52 Loaves
Authors: William Alexander
52 LOAVES
ALSO BY WILLIAM ALEXANDER
The $64 Tomato:
How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity,
Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential
Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden
Loaves
ONE MAN’S RELENTLESS
PURSUIT OF TRUTH, MEANING,
AND A PERFECT CRUST
William Alexander
Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2010 by William Alexander.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published simultaneously in Canada by
Thomas Allen & Son Limited.
Descriptions of the seven Divine Offices used with
permission from the Abbey of the Genesee.
Leeuwenhoek’s sketches of yeast cells © The Royal Society.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Alexander, William, [date]
52 loaves : one man’s relentless pursuit of truth, meaning,
and a perfect crust / William Alexander.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-56512-583-4 (alk. paper)
1. Bread. 2. Bread—Anecdotes.
3. Alexander, William, [date]. I. Title.
TX769.A4858 2010
641.8'15—dc22 2009049656
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
I am going to learn to make bread tomorrow. So if you may imagine me with my sleeves rolled up, mixing flour, milk, saleratus, etc., with a deal of grace. I advise you if you don’t know how to make the staff of life to learn with dispatch.
—Emily Dickinson
They say bread is life. And I bake bread, bread, bread. And I sweat and shovel this stinkin’ dough in and out of this hot hole in the wall, and I should be so happy! Huh, sweetie?
—
Nicolas Cage in
Moonstruck
THE PREVIOUS OCTOBER
. Rarin’ to Go
WEEK
2. Naturally Pure and Wholesome
WEEK
3. The Winter Wheat of Our Discontent
WEEK
8. “The Rest of the World Will Be Dead”
WEEK
17. The Short, Unhappy Life of an Assistant Baker
WEEK
19. Playing the Percentages
WEEK
21. With Friendships Like This . . .
WEEK
27. The Sound of One Hand Kneading
WEEK
28. A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste
WEEK
34. Blown Away (by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August)
WEEK
35. Lecture to Young Men on Chastity
WEEK
39. A Lot of ‘Splainin’ to Do
WEEK
41. “Nous Acceptons Votre Proposition”
WEEK
45. The Trials of Job: Travel Edition
WEEK
46. A Time to Keep Silence
WEEK
51. Let Them Eat . . . Brioche?
WEEK
52. The Perfect Future in the Present
Peasant Bread (
Pain de Campagne
)
Pain de l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille
“Next!”
My heart was pounding so hard at the airport security checkpoint, I was certain the TSA agent would see it thrusting through my jacket.
“Laptop,” I blurted out for no apparent reason, my voice cracking like a teenager’s on a first date as I placed my computer into the plastic tray.
“Liquids.” The TSA inspector held up my regulation Baggie stuffed with three-ounce bottles and nodded approvingly.
I reached into my backpack and casually pulled out a half-gallon plastic container filled with a bubbling, foul-smelling substance. “Sourdough.” I might just as well have said, “Gun!”
“Uh-uh, you can’t bring that on a plane!” a TSA Official stationed at
the next line
called out. I wanted to say, “Who asked you?” but sensibly kept my mouth shut as I looked around nervously. Thanks to that blabbermouth, every passenger and TSA employee at the security checkpoint was looking my way.
“Can he bring dough?” another inspector yelled.
A buzz had now started, with murmurs of “dough” audible from the passengers behind me, all of whom, I’m sure, hoped they weren’t on my flight.
A tense and chaotic ten minutes later, I found myself talking with a stone-faced supervisor.
“Sourdough?” He sighed with the heavy air of someone who didn’t want to deal with a situation—any situation.
“Twelve years old!” I beamed. So that I could say it wasn’t a
liquid and thus subject to the three-ounce rule, I’d added half a pound of flour to the wet sourdough before leaving the house. Unfortunately, this had the effect of stiffening it into something with an uncanny resemblance to plastique explosive. As the supervisor started to run a wand around it, I held my breath, half expecting it to beep myself.
“A thirteen-hundred-year-old monastery in France is expecting this,” I offered.
His trained poker face remained blank, forcing me to pretend he’d asked why.
“They managed to keep science, religion, and the arts alive during the Dark Ages, even risking their lives to protect their library from the barbarians who burned everything else in sight. After thirteen centuries, though, they’ve forgotten how to make bread.”
Still no reaction. None. Trying to lighten the mood, I added, “The future of Western civilization is in your hands.”
That bit of hyperbole got his attention. “You’re a professional baker?”
My wife coughed.
“Um, no.”
He arched an eyebrow. But no matter. Whatever transpired in the next few minutes, I was boarding that plane with my starter. I had to. During nearly a year of weekly bread making, I’d disappointed my wife, subjected my poor kids to countless variations on the same leaden loaf, and, most of all, let myself down, time and time again, loaf after loaf, week after week. Well, I was not going to let down the monks at l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille de Fontenelle.
Granted, I was as unlikely a savior of a monastery as you could imagine—a novice baker who’d lost his faith and hadn’t
set foot in a church in years, carrying a possibly illegal cargo of wild yeast and bacteria practically forced on me by an avowed atheist—but nevertheless I was determined to succeed, for I was on a mission.
A mission from God.
Vigils
Vigils, or watching in the night, is prayer to be celebrated in the middle of the night. In monastic communities the concentration on vigilance begins with this Office, enveloped in and supported by darkness and silence.
OCTOBER
Rarin’ to Go
How can a nation be great if its bread tastes like Kleenex?
—Julia Child
I was up before dawn, watching and waiting for daylight, and was rewarded with a promising sunrise that delivered a glorious, sparkling October day, a Flemish landscape painting come to life. With the low mountains of New York’s Hudson Highlands as my backdrop, I set out across the fields, endless rows of rich red soil stretching to the horizon, a sack of wheat slung over my breast, swinging my arm to and fro in an easy rhythm, sowing while startled birds furiously flapped their wings into flight, fleeing the advancing rain of seed. The silence of late October was interrupted only by the laughter of barefoot children playing hide-and-seek among the crisp, golden cornstalks and by the church bells in the distance, which marked the passing of every quarter hour. What a great day to be alive and to be sowing life.
“Are you going to weed or stand there daydreaming?” Anne asked, snapping me out of my reverie.
My wife was on her knees, pulling weeds, her face streaked with sweat and dirt, her nose runny.
I dismissed her comment with a grunt but reluctantly joined her. “How did we ever let these beds get so out of hand?” I wondered aloud as I yanked another foot-tall clump of thistle from the earth and flung it into the wheelbarrow. We pulled and
tossed, tugged and heaved, the weeds having progressed far beyond the stage where they could be removed with a hoe.
Two hours later, the neglected beds, more used to being a home to beans and tomatoes than to grain, were cleaned, raked, and ready for winter wheat. I drew shallow furrows through the earth with a triangle hoe as Anne, on all fours, her drippy nose almost touching the earth, poked seeds into the soil, four inches apart, as if planting peas, not sowing wheat. The scene was more phlegmish than Flemish, but as much as I loved the romantic notion of turning my yard into a wheat field, of
sowing
wheat instead of
planting
it, I wasn’t about to till up my lawn and construct a deer-proof fence when I already had good soil, good fencing, and available beds in the vegetable garden. And planting in neat rows, rather than broadcasting seed, would allow for efficient weeding with a hoe later.
“We need Jethro Tull’s seed drill,” I remarked as Anne continued to press seeds into the earth.
She didn’t take the bait.
“Sitting on a park bench, da, da-daaaa, eyeing little girls with bad intent,” I sang, getting her attention, not to mention thoroughly irritating her. Anne had once unbuckled her seat belt and threatened to get out of the car—at sixty miles an hour—if I didn’t remove
Aqualung
from the CD player.