WEEK
43
Puttin’ On the Ritz

If you’re blue and you don’t know Where to go to, why don’t you go
Where fashion sits,
Puttin’ on the Ritz.
— Irving Berlin

I didn’t expect the service entrance to the Hotel Ritz to be completely unmanned, but neither did I anticipate five hundred armed antiterrorist police, including two hundred members of the elite French CRS riot squad, dressed up the wazoo in body armor.

“Guess they heard I was coming,” I quipped to Anne as I presented my confirmation documents for the bread class to the Ritz security guard at the rue Cambon entrance. “Wait here for a sec. Let me see what time I’ll be done tonight.” She looked around nervously at all the rifles. “Don’t worry,” I reassured her. “You’re well protected.”

When I returned five minutes later, Anne had vanished without a trace. My first instinct was to call her, but we’d left our cell phones, incompatible with Europe’s cellular network, back at our hotel. I asked some Ritz staff on cigarette break if anyone had seen her, but she’s hard enough to describe in English, let alone in my primitive French. It wasn’t like her to just up and leave, but, hoping she had given up on me and wandered off, I went back inside to start the first day of my cours de boulangerie, feeling a touch unsettled. Why all the security? The hotel felt more like a military encampment than the famous Ritz, whose very name is synonymous with (After crackers) luxury, service, fine dining, and expense, the hotel that has for a hundred years been the Paris home to kings and princesses, writers, and actors.

Ernest Hemingway claimed to have personally liberated the Ritz in 1944, but the hotel’s Hemingway Bar was more likely named in honor of his bar tab. Other luminaries whose celebrated stays helped fuel the legend include F. Scott Fitzgerald (who wrote “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”), Marcel Proust, King Edward VII, Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, and Coco Chanel, who made the Ritz her permanent home for thirty years. Some say the place has lost a bit of its luster, but thanks to continuing cameos in such movies as The Devil Wears Prada, the Ritz continues to loom slightly larger than life.

This week, however, it was mainly a reminder of death. In class, rumors about the heavy security were swirling: Bill Clinton was staying there; a prominent Arab head of state was visiting. The truth, however, turned out to be a shocking and unwelcome reminder of the last time the Ritz had been in the news.

That was August 31, 1997. Dodi Al Fayed and his girlfriend, Diana, Princess of Wales, were at the hotel because (a) she was a princess, and as I said, princesses stay at the Ritz; and (b) his father owns the joint. The half-royal couple, in an attempt to elude the ever-present paparazzi, had departed the Ritz via the rue Cambon service entrance, where I’d just left Anne. The paparazzi weren’t fooled, however, and the high-speed car chase that ensued ended with a horrific fatal crash in a tunnel under the Seine. Now, ten years later, a British jury conducting an inquest had come across the channel to reconstruct the events leading up to Diana’s death, and the French police, still smarting from the stigma of losing the princess on their watch, didn’t want any more trouble. And that included trouble from my wife, who, she’d later explain, had been first interrogated, then shooed away while I was inside. Whether she protested that her husband had won second prize in a bread contest is not known.

With that somber backdrop, I began class in the subterranean bakery of the Ritz. After some formalities, a young Vietnamese woman, who held the dual (and largely incompatible) roles of chef’s assistant and translator, took the eight of us down the elevator even deeper into the basement, to the laundry, where we received our uniforms: from top to bottom, a towering paper toque that turned me into a seven-footer; a tour de cou (a white cloth napkin worn knotted around the neck); a veste de cuisine (a sharp-looking white double-breasted jacket), over which I wore a tablier, or apron, into which I tucked my torchon (dish towel); and last but not least, striped, blue gray pantalon, or pants.

It was this last item of apparel that created what you might call a crisis of confidence among one of my classmates, a Canadian (thank goodness he wasn’t American) I’ll call Nebbish. You know Nebbish. Everyone knows Nebbish. If you’re a guy, he’s the kid you went to high school with who always forgot his gym clothes, who refused to wear a jockstrap, who was forever losing the combination to his locker, and who regularly broke his eyeglasses. To women, he’s the kid about whom you whispered to friends, “He’s so annoying!”

Now, some four decades later, Nebbish was back in my home-ec class, and naturally, he had a question: “Do we have to wear the pants?”

Stares all around: from a Californian veterinarian whose husband had been transferred to Paris, two giggly Japanese girls with video cameras permanently affixed to their hands, a young Brazilian woman of Chinese ancestry, a very cool Australian chef at the Ritz who was taking this as an in-service course, and Nebbish’s eighty-year-old father.

Yes, Nebbish had brought his father to class.

“Whaddya mean, do you have to wear the pants?” Pop growled. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Of course, you have to wear the pants,” the Vietnamese assistant said.

“I can’t.”

“But you have to. It is part of the uniform.”

“I can’t.”

“You can’t.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Why?”

A pregnant pause.

“I don’t have any underwear on. I didn’t know we’d be taking off our pants.”

——————————————

French chefs, as anyone who grew up on Looney Tunes knows, come in only two sizes: short and fat, and tall and skinny. Chef Didier, our instructor and a baker at the Ritz, was in the latter group. He was a pleasant enough fellow who sported a broad grin and didn’t at all fit the stereotype of the ill-tempered chef. He even told us to call him just plain “Didier,” but, trained by watching reality chef shows on TV, I found myself involuntarily answering him with a snappy and militaristic, “Oui, chef !” every time. He didn’t seem to mind.

Becoming a professional baker in France is only slightly less difficult and time-consuming than becoming, say, a nuclear physicist in the United States. In the States, if you want to become a baker, you have a couple of options. You can find a bakery that will hire and train you. Or if you prefer formal training, you can attend a professional school like the San Francisco Baking Institute, where they turn you into a baker in eighteen weeks.

In France, to become a boulanger, you enter into the government-supervised apprenticeship system that has been in place since the Middle Ages. Didier’s route to the boulangerie of the Ritz included a four-year apprenticeship after high school, where he was required to master not only bread, but also patisserie, chocolate, and ice cream.

Didier had to wait to finish high school before starting his apprenticeship, but tomorrow’s bakers won’t have to waste all that time learning algebra. Reacting to the shortage of bakers in the country, the French government in 2007 lowered the minimum age of apprenticeship to a medieval fourteen.

The boulangerie course taught at the Ritz was, in a bizarre way, a miniature version of the apprenticeship program. The emphasis was not, as would have made sense, on crafting artisan loaves for the home kitchen, but rather on learning how to make bread for restaurant service. This meant learning the standard formulas and recipes of the classical repertory and baking lots of bread. Lots. The seven of us (Nebbish père had dropped out after the first day) baked several hundred loaves over the course of the week. We baked baguettes, olive bread, bacon and sun-dried tomato bread, sourdough bread, rye bread, whole wheat bread, whole wheat bread with currants and spices, raisin bread, apricot bread, rye bread with whole garlic cloves, white sandwich bread, pain au levain, pain de campagne, and more baguettes. When we’d exhausted those variations, we learned decorative bread (I can now make a rose out of dough, a skill that I’ve yet to find an opportunity to showcase) and rolls.

Each batch started out the same way—loading up the commercial kneader with about twenty pounds of flour, then kneading, fermenting, and dividing into loaves. Because the Japanese girls, who were my partners, were too busy videotaping to actually make any bread, I did much of the dividing and weighing and had become quite good at it by the end of the week.

Only briefly, and in mockery at that, did Didier demonstrate hand kneading, when he was making a whole wheat loaf.

“You can knead it like this for forty minutes,” he said, exaggerating the effort with huffs and puffs, looking like Ed Norton in The Honeymooners demonstrating how to “core a apple” the old-fashioned way, “or like this for eight minutes.” He threw it into the huge, rotating mixer and smiled. And autolyse? As we say in New York, fuhgetaboutit.

Much of the dough we made went, after shaping, into a huge refrigerated unit called a retarder proofer cabinet, more commonly known as the marriage saver. The origin of the nickname is easy to understand. When I make bread at home, it takes anywhere from seven to ten hours from start to finish. My loaves usually come out of the oven around four in the afternoon. If I were running a commercial bakery, and my bread had to be out on the counter at 7:00 a.m. — well, do the math (if, that is, you haven’t left junior high school to become a baker’s apprentice). In fact, not all that long ago, a baker’s workday started about midnight and ended in the morning. The sight of the baker’s assistant sleeping atop the warm oven at noon was not an uncommon one.

What the marriage saver does is control temperature and humidity, keeping the dough chilled (35 degrees Fahrenheit at the Ritz) and moist overnight, and then, using a timer, bringing it back to room temperature (75 degrees) the last few hours so that the bread can rise and get ready for the oven, all while the baker is at home in bed. With his wife.

The biggest challenge of the class (other than rolling baguettes and bâtards, which I proved to be spectacularly bad at) was simply staying out of the way of the Ritz’s boulangers. This wasn’t a classroom kitchen but a working bakery, and bakers were constantly rushing through with trays of breads, crying “Attention!” and “Excusez-moi!” Nebbish took the opportunity to seek the attentions of a young female baker, using the novel approach of criticizing the baked goods he’d been eating daily in the restaurants of the Ritz. This seemed to me a self-defeating, hopeless way of flirting, but damned if she didn’t go from biting-her-lip tolerance to jocular familiarity with him by the end of the week, making the rest of us (okay, me) gag.

I hate to admit it, but Nebbish had a point. The bread at the Ritz wasn’t very good, the course wasn’t very good, and none of the breads we’d baked all week were particularly good, including the much-anticipated pain de campagne, the Ritz’s version of the loaf I was trying to perfect. To that end, when not in the bakery of the Ritz, I was running around Paris, visiting the best bakeries in the city in hopes of finding the perfect peasant loaf, if for no other reason than to assure myself that I wasn’t chasing an apparition, that the crumb, crust, texture, and taste I was seeking, still so vivid in my memory, in fact existed.

Class ran from early afternoon to early evening, leaving my mornings free. Anne and I started at the temple, Boulangerie Poilâne, home of the famous wood-fired-oven-baked, four-pound artisan miche. I talked my way downstairs to the working bakery, or fournil (“Je suis un boulanger américain”), and warmed myself before the roaring wood fire of the famous, ancient brick oven while a baker removed the large loaves. Having spent a fair amount of effort trying to get steam into my own oven, I was a bit chastened to see that the method used for steaming what many consider the best loaf of rustic bread in the world (Americans shell out fifty-three bucks to have a single miche shipped to their home) is nothing more than a badly battered metal bowl of boiling water sitting over the fire.

Lionel Poilâne, arguably the most famous baker in the world, had died in a helicopter accident in 1992, leaving the family’s million-euro bread business in the hands of his daughter, Apollonia. I’d say this recent Harvard grad was up to the task, judging by the ruckus (and free publicity) she’d recently raised by suggesting that the baguette, the very symbol of French bread (if not of the French themselves), wasn’t French at all. Debunking the legend (repeated in class by Didier) that the baguette was invented by Napoleon so that his troops could strap the long, skinny loaves to their legs, Apollonia insisted that the baguette was actually a recent Austrian import (quelle horreur!—the last Austrian import of note was Marie Antoinette, and we know how the French dealt with her) and that all patriotic French people should give up their love affair with this foreign white bread and return to a traditional Gallic loaf.

And just what would that loaf look like? Why, Poilâne’s four-pound rustic miche, made with levain, sea salt, and stone-ground flour. Naturellement.

Lionel Poilâne, along with a handful of other young bakers, had been an early leader in the movement to reverse the decline of French bread, a decline dating to shortly after the end of World War II. With pressure to keep prices down and quantity up, French bakers started taking shortcuts, using flour adulterated with extra gluten, ascorbic acid, enzymes, and even fava bean flour, in order to create a dough that could both rise quickly and stand up to rough mechanized kneading and shaping.* The resulting bread, which, unfortunately, you are still quite likely to encounter today in a typical neighborhood boulangerie, had the texture of cotton candy and the flavor of cotton.

Two of the young maverick bakers determined to return good bread to France, Eric Kayser and Dominique Saibron, set up artisan bakeries on either end of rue Monge, one of the oldest streets in Paris’s Latin Quarter, so packed with boulangeries that one of the side streets is named rue des Boulangers. Other noted bakeries were located on the outskirts of the city. Anne and I visited them all, after each excursion racing home and eating the bread for lunch before I ran off to make another couple of dozen mediocre loaves at the Ritz. Anne, meanwhile, was having a blast wandering Paris, going up the Eiffel Tower, visiting museums, and strolling through the Tuileries. By the middle of the week, tired of watching Anne have all this fun, I was considering dropping out of the class and joining her, but the slim hope that I might just learn something kept me going right to the bitter end.

The bread Anne and I were gathering on our morning forays was anything but mediocre, and slicing into each loaf was an enjoyable little drama. Returning from Poilâne, Anne and I bent over the miche like a couple of archaeologists examining a rare artifact, bread knife in hand, while I sliced through the center, releasing a rich, yeasty aroma and revealing the brown crumb within—a crumb that was almost identical to my “unsatisfactory” loaves, moist and dense, devoid of holes and netting. We took a taste. The high-extraction stone-ground flour (meaning that most, but not all, of the original wheat berry makes it into the flour) provided a consistency and taste somewhere between whole wheat and white flour. Not bad. Nice sourdough flavor. But fifty bucks a loaf?

“I think I prefer yours,” Anne said, bless her heart.

I took little solace in that, however, because it was starting to look as though the loaf I was trying to imitate didn’t even exist. To be sure, we’d had some truly fine bread, both peasant loaves and baguettes, but not the loaf I was after. Until, near the end of the week, when I tasted Eric Kayser’s boule, made with a liquid levain that he maintains in a machine he designed when he couldn’t find anything that met his requirements.

“This is it!” I cried.

A peasant loaf with the rich taste of wheat and a dry, open, alveolar crumb. So it was possible! Then I ran off to class, wondering if Chef Didier and his colleagues were even aware of what was happening on rue Monge and elsewhere, where bakers were experimenting with liquid levains and preferments, while the Ritz was stuck in the classical repertory.

I shouldn’t have been surprised; the more traditional an establishment, the slower it is to change. And this hotel—its kitchen was founded and once run by the legendary Auguste Escoffier, whose kitchen-staff hierarchy system is still in place today, whose hundred-year-old cookbook of five thousand standard recipes is still used in culinary curricula around the world—was nothing if not steeped in tradition.

Just when I was ruing the money and time I had wasted on this course, something happened that seemed to make the entire week worthwhile. It happened not, however, in the bakery but in the classroom, where we gathered each day for coffee, tea, and a brief lecture from Didier. Chef Didier was describing the flour system in France. Flour is difficult to translate from French to English because there is no direct equivalent of French flours in the United States. We have cake, all-purpose, and bread flour, which are differentiated solely by their protein levels. The French have many more flours (distinguished not only by protein level but by mineral content), none of which really corresponds to any of ours. French flours are designated by type. Type 55 is basically their all-purpose, although the Ritz uses type 65, which has a little more of the bran and a higher protein level.

I was only half paying attention, drowsy from a week of racing between Parisian bakeries and the Ritz, when Didier mentioned that you have to add malt to the flour in order to help the enzymes react with the yeast.

That caught my ear. I raised my hand. “There’s no malt in the flour? In America, the malt is added at the mill.”

Didier found this astounding. In France the baker has to add his own malt.

Uh-oh. My mind raced forward. In a week I’d be baking at the monastery. I’d asked them to buy some type 65, some whole wheat, and some rye flour. But not malt. All my loaves might be doorstops without malt! Where was I going to get malt flour?

My classmate the veterinarian, who was a vegetarian (I guess you don’t eat what you heal), gave me the names of several health-food stores in Paris, suggesting that I might find some there. The next morning before class, instead of tracking down artisan bread, Anne and I went out on a hunt to procure malt. The clerks at these stores didn’t even know what it was. We also tried to buy some rye and whole wheat flour as insurance in case the monastery couldn’t locate any. Parisian supermarkets, we’d found, had six hundred varieties of cheese but hardly any flour.

“Avez-vous la farine complète?” I asked to blank stares. They didn’t know what whole wheat flour was? In a health-food store? That was incredible. Had I said the right words? I asked Didier about it in class that afternoon.

He wasn’t surprised. “You’ll find whole wheat flour in the country,” he said through the interpreter. “But in Paris, people are not so much concerned about their health. They want tasty food, not healthy food.”

No argument there. I’d been living delightfully on a Parisian diet of pâté, cheese, duck, foie gras, and wine all week. Plus, Poilâne notwithstanding, this was still white-bread country, where the baguette ruled. And with a boulangerie on every street corner, selling baking ingredients to Parisians was akin to selling snow to Eskimos.

I told Didier of my concern about baking at the monastery and my inability to find malt. Could he give me a bit? I figured since only a tiny amount was needed for a loaf, a small sandwich bag of malt flour should last me all week.

Didier hesitated but agreed, reappearing a few minutes later with a large jug from which he poured about a quarter cup of a black, viscous substance that looked and smelled like molasses.

“I was expecting flour,” I said.

Didier shrugged.

The last of the two dozen or so different breads we made in our twenty hours in class was a pain surprise, a tall, round loaf that, when you lift off the top, is—surprise!—hollowed out and filled with tiny triangular smoked salmon and ham sandwiches, thickly buttered (the better to stick together). This is the type of banquet food that was last in fashion when Gertrude Stein dined at the Ritz, but it was still the climax of the baking curriculum.

Finally the class was over. After much shaking of hands and posing for pictures, we were told in no uncertain terms not to leave any loaves behind tonight. What was I going to do with this dreadful pain surprise? The veterinarian had the same dilemma. “Maybe I’ll give it to the beggar who’s at the Métro every day,” she said. I wasn’t sure if she was serious. But I left class first, and sure enough, right at the Métro entrance was a pathetic-looking woman sitting on the sidewalk, wrapped in filthy shawls, with a cardboard sign asking for money to buy food for her children. I’d passed her every day but hadn’t noticed her, just another beggar in Paris.

But was she even (excuse the term) a “real” beggar or a con artist? Deciding it didn’t matter, I bent down and handed her the loaf, pulling off the top, revealing the little triangular salmon and ham sandwiches inside.

“Pain surprise, madame. Du Ritz.”

No con artist could fake the look of joy, mixed with a little shock, that washed across her face. She thanked and blessed me, and that night she and her children dined on food from the kitchen of the Ritz. Seeing her face was heartening, but I really would’ve liked to see the vet’s face when she walked by.

The week at the Ritz had left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth (and I’m not just talking about the bread). The way it ended—giving my last loaf to a beggar—seemed not only appropriate but symbolic. My quest for perfect peasant bread had led me far from the peasants, and I needed to return. I had five days before I was due at Saint-Wandrille. I wanted to go someplace where bread was still vitally important, where it was a staple, not a plaything of the rich. I needed a place where the peasants last rioted over the price of bread, not two hundred years ago, but two weeks ago.

The next morning, Anne and I boarded different planes. Her afternoon flight followed the sun home to New York. I parked some clothes and my levain with a friend living in Paris and headed south to the continent where, six thousand years ago, the first loaf of leavened bread on earth was baked: Africa.