Notre pain de ce jour

Warning: a long essay on bread ahead

Breakfast, according to the French.

I have recently discovered Meudon’s sixth artisan boulanger.  Hidden away though it may be in the rue des Marais, and small though be its size, the baguettes I bought there were better than any bread sold anywhere in Britain.  By their piping heat, I judged that they had still been in the oven when I left the house, where, on my return, I subjected them immediately to an appropriately rigorous examination which largely took the form of lunch.  With jubilation I found the quality of this new boulanger’s handiwork entirely consistent with that of the other five’s: the radiance with warm earthy gold, the dying glowings of the oven, the perfection of the patterns sculpted by the craftsman’s hand, the structural poise of the whole, the pale underbelly below, the copper-crowned ridge above, and the crust, delicate enough to crumble exquisitely under pressure, but robust enough to protect the rich mellifluous dough (la mie) within!  And the smell (the smell, dear reader!), the scent of the French field!  The scope of the written word is transcended, almost even in French.  And this is only a baguette – I have not even mentioned the other loaves, nor the croissant, nor indeed the pâtisseries, stacked on high shelves and glittering along luminous counters.

Another gratuitous croissant photo.

Kneading my bread in my bakehouse...

If you feel, as you read this, that I have become a ‘bread snob’ (well-picked words used to describe me recently!), or alternatively very hungry all of a sudden, you do either with good reason.  The purple prose above is only slightly hyperbolic (see the view from Reims here), and bread-wise I shall be at a loss on my return to G.B.  On the other hand, it must be realised that such an attitude towards bread is entirely natural by French standards.  The Englishman becomes like a child in a sweet-shop (in a bakery), but the Frenchman expects nothing less than what I have just described.  He expects several panary establishments in a single town; he expects to find them (in Paris at least) with the official website (whose existence I have discovered far too late); he expects it even to be subsidised by the state.  One of the boulangeries has recently had its entrance refurbished jointly by the town council and by the FISAC, (the Fonds d’intervention pour les services, l’artisanat et les commerces), that is, a body which offers grants to maintain the institution of the artisan.  Now of course, he must pay for this in his taxes, but the situation reflects an element of government which is peculiarly French.

Never enough gratuitous croissant photos!.

And also a gratuitous photo of a pépito

'The front of this shop has been modernised thanks to the financial support of Meudon's Town Council and the FISAC, the Service, Artisan and Business Fund.'

 St Honorius, not perhaps at his saintliest

 Those of us in Britain who eat impatiently and without thought, who deliberately pare the meal down to its essential function, who discard anything lacking immediate material reward, and who seldom eat as families, have much to learn from the French, in this and in other things, who (far from being snobbish) express their appreciation of their daily bread by making of it an art, and by merging it with culture (The poet Francis Ponge disagrees, or does he?).  The paper bags which cradle the commonplace manna prove this: they draw the client’s attention to the baker’s adherence to tradition and to craftsmanship: ‘je pétris mon pain dans mon fournil’ (‘kneading my bread in the bakehouse’), assure him that  ‘le pain, c’est la santé!’ (Bread is health!), or regale him with the tale of St Honoré’s announcement, as a boy, of his vocation to the priesthood, of the scoffing of his nurse and of her assertion that her dough-spatula would be just as likely to burst into leaf – which of course it duly did.  Sometimes they instruct him simply, ‘À déguster sans modération!’ to enjoy without moderation, an entirely superfluous suggestion.  It is all beauty, thriving miraculously even in this age, and springing not from snobbery, but from the recognition that, once given our daily bread, we are to treat it with respect.

'Did you know?  St Honorius (Honoré) is the patron saint of bakers.  When the unruly young fellow announced to his nurse that he wanted to become a priest, she was in the middle of baking her bread.  The good woman scoffed.  "You'll be a bishop when my spatula grows leaves!"  Before her astonished eyes, the spatula began to bud with greenery.'