WEEK
25
Sweeney Todd

The Gillette safety razor became an object for heightening sexual pleasure when it received the “united thanks of two fond hearts” by allowing the honeymooner to shave off a 3-day beard. Underarm deodorant, toothpaste, mouth wash, Wonder Bread . . . and a host of other products were advertised as . . . ensuring the attentions of a new lover.*
—Joel Spring, Educating the Consumer-Citizen, 2003

Here’s why I’m still a working man: Back in 1952, if Floyd Paxton of Yakima, Washington, had offered me an opportunity to invest in his new invention, little plastic clips to close bread bags, I’d have said—well, I’d have to have said, “I can’t. I won’t be born for another year yet.” But even if I’d been fifty at the time, I’d have said, “No thanks, Floyd. You can only charge a fraction of a cent for them. Do you know how many of those you’d have to sell to make any money?”

A hundred billion Kwik Lok tabs later, Floyd presumably knows, while I’m clipping coupons. The Kwik Lok Corporation sells over five billion bread tabs annually. Most of these wind up in landfills, but a handful end up in human intestines, which isn’t a bad percentage, all things considered. Unless you happen to be one of the unlucky ones. As foreign objects go, this is one you really don’t want to swallow. Kwik Lok tabs have been found to cause, in the words of one medical journal, “small bowel perforation, obstruction, dysphagia, gastrointestinal bleeding and colonic impaction.” It seems that the same tenacious qualities that make these clips so effective at staying attached to plastic bags make them equally effective at staying attached to your small intestine.

Still, there are worse things to swallow in a loaf of bread—for example, a double-edged razor blade. Like the one on the end of my lame right now. Yes, I finally had a real, professional lame. Well, almost. Charlie van Over had sent me home with one, which I’d promptly misplaced before I could use it. So I’d made my own from something I’d inexplicably found in my desk at work—an unapologetically nerdy little metal ruler, a quarter-inch wide, with engraved rule markings and a clip for your chest pocket.

Figuring I’d have less need to whip a ruler out of my shirt pocket for an impromptu measurement than I’d have for scoring dough, I removed the clip and ground one end of the ruler to make it narrow enough to fit into the slots of a double-edged razor blade. Surprisingly, I found double-edged razor blades near the checkout counter at Kmart. This bothered me for days. Finally I asked Anne for a consult.

“What are they doing at the checkout counter? For that matter, why are they even still manufactured? I can’t believe anyone shaves with these anymore.”

She patiently listened to my diatribe about how the double-edged safety razor was good in its heyday, especially compared to its early predecessor—the jawbone of an ox—but the decades since have seen the introduction of the twin-bladed Trac II, the triple-bladed Mach3, the four-bladed Quattro, and, most improbable and redundant of all, the five-bladed Fusion, which we can only hope represents the end of this artificially extended evolutionary line. Choose your favorite weapon and number of blades, but any of these razors shave closer and nick less than the so-called safety razor invented in the late eighteenth century.

“How do they sell any?” I concluded. “Name me one person who even uses a double-edged razor.”

“My dad.”

By the way, if you’ll pardon one more digression—this one is worth it, trust me—I have it from an extremely reliable source who works in market research that when a razor company introduces a new razor, which they do every few years whether there is a consumer need for one or not, they intentionally dull the replacement blades of their existing razors to make the new one feel superior. So, caveat emptor. (That’s Latin for “the bastards!”)

In any event, I had no sooner thrown away my ten-dollar mail-order lame, with its nonreplaceable blade embedded in a stick of green plastic, and loaded up my homemade French-style lame with a fresh double-edged razor blade when I came across the following piece of information, staggering in its magnitude: My “authentic” French lame had recently been outlawed in France. Boulangers giving up their metal lames? Unthinkable! As was the replacement: the fixed blade on a plastic stick I’d just thrown away. Indeed, “fixed” was just what le docteur ordered; the reason for this blasphemous law was that while Americans were merely digesting Kwik Lok tabs, the French were swallowing double-edged razor blades that had fallen off bakers’ lames and ended up in loaves of bread!

Now, consider this for a second. Imagine you’re a baker in a large bakery, maybe even a production bakery. And granted, you’re slashing hundreds of loaves, quickly, rushing to load them into the oven, just as I always find myself doing, even with a single loaf. You suddenly realize that your lame is missing its blade. Do you stop and look for it, to determine whether it’s on the floor or in a baguette, or do you yell, “Merde!” then pop on a fresh blade and just keep going?

Apparently, French boulangers have been doing the latter. Well, I wasn’t going back to that ten-dollar lame with its non-replaceable blade for anything (presumably they’re considerably cheaper in bulk, in France), but I’d make damned sure my metal ruler still had a blade attached when I was done.

I was determined to slash like Scaramouche today, having been inspired at the kneading conference in Maine, where I’d seen what a lame in the right hands could do. The very same professional baker who’d embarrassed me with his cutting remarks about my kneading did have a redeeming quality: he was an artist, I mean a veritable Rembrandt, with a razor, a regular Sweeney Todd. In less time than it takes me to make a simple crosshatch on my loaf, he’d scored a butterfly into his boule. And I don’t mean merely scratched into the surface. This butterfly opened up in bas-relief as the loaf baked! This is even more difficult than it sounds, for not only do the cuts in the wet dough have to be done in the right shape, but they have to be made at a consistent depth and at the correct angle. This was something I was having difficulty doing even with my simple crosshatch. The lopsided loaf I’d baked for Charlie van Over was a fairly typical case.

Still, my makeshift lame was working far better than the single-edged razors I’d also tried for a while. One thing I’d learned from Lindsay at Bobolink’s bakery is that you have to slash almost with abandon, that is, with confidence and without hesitation, and on an angle, not perpendicular to the loaf. A slow, careful cut will invariably catch and drag in the dough, while a quick, bold slash will slice through cleanly.

Slash with confidence and abandon. As the Katha Upanishad exhorts, “Arise! Awake! Approach the great and learn. The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to salvation is hard.”*

And not about to get any easier.