WEEK
52

The Perfect Future in the Present

The perfect is the enemy of the good.
—Voltaire

It was twenty-three degrees and snowing when I went outside to light a fire. I pulled a lawn chair close to steal some warmth, but the clay oven was stingy, absorbing every kilocalorie that the fledgling fire inside generated. I really couldn’t complain—this was the entire point, to transfer heat from burning wood to a large thermal mass of clay and brick, which would in turn transfer it to a mound of dough, transforming it into bread long after the fire itself had died out.

I hadn’t planned on doing this in the middle of winter, and certainly not in snow, but my year of baking was remarkably, suddenly, and almost too soon down to its final weekend. What had started out as an experiment had become routine, then ephemeral. Before it ended, however, I had one last mission to accomplish.

As I sat outside in the snow, tending the fire, I heard a familiar birdcall, one I hadn’t heard in months: “Wheat-eater, wheat-eater, wheat-eater, wheat!” He was back. In the middle of winter! Had my conscientious pal returned early for the event? I welcomed him, perched in the tree above me to see his wheat, finally, turned into bread.

I should’ve kept the sheet metal firing door in place, but I needed to see the fire, burning strongly now in its second hour. Watching the orange and yellow flames twist and dance their mesmerizing ballet, it seemed that what I was about to do was a miracle, as much a miracle as fire itself. Seeds of grass, wild micro organisms, and water were about to become bread. This is not anything that could happen in nature. A strike of lightning would turn a primeval swamp of amino acids into Jerry Lewis before wheat seeds left on their own would become bread. Bread happens only through the intervention of humans.

I’d planted seeds of grass, harvested and cleaned them, and crushed the resulting grain into flour. To leaven the bread, I’d nurtured a colony of wild microorganisms that had landed on my apple trees on their way to somewhere else. I’d vigorously worked the flour and water with my hands to coax the long, tangled gluten molecules to unwind. And finally, this oven, this oven that had been such a source of exasperation and pain, was about to perform the final step, providing the heat to transform the grass known as wheat into bread.

Fire, clay, grass. I felt primitive, and I felt good.

And not so good. Sitting in the freezing temperatures aggravated the pain in my back, still aching from building the oven, reminding me of the tribulations of the past year. In addition, I’d reawakened a hernia, broken not one but two ovens, moved out of my marital bed, and suffered food poisoning in Morocco, from which I had only recently fully recovered. In search of the perfect loaf, in search of understanding the miracle of bread, I’d driven hundreds of miles to visit yeast factories and flour mills, flown thousands of miles to study in Paris and bake in Africa. Yet my bread, although very good and vastly improved since the first week, never, except for the one mystical moment at the abbey, reached the mantle of perfection that I’d aimed for.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1843 story “The Birthmark,” one small imperfection—a birthmark in the shape of a hand—on the face of Aylmer’s otherwise perfect wife starts to drive him crazy, to the point where he concocts a strong but dangerous potion that he believes will erase the blemish. His wife, Georgiana, to please her obsessed husband, agrees to drink the liquid, and in fact it works. Her birthmark starts to fade. And as the last trace of it vanishes, she reaches for one brief moment the pinnacle of perfection—and dies (though not before getting in a last rebuke at her unappreciative husband). Hawthorne ends the story this way: “He failed to look beyond the shadowy scope of time, and, living once for all in eternity, to find the perfect future in the present.”

Novelists, by convention, aren’t allowed to do this anymore — that is, speak directly to the reader and tell him what he’s supposed to have learned.* Memoirists, I’m not so sure about. Anyway, what a superb phrase. I think that may be exactly what the monks at Saint-Wandrille are up to, focusing on the perfect future in the present of their shadowy scope of time.

Since returning from the abbey, I’d stopped tinkering with my recipe. Not only had I recognized the futility of trying to reproduce the sublime boule I’d made in Normandy, but I’d realized something far more important: it didn’t matter. The goal had yielded to the process. Freed from the shackles of perfection, I’d spent the past few weeks actually having fun in the kitchen, maybe really for the first time. I made pizzas and baguettes. For breakfast one morning I made ebelskiver, a spherical, leavened, stuffed pancake from Denmark. I still baked peasant bread more often than not, to have in the house for breakfast or to bring to friends, or simply because fresh bread had become part of our diet and we missed it when it wasn’t there. I’d also switched from a boule to a bâtard—yes, that was another prejudice I’d left behind in Saint-Wandrille, that peasant bread could only be a boule. The bâtards were even occasionally dotted with some gas pockets, and they seemed to have more flavor as well, possibly because the proximity of the crust to the interior allowed for greater exchange of those Maillard compounds between crust and crumb. I had also come to appreciate (apologies to Philippe, for he was right all along) the fact that in a bâtard, all the slices were the same size.

At high noon, the snow falling heavily now, both the dough and the oven seemed ready, and as my family gathered around the oven, I slipped the bâtard—made with my own hand-ground wheat, levain from yeast in my orchard, and Hudson Valley water—into an oven fueled by my apple branches.

I could legitimately say I was baking like an Egyptian.

Although Egyptians were no doubt more skilled at building fires. Concerned about generating enough heat on this snowy day, I’d overdone it. We could’ve melted steel ingots in that oven, which by now was more suited to glassblowing than baking. The dough cooked too quickly, charring on the outside. But no matter. I pulled it out, hearing the crust crackle and pop in the cold air, a sound I hadn’t heard since the abbey.

“Listen, it’s singing!” I cried, delighted, echoing Lindsay’s words at Bobolink Dairy.

“Is that a good thing?” Katie asked.

“Oh, yes. That’s a very good thing.”

There was one other “very good thing,” also a very big surprise. My backyard wheat, so low in gluten that it appeared to be soft wheat to the technicians at Bay State Milling who’d analyzed it, made fine bread, especially the half I’d stone-ground, whether in the clay oven or the electric. So much so that Anne, whose memory was apparently growing even shorter than mine, asked if I was going to grow wheat again this year!

“Only if you buy me a combine for Christmas,” I answered.

After the bread had cooled, I opened a bottle of wine (French, of course) and proposed a toast, which came out sounding more like a benediction than I’d intended. “To our ancestors, and their ancestors, and their ancestors before them, who for six thousand years survived on this bread that we’re about to eat.”

As I sliced the loaf, I was acutely aware that across the Atlantic Ocean, the monks at Saint-Wandrille were also just sitting down to break bread for their evening meal—it was Sunday, so they’d have butter—and I added a silent toast to Bruno. While we ate bread and drank wine, a ritual nearly as old as civilization itself, Anne asked, “So, dear, what have you learned over the past year?”

Let’s see . . .

Bread in a healthy diet doesn’t make you fat.

Too much bread, washed down with wine, does.

The only thing more unsettling than having your faith shaken is having your lack of faith shaken.

Use a levain.

Do not undertake any project that promises it can be completed “in a weekend.”

Do not drink the water in Morocco. Or the tea, or the coffee. In fact, you might think about skipping Morocco altogether. I hear Barbados is nice this time of year.

Trust strangers. Well, some. Only those that you can trust.

Choose one thing you care about and resolve to do it well. Whether you succeed or not, you will be the better for the effort.

Bread is life.

——————————————

I should’ve added, “Monks use e-mail.” Just before Christmas I’d received a note from Bruno:

I do not know how to thank you for your kindness! I had not received a Christmas present since entering the monastery. I found a bit of the joy of my childhood! I do not know how to say thank you, I have nothing else to offer you except my friendship and my prayers.

His first Christmas present since entering the monastery . . . I’d read those words over and over again. Poor soul. Poor blessed, fortunate soul. He had, by the way, used the tu form.

I was even less prepared for Katie’s question. “So, Dad, are you going to bake bread next week?”

What was I going to do next week? And the week after that, and the week after that? The year that had started so slowly had gone by so quickly. So much seemed unanswered, undone. I had only scratched the crust of bread, only begun to understand the possibilities in bread and in the baker. It didn’t feel like the end of anything. It felt like a middle, or maybe even a beginning.

On the other hand, I was greatly looking forward to some freedom on weekends, to not having to plan a Saturday or Sunday around a five-hour fermentation and a two-hour rise, followed by a one-hour bake, to being able to work in the garden, or go to the market, or, yes, even have afternoon sex without scheduling it around the anaerobic respiration of a one-celled organism. I was ready to have my old aerobic life back.

“Dad?”

“Gee, I don’t know, Katie,” I finally answered. “I guess I’ll see how I feel.”

She and Anne both tried to hide their disappointment, but my answer had left the kitchen as deflated, dense, and cheerless as one of my early loaves.

“But I was wondering,” I continued. “Do you think you might like some croissants?”