WEEK
17
The Short, Unhappy Life of an Assistant Baker

In Turkey in the 18th century . . . it was common to hang a baker or two. This was common enough that it was the custom of master bakers to keep an assistant who, in return for slightly higher wages, was willing to appear before the courts in case a victim were needed.
— Halvor Moorshead

We bakers have never had it easy. I suppose the more society depends on you, the more society is going to scrutinize you. Bakers were so mistrusted in the Middle Ages, a time when a slice of bread could mean the difference between salvation and starvation, that thirteen years before the Magna Carta, English magistrates felt it necessary to write into law severe penalties for bakers who committed fraud by selling underweight or substandard loaves.^* This isn’t to say that the bakers were always innocent victims. Often times, if the millers weren’t adulterating the flour with sawdust, the bakers were. Bread tensions in jolly old England came to a head in the 1266 “bread trials,” which resulted in a new regulation: each baker was required to mark his loaf with a distinctive mark—perhaps the world’s first commercial trademark—to make offending loaves easier to trace.

Why do I bring all this up? To be sure, I was in no danger of being hanged (my kids belonging more to the tar-and-feather crowd), but I was starting to sense a level of discontent with the all-peasant-bread-all-the-time menu. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I’d even heard the words “Groundhog Day” whispered. And we were only in week 17, just a third of the way through the year.

Perhaps it was time for a new recipe. I’d been reading James Beard’s Beard on Bread and noticed he had a free-form loaf made from a poolish, using a long fermentation. I’ve always been a fan of James Beard’s, and not only because the dust jacket of Beard on Bread has my all-time-favorite author photo: here’s the old man, bald as a cue ball, dressed in his tweed jacket and bow tie, looking every bit the aging, uncomfortable, closeted gay man that he was, stiffly holding at arm’s length an enormous, misshapen loaf of bread that more resembles a giant wild mushroom than a miche (an imprecise word for a large, flattened loaf).

It’s absolutely marvelous. Thus I was distraught when I’d lost it. I’d been reading outdoors on this pleasant, breezy day and had put Beard down to retrieve the mail. And predictably forgot all about him. “Predictably” because my memory lapses and confusion were becoming more frequent and disturbing. I’d been forgetting to pay bills and giving contradicting instructions at work, and most upsetting, I had recently spent a good five minutes looking for sunglasses that were perched atop my head.

Anne handed me the naked book. “Where’s the jacket?” I asked.

“I didn’t see a jacket on it.”

Didn’t see a . . . I ran out and started searching the yard, then the neighborhood, studying the wind and trying to calculate how far the jacket might have traveled, all the while wondering how the wind could’ve stripped a dust jacket off a closed book. Regardless, I had to find dear old Jim. After a fruitless search, though, I dejectedly headed back to the house. There, patiently waiting at the front door, on my welcome mat, was James Beard, offering up that huge loaf of bread to me.

Wow. Relief was followed by a deep chill that stayed with me for days. If I saw this scene in a movie,* I’d say, “Oh, please, that’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think?” But there it was. No, there he was, having returned home after his tour of my neighborhood. And what did that ugly, misshapen loaf being passed to me by a dead American culinary giant represent?

I wasn’t sure, but I knew I had to bake his peasant loaf (he calls it a “white free-form loaf”) this week. There was only one small problem. It included oil and buttermilk.

Adulterated bread. Okay, so it wasn’t sawdust (or chalk, pea, bean, or potato flour, alum, sulfate of zinc, subcarbonate of magnesia, subcarbonate of ammonia, sulfate of copper, or plaster of paris, to name a few of the additives that have been snuck into bread to cut costs or improve poor flour), but I was a charter subscriber to the school of thought that “true” bread, the stuff of peasants, has only four ingredients—flour, water, yeast, and salt—and with the single exception of my rich Easter bread, I’d stuck to my guns. Oil and buttermilk? I’d as soon add plaster of paris.

To be fair to Beard, it is not unusual to find bread (especially white sandwich bread) that includes some milk and fat in the form of oil or butter. Both milk and fat add flavor and are dough conditioners. Fat coats the gluten strands, making the bread more tender and increasing its shelf life. Additionally, the sugar (lactose) found in milk caramelizes during baking, producing a golden crust.

I followed Beard’s recipe to the letter, with the exception of substituting a little whole wheat flour for some of the white. The result?

“This is better than your bread, Dad,” Katie said. Zach agreed.

“Enjoy it today, then,” I said, the sharpness of my voice surprising me. “You’re not going to have it again. It’s not eligible for the perfect loaf. It has milk and oil in it.”

“Guess that means you won’t be making croissants, either,” Katie groaned.

“Just bread with four ingredients, kids.”

“So why’d you make this?” Zach asked.

I just shrugged. They wouldn’t have believed me, anyway.