantheon, or maybe the Tempietto.

“Oh, no, not
that
,” she said, as though a Pantheon were as commonplace as a lawnmower shed. “I mean our Erechtheion!”

Alarmed by the name, I peered out the left-hand window, and, insanely enough, there it was: in wood and plaster, a nearly full-scale model of the Porch of the Caryatids from the Acropolis, with its six Ionic columns and six draped female figures supporting the roof. The Greek girls were about six feet tall, and, in the Ontario farmland, they looked pretty impressive, though something about the way the figures were incised gave them a demure Canadian quality.

“It's beautiful, Mom,” I said, feebly.

That night, we sat down to a dinner mostly of breads—sketches of the weekend to come. I recognized most of them from childhood, but there was a dinner roll that was the best dinner roll I had ever eaten: flaky and rich and yet somehow reassuringly simple and eggy.

“Oh, that's my
broissant
,” she explained gaily. “It's my own invention. It's brioche dough given a croissant treatment—egg dough with butter folded in in layers. Do you want to try it? We'll do it tomorrow.”

My stomach filled with gluten, I took the books on bread baking and bread history I had brought with me, and went back to my old bed.

At this point, there should be a breath and a space and a new paragraph and lots of stuff about ancient yeasts, the earliest known instances
of bread, bread-in-Sumer-and-Egypt lore, and then a joke or two about the Jewish invention, on the lam, of the unleavened kind. I will spare the reader this, for, turning the pages in my books, I decided that the worst of modern food bores is the bread bore. The very universality of bread, the simple alchemy that makes it miraculous, can also make it dull to discuss.

But, as I was reminded the next morning—with my mother wearing her flour-resistant “Monaghan Lumber” T-shirt—bread, though perhaps unrewarding as an analytic subject, is fascinating as a practice. It is probably the case that these two things often vary inversely: activities that are interesting to read about (science experiments) are probably dull to do, while activities that are dull to read about (riding a bike) are interesting when you attempt them. What makes something interesting to read about is its narrative grip, and stories are, of necessity, exercises in compressing time. What makes something interesting to do is that—through repetition, coordination, perseverance—it
stretches
time.

Fortunately, my mother is also an expert in-depth explainer, although her children have been known to run for doors and leap out windows when she starts up with “Well, studies show that. . . .” I have a fond summertime memory of her explaining Gödel's Proof to me; I wish I had retained it, though I recall an indecently vivid picture of sets struggling, in vain, to contain themselves.

Yeast, my mother explained now, is really just a bunch of bugs rooming together, like Oberlin grads in Brooklyn—eukaryotic organisms of the fungus kingdom, kin of mushrooms. “When you mix the little bugs with carbohydrate—wet wheat is a good one—they begin to eat up all the oxygen in it, and then they pass gas made up of ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide.” The alcohol they pass is what makes spirits. The carbon dioxide is what makes bread. The gas they pass causes the dough to rise. It's what puts the bubbles in the bread. If you bake it, you trap or fix the bubbles inside.

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.)

Like most good cooks, my mother is sweet-tempered in the run-up to cooking, short-tempered in the actual event. (Her quick, sharp “Gop!,” instructing my father to do something instantly, is as familiar to her children as birdsong.) For all its universality, bread's chemistry; or, really, biology, is a little creepy. “The longer it takes the little bugs to eat up the oxygen, the better the bread tastes,” she went on. “The high heat of the baker's oven simply kills off the remaining little bugs, while leaving their work preserved in place. It's all those carbon-dioxide bubbles which become fixed as the nice spongy holes in the crumb of the bread.” The tasty bites of your morning toast, I realized, are all the tombs of tiny dead creatures—the Ozymandias phenomenon on a miniature scale. Look on my works, you mighty, and eat them with apricot jam.

We turned to the
pain Poilâne
, whose starter she had made earlier; it now luxuriated under a plastic bag in the sink. You can mix up water and wheat, she explained, put it out in the air, and wait for all the wild yeast that's drifting around in the schmutz of the kitchen to land on it and start eating the carbohydrates. This yeast tends to have more character than the yeast that you buy in the store, because, as every dog knows, the schmutz on the kitchen floor has more flavor than anything else. Well-kept schmutz of this sort provides the sour taste in sourdough bread. (San Francisco has a distinctively sour kind of schmutz, so distinctive that it has a scientific name: Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis.) The long-cherished deposit of ancient schmutz—a spongy mess that you can use day after day and even decade after decade, and whose exigencies you, as a baker, basically can't escape—is called, no kidding, “the mother.”

“Bread is very forgiving,” my mother said, as she turned over the
pain Poilâne
dough. “In the books, they fuss endlessly, and, you know, I used to worry and weigh, but now I know the bread will forgive. The secret of bread is that bread is much more forgiving than non-bakers know.”

We took out the breads that we had prepared the night before. “The broissant is essentially a brioche egg dough with butter folded into it,” my mother said. “Now, the trick, dear, about laminating butter is to get the thickness of the butter
exactly
the same as the thickness
of the dough.” We cautiously beat down the butter into layers. “Then you fold it over in exact thirds, like
this
.” She showed me.

We began to fold. And fold. And fold again. As I tried to fold, she frowned ferociously. “You have to even it out so that you don't have these budges at the corners,” she said. The CBC rose in the background. As luck and life would have it, a mildly alarmed Canadian-style piece about gluten allergies and gluten-free diets was on. In a slightly prim tone—as my sister Hilary points out, Toronto is the last big town where “hygienic,” a holy word, is pronounced as though it had five syllables—it told of how many people had given themselves a diagnosis of celiac disease, and how our bread-addicted society might be ending.

“That is so stupid,” my mother bristled. She went on to rattle off facts about the incidence of celiac disease and the follies of self-diagnosis. But beneath it, I knew, was the simple love of bread. I imagined my mother and myself as the last bread-heads, the final gluten addicts, sitting in a stifling, overheated basement room somewhere, stuffing ourselves with broissants.

We spent two days mixing water and yeast and different flour, and then we waited for different lengths of time. We did the
pain Poilâne
, dark and crusty and dependent on a long, long resting period, we did bagels—real bagels, as produced in the Montreal bakeries, with a large hole, a bright sesame glow, and a sweet, firm bite. These had to be rolled, and my mom was impatient with my rolling, since unless you do them just right they bounce back yeastily to their original form.

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.