Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [97]
The harshness of his early youth had left a permanent toll and he felt he would have to sell his now flourishing business. His attractive young daughters, Valérie and Isabelle, were aghast. “Papa, you simply can’t do it. We will carry on for you.”
They enrolled in a professional school and finished the three-year course with top honors. As far as I know, Ganachaud’s girls are the first professional women bakers in France and the first to earn the tough CAP (Certificat d’Aptitude Professionnelle) in what is regarded as one of the most macho of the artisan trades.
Slender and full of grace, they admit to consuming at least a half pound of bread a day regularly, proof that it is not bread that makes you fat but what you put on it. Except for the respite offered by the slowing down of the night fermentation through cold, they watch the clock like hawks, for good bread making demands chronometer precision.
In most other ways the Ganachauds work by the old-fashioned precepts. “A true baker,” says Papa, “mixes his own flours.” (Any loaf that disobeys his commands is rushed to a laboratory to find out the reason why.) The true baker chooses his combination of flours the way a great tea blender selects leaves of different strains. He uses natural leavenings instead of factory-produced yeasts and baking powders and shuns the preservatives that give added shelf life.
In Paris an alarming number of bakers are buying prepared mixes or frozen dough from industrial plants. With the latter they need but shape it into the desired form and slide it into the oven for baking. Bread from these terminal stations is rarely better than average. Bake shops are springing up with charming décors that suggest a world as it used to be, but the décors are deceptive stage sets masking chain operations.
Lucien Pergeline, a director of the Grands Moulins de Paris, revealed that certain bakers have cut down on the traditional fermentation period with the astute use of commercial baking powders, thus saving themselves an hour or more of time. In addition, with the powders they can achieve a short-weight loaf of 200 grams that has the size of a 250-gram baguette and sell it for the price of the latter.
“Hmm,” I said. “Sounds like watered stock—when the drovers of upper New York State used to walk their cattle to market forcing them to drink a maximum on the long march, thus upping the price on the hoof.”
The purists of the profession are up in arms and there are debates, symposiums, and articles on saving the Good Bread of France. An alerted segment of the public passes around the names of honest bakers the way they pass on the name of a good bistro discovery. Jean-Michel Bédier, chef of Le Chiberta in Paris, tells me there is a worthy baker in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, the Burgundy town where Colette was born. We may drive down. It is only seventy-five miles away.
The more I learned, the more choosy I found myself becoming. Strolling in Paris, I noticed Gérard Mulot’s sign at 2 rue Lobineau, a step from the rue de Seine in the sixth arrondissement. Fabrication Maison depuis 1976. I liked this proud proclamation of the date as if it went back two centuries. What caught me, however, was the mention of pain au levain, which meant that Mulot was using a starter dough as his leavening. His pain de campagne was excellent with a faint and pleasant note of acidity, more to my liking than any I have found in my neighborhood of the seventh arrondissement.
On a recent Sunday afternoon I went to the big book fair at the Porte de Versailles because Paul Guth, whose Moi, Joséphine, impératrice (I, Joséphine, the Empress) is one of my favorite biographies, was to autograph his latest work. The delightful Mr. Guth has written more than fifty books and is one of the few contemporary French authors who has been able to live by his pen.
He turned out to be a fervent partisan of honest bread. I went to see him