WEEK
51
Let Them Eat . . . Brioche?

Whenever weighty matters are to be transacted in the monastery, let the Abbot call together the whole community, and make known the matter which is to be considered.
—The Rule of Saint Benedict, ca. 530

Still no news from the abbey. I stayed in denial as long as I could, reminding myself that an ancient abbey moves slowly, but weeks after the supposed date of the vote, I had to face reality: the abbey would not be reopening the bakery. Most likely, after the initial excitement had worn off, cooler heads had prevailed, and they had realized how difficult it would be for a novice baker to supply three dozen monks with their daily bread. It was, after all, quite a commitment. I tried to be stoic about it. I’d given it my best shot, and that was all I could do.

Then I woke to this e-mail:

It took a moment to sink in. The monks had taken a vote and preferred my bread to the bread of the French boulangerie in town.

I soon heard from Bruno as well.

“The father abbot has finally decided to permit the return of bread making. I am very happy,” he wrote in French. I could hear his exasperation in the word finally.

“The abbey is a novel,” he added, hinting at the intrigue behind the abbey walls, leaving me wanting to hear more. He closed by saying that I was in his prayers.

“I now have two monks praying for me daily,” I joked to Anne. “I’m in clover!”

Bruno’s note also included a request: Did I have recipes for brioche and croissants? Croissants again? What was with the damned croissants?

“Dad, I told you!” Katie cried when I showed her the note.

“Katie, do you have any idea how difficult croissants are to make? All those layers of butter and paper-thin dough? It takes years of practice. I’ve had, like, three good croissants in my entire life, and two of them were in Paris.”

I wrote Bruno, telling him that croissants were quite challenging but that I would try some brioche recipes this weekend and get back to him. You have to give the guy credit. He was nothing if not ambitious.

His request for brioche, a rich (but not sweet) bread made with butter and eggs, baffled me a bit, though. I’ve never understood the attraction of this egg bread. It is, however, a classic French bread, immortalized in Marie Antoinette’s alleged callous response to the starving masses’ demand for bread, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,” or “Let them eat brioche.”

Hang on a second—shouldn’t that be “Let them eat cake”? Only in this country, where brioche was long ago mistranslated as “cake,” an error that probably resulted from the fact that brioche was unknown in America two centuries ago. It’s not exactly commonplace even today. You can be quite certain that Marie Antoinette knew her cake from her bread, and had she wanted to say “cake,” she’d have said “gâteau,” not “brioche,” if she ever said any of this to begin with, which is doubtful, since similar remarks (“Let them eat crust”) had been ascribed to various unpopular royalty decades before the queen’s birth.

In any event, with a host of other great breads available, I wondered out loud why Bruno wanted to make brioche. Anne pointed out that I didn’t grow up with brioche, and who knew what kind of hardwired memories it held for Bruno and the other monks: Was it a special bread eaten only on Sundays? Would it remind him of his mother or father? Bread, as I was learning, is a powerful stimulus, capable of probing deep into the subconscious, if not into genetic memory.

I thought about Bruno’s choosing to leave home at just eighteen to live the sequestered life of a monk, making me wonder what kind of home life he’d had up to then. Home . . . Christmas . . . I suddenly realized Christmas was approaching. Bruno probably wanted to make brioche for Christmas!

Rather than delay any further, I located two brioche recipes, one that used equal parts flour and butter, and a more modest one with half the butter, mindful that butter was such a luxury at the abbey that it was only served with bread on Sundays. Both came out well, so I sat down with my online French-English dictionary and painstakingly translated as best I could. Then came the really hard part: composing an e-mail. Not only because, with an American keyboard, it takes forever to insert the accents that seem to appear in every other French word, but because I faced a real crisis: Do I use the vous form or the tu form in addressing Bruno—the formal or the familiar?

The entire time I was at the abbey, I’d been addressing him as “vous.” This was partly out of respect for a monk and partly because this form was easier for me to conjugate, having had more practice. Traveling in a foreign country among strangers, you don’t get many opportunities to use the familiar. On the other hand, I had kissed him. Surely there must be some rule that once you’ve kissed a person of the same sex, you can use the tu form. Bruno, however, in his note, had addressed me as “vous.” Yet that might be because in a brief note I’d sent on returning home, I’d used the formal, and he was taking my lead. Argghhh! I pondered this vous/tu business for a good half hour, marveling (and frustrated) that the French never seem even to give it a thought; it just comes naturally.

Sticking with vous was the safer path, but it just felt wrong. I took a chance and went with the familiar, addressing this young monk as “tu.” I’d find out whether I’d blundered or not when he replied.

Finally I did something I should’ve done earlier, when I sent my Moroccan friend Petit Ali a richly illustrated English dictionary, but I’d never thought of it. I ordered a French-language bread-making book for Bruno, one written by the great rue Monge baker Eric Kayser, with a card wishing Bruno a joyeux Noël.