WEEK
48
Half-Baked

Fix, sell, or close.
—Former CEO of a major multinational conglomerate

Beep-beep-beep-beep.

“What’s that?” Anne asked, coming into the kitchen. “Are you baking?”

“Not anymore.”

The oven had shut down, leaving a half-baked two-pound miche inside to steam and a two-hundred-pound baker outside to smolder.

A cryptic “F2” flashed on the control panel. I pressed the off button, which stopped the infernal beeping while I looked up the code in the owner’s manual.

“It’s a high-temperature warning,” I reported.

“How high did you have it?”

“I think Katie needs help with her homework.”

“How high did you have it?”

Since returning from the abbey, I’d been preheating the oven to its maximum setting of 550 degrees before steaming the hell out of it, hoping to reproduce that great Saint-Wandrille oven spring, with pretty good results. I hadn’t reproduced the perfect boule of my last day at the abbey, but the bread had never been better, even though I was using essentially the same recipe I’d used before going to France. There was another mystery as well: I hadn’t used parchment paper since watching it vaporize in the abbey’s oven, yet the dough never, ever stuck to my rice-flour-dusted peel,* as if (I like to think) it had acquired a certain respect for me.

The oven, however, afforded me no such respect.

Beep-beep-beep-beep, it protested.

“Turn it off,” Anne pleaded.

“It is off ! Shut up!” I screamed.

“Hey!”

“Not you, the oven!” I hit the off button again. It quieted down, like a baby with a pacifier, but soon started up again.

Beep-beep-beep-beep.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” I muttered. “I’ll fix you!”

I headed outside.

“What are you going to do?”

“Pull the plug on HAL.” I went down to the basement and threw the circuit breaker. HAL went dark. And quiet. For good.

Two days later, our appliance doctor arrived, replaced the probe, collected two hundred dollars, and then pronounced the patient dead. The instrument panel was fried, he said (I didn’t dare ask if 550-degree steam could be a factor), and the manufacturer no longer made the part. This was, mind you, not some obscure Scandinavian company, but an American megacorporation (let’s call it, in deference to HAL, “FD”) whose celebrity ex-CEO’s motto (“Fix, sell, or close”) should be modified, when it comes to his ephemeral appliances, to simply “Throw away,” because apparently fixing is not an option when they break.

“What do you mean, they don’t make it anymore?” I said to the repairman. “That oven’s brand-new.”

“Well, most people wouldn’t consider twelve years old brand—”

“My mother has an oven built in the fifties—the nineteen fifties!—that she can still get parts for.” Which is true. Of course, on these older units, there are few parts to break. They don’t have timers, they don’t have cycles, and most importantly, they don’t have circuit boards, yet they work great. If you stop to think about it, an oven is probably the simplest appliance in your home. All it needs is a heating element and the simplest of thermostats, a strip of metal that curls when heated. An oven should last a hundred years, and could, but that’s no good for a company like FD, so they top the thing off with a wholly unnecessary digital panel whose built-in obsolescence guarantees they can sell you a replacement every decade or so. Determined to fight the system, I told the repairman I’d find the part on eBay.

“Look,” he said, trying to talk some sense into me, “even if you can, with labor it’s going to cost you as much to fix the oven as to replace it. And the door needs a new spring. Half your heat is leaking into the kitchen.” As it was, I’d already dropped two hundred dollars with nothing to show for it, so I gave in. Fortunately we had a second FD oven, a smaller convection unit, also twelve years old, that I could use in the interim. I’d made bread in it only once, using the convection mode, and wasn’t pleased with the results. Emotionally as well, it was going to be hard leaving the other oven, whose quirks and nuances I had mastered, this oven that had been my faithful companion these forty-eight weeks. Sometimes, though, you just have to move on.