Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [98]
At the request of other partisans, he had written a pamphlet entitled Le Pain en majesté, or Bread Enthroned, in which he called bread “God’s representative of his flesh and soul, born in the secret of the night during the night of time.” Like a troubadour of old, Guth proclaimed the virtues of bread battling against our delirium for speed, which was ruining our sensations and sentiments and leading to the downfall of the Occident. “With its eternal values, bread attaches us to the earth from which we are being torn by an industrial civilization.”
In his childhood in a peasant house in the Bigorre, a pretending-to-be-asleep little boy watched his aunt Amandine knead the dough. “Writhing, she lifted it in strips, stretched it, threw it, punched it down. All the while, she groaned softly with the wails of love, of birth, of death.”
After my next trip to Ganachaud, I dropped off a loaf at Guth’s door.
My friend Maxine, who eats out at a different Paris restaurant every night, told me excitedly, “I found two great new ones. And they are baking their own bread.”
Alain Passard is the chef-owner of l’Arpège at rue de Varenne in the locale that used to be l’Archestrate. The youthful Passard has two stars from Michelin. At Arpège, the bread is baked in the morning for the lunch service and in the afternoon for the evening service.
“Bread is very important in a restaurant and I love to make it. The customers are very surprised. Almost the first thing they say is, ‘Where do you buy this bread? It is fabulous. We don’t find it in Paris.’ Some of the women ask me, ‘Oh, if only I could have some with my coffee in the morning.’ If any is left over, I give it to them for toast.” His hundred clients a day manage to put away four kilos of Arpège’s individual rolls and six kilos of country bread, which is a lot of bread for a fashionable crowd.
Alain grew up with the taste of good bread. It was made by a farmer friend of his father. When he was twenty and already trained as a pastry chef, he said to his father’s friend, “May I spend two weeks and learn to make bread the way you do?” One of its secrets is sea salt from Guérande in Brittany, sel de Guérande, considered the Flower of Salt.
The fine bread accompanies a cuisine that is refined and restrained, genuine and unpretentious and never banal. An example is a simple and charming entrée consisting of cabbage leaves stuffed with crab meat in a light mustard sauce. The combination of rusticity and sophistication is characteristic of Alain Passard.
Like Passard, Gilles Epié of Le Miraville is a young Breton. His approach to food is much the same—imaginative and inventive without excess or affectation. His little restaurant was barely six months old when it received the accolade of a star from the Michelin.
He started baking bread while working in Brussels, and could find none that seemed suitable to partner his style of cuisine. The public’s reception convinced him to do the same when he came to Paris. Not an insipid bread but a forthright loaf with the fermentation set off by beer and grapes. Into his dough goes a touch of honey and the honorable sel de Guérande. There is never any bread left over to give the customers to take home.
At Charenton-le-Pont on the edge of Paris, an address as unprepossessing as the rue de Ménilmontant, is the small Musée Français du Pain. Occupying a floor in the head office of a flour-milling company that supplies most of the leading pastry chefs in France, it is an endearing place.
The museum is the dada of the company’s owner, Jacques Lorch. For twenty-five years M. Lorch has been ferreting out artifacts pertaining to the subject that is his passion. The collection now numbers more than a thousand pieces, and to obtain some of them he had to beat out offers from big museums around Europe.
“The story of bread is the story of the life of man,” said M. Lorch.
The oldest exhibit