The French Bakery

The Best Bread in France

It’s taken me several attempts to start to write.  I suppose having taken the whole summer off I feel almost rusty. My fingers feel slightly out of touch with the keyboard and as I am writing about both my summer in France and my childhood experiences in a French bakery.  For some reason I am feeling oddly vulnerable sharing both my holiday and my childhood helping in a bakery in France. It feels deeply personal to be writing about a place that is a large part of who I am.

I read Paul Hollywood’s vivid account of his very first memory baking bread in this week’s Telegraph.  I am sorry to say I have no such memory.  Bread is so much part of my childhood it is as though it was always there, so I am afraid there is no such first time account.

Boulangerie Janet in Nadaillac, France

When I was very young my mother used to make soda bread. It was damp, slightly green and smelt of of sour milk and soda.  I’m not sure I appreciated it very much.  I remember pleading with a boy at school to swap the chunky wholemeal soda bread and cheese lunch my mum had lovingly made for me for his flaccid limp white marmite ones. He was not persuaded.

When my parents bought a house in the Dordogne I was just nine. It was late spring and I remember looking in delight at the yellow cowslips peeking out from the verges as we drove into the village.  We didn’t go the house as we first arrived weary and hungry after a fourteen hour drive.  We went to the hotel, where Jeano, the Frenchest of Frenchmen and his family welcomed us. The restaurant was full of locals eating delicious smelling food, drinking Pernod and red wine.  The potage, the juice from the steaks and the cheese were scooped up with crusty white sourdough bread from baskets piled high on the tables. The bread smelt slightly of woodsmoke.  I remember eating the bread thinking that the soft white interior was the best bread I'd ever had.   My brother and I fed carrots to the rabbits in cages, little realising their final destany

It got dark quickly and a slim dark boy called Bertrand showed me the tree in the square. He chatted to me in the most beautiful language.  I hadn't a clue what he was saying but we stood under a huge oak tree outside the church, which is sadly no longer there, but I was captivated by all things french from that moment to this day. 

Une Courant. 

It didn’t take long for the local children to find my brother and I and after just two or three holidays we were given the run of the village with the other children. It was the most perfect childhood. There were people everywhere. Farmers drove their tractors through the narrow streets, women tended their vegetable gardens, chickens scratched about unconcerned by the dogs, who barked at strangers and chased cats.  Morris our neighbour would wander past twice a day with his four cows and the three village shops stocked a range of never seen before sweets such a carembars, but the best bit for me was the bakery. 

I soon made friends with Noel, who has four strapping boys.  Perhaps because she had no daughter, or perhaps because I was so interested in everything she did in her kitchen she spent hours teaching me to speak French. I affectionately call her my French mum and her youngest son Eric I call my cousin. I love her wry humour, patience and affection.  (We've been scouting around al the brocontes together buying French treasure, visiting the market at Terrasson an generally laughing, gossiping and eating - it's been so good to catch up. )

The bakery is known to be 150 years old but it probably older

Bu the time I was twelve I spoke better French then my parents and would find myself translating for them. Even now I count myself incredibly lucky to have such amazing parents and smile as I remember creeping past their bedroom in the early hours, out into the night to the bakery. 

I used to think that it was the smell of the sourdough bread that woke me up, but having been woken up almost every night this summer I now know it was not the smell of baking bread that woke me at all.. it was the smell of the wood smoke as the oven was lit. The wisps of smoke wind out of the chimney over the roof tops, curl under the shutters of my bedroom whispering an invitation into my dreams and promising fresh baked bread in the morning.

Thinking back now I would have been about eleven when I first woke up and decided to crept out of bed and down to the bakery.  The baker was happy to let me help and I spent every summer until he left when I was about fifteen.

I swept the floor, brushed the croissants with egg and milk and brushed the hot loaves off as they came out of the oven, and as I got older helped knead and shape the bread. The smell was heavenly and the warmth of the bakery was enough to make me brave walking down the black unlit alleyway to get there.  The church clock would chime, just as it does now, and I’d while away from 3am until the morning when the sun would come up and I was allowed to serve the villagers their bread.

The same recipe has been used since the 1950's as Laurent passed his recipe on to Herve in 1988 

This summer Herve, who bought the bakery in 1988, welcomed me back.  The bakery shut for a year or so and the original owner trained him in his way of making bread. By the time I was in my late teens all the children I’d grown up with in the village would go night clubbing together and on the way home we’d stop and buy warm bread from Herve. We’d all sit drinking coffee and smoking our cigarettes, still slightly drunk, whilst eating warm buttery croissants and fresh crusty bread until the sun came up and then we'd all sleep until after lunch.

Thirty years on I relived waking to the smell of wood smoke.  I crept out of the house in the early hours, only this time it was my children I was trying not to wake. The same irrational fear sat in the pit of my stomach, even though cows a long gone, as I walked along the black alleyway again, and the same feeling of absolute joy was there as I walked under the orange street lights and into the warmth of the bakery. 

The alley way isn't scary during the day .. but when it's dark, trust me,  it's spooky. 

This summer my own children found me in the bakery first thing in the morning. I have no doubt that they saw glimpses of the eleven year old me, eyes shining, covered in flour and chatting to the locals as I once did. I seemed to connect with them as they fell in love with my village. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so happy as I have this summer.

Herve still uses the same sourdough recipe for his bread and bakes it in the same oven that has been used since 1950. He's an amazing baker.  Nowadays most of the business is hotels and restaurants, although some of the older residents still buy their bread early in the morning.  The hotel is now the distribution point for the bread and Herve delivers bread all over the area as he bakes over 200 large loaves a night.

I can’t thank Herve enough for having me back, sharing his sourdough method, recipe, techniques and advice.  Of course I have brought back the “chef,” starter so I’m now baking my bread with my French starter from the bakery. I will spend rest of the year making sourdough and telling my students about the bakery and return to the village again next year for the summer .. and treasure the time I spent there.

listen to ‘Interview with Herve’ on Audioboo

Isobel helping Jordan brush the flour off the hot loaves.  She wants to be a baker too she told me. x

Closed for the Summer

I've been so busy setting up the Juniper and Rose Kitchen Garden School this year I've hardly paused for breath. Looking back over the year so far I'm really pleased how far things have come. The garden has provided all the herbs, salads, flowers and fruit I've needed for the school,  the extra's I've relied on my local Green Grocer and my local butcher, Sauls of Spratton, and I've sourced as much produce as possible directly from my local flour millers and farmers.  If there has been a fairtrade option on any of the ingredients we use then we've chosen Fairtrade and we've had lots of students through the doors learning to bake sourdough bread, make jam, create their own artisan cheeses and bake...all whilst using ethical and sustainable ingredients. 

Now after what seems like an eternity of rain and cold there is some sun shine.  It's glorious, and I've time to stop and really think about where we are and everything else that needs to be done.  The builders are in full swing, turning the two bedrooms in the coach house into bed and breakfast and we'll have guest bedrooms ready for students in September. 

Early Autumn will see the How to Keep Chickens course ready to run again and as chickens have laid all the eggs we've used as well as  successfully hatching out two small clutches of Lavender Pekins, we'll some spare Pekins for sale. 

I've started learning about bee keeping on Sunday morning.  A wild honey bee colony have moved in above the sitting room. We'll move them into a hive and hopefully have our own honey next year too.  

If you go to France of Italy in the summer months you will see that the French and the Italians have no problem shutting up shop, whilst for some reason we English seem to plough on despite that fact that half the country is on holiday and the other half are just too hot to be bothered to do anything. 

I know I'm working on new projects over the next couple of months, but for now the Mediterranean in me wins as the summer holidays are upon us.  My children are growing up so fast and these next six weeks are precious days.  Sometimes you just have to forget technology, switch the computer off, abandon the housework and enjoy the sunshine, so we are closed for the summer. 

See you all in September. 

Temptation

I made cheese today; a lemon and mint soft cheese with poppy seeds and lime.

It was made with local buffalo milk and organic lemons, which is all very well .. but really I made cheese as a distraction.  

I was distracting myself from feeling naughty.  Do you remember that feeling.  Mischief.. .. it's the kind of feeling that as a child would make me rope my brother into going scrumping or play cherry knocking in the village, or dare him to climb a tree that I knew was far too big for him to climb down from.  It's the kind of feeling that only goes away when you do something you shouldn't and just get away with it by a whisker. 

I used to love the thrill of climbing over the neighbour’s fence, sneaking up under an apple tree, and  picking the most tempting apple I could see.  Of course my brother and I would then run.  Really run.  Perhaps it was the running that gave me the thrill.  I was always convinced that we’d be caught.  We’d have to find a spot to eat our warm slightly acidic, under ripe  apples, and we'd laugh and laugh...  more from the sheer pleasure of the deed than anything. 

I'm not sure that we ever got caught  ..  but I do remember those stolen apples being delicious. 

Does Nationalism Mean That We Care Less?

 This little girl lives in The Rwenzori Mountains.  I wonder though .. would you feel differently about this little girl if she lived next door to you? 

When I did my degree many years ago my dissertation was on decision making.  I studied psychology of human communication and I brought together two theories from Cox and Ash on attribution.  What  the study revealed was that one defining element would affect your entire perception about a person or product.

The words were called key influencing words and they had the ability to influence attributes a person would give to a person or a product, and therefore affect the way you feel about that person or product.   I proved in my paper that the two theories were the same process.  This ability to attribute qualities is a key factor in our decision making and affects the way we feel and react to the world around us. . Why am I telling you this?  Because I believe that your reaction to the picture of this child would be very different depending on one key influencing word. 

I'm the first person to advocate being proud to be British. I believe that we are one of the fairest most tolerance countries to live in the world.  I also accept that as a rule most people don't think about the people who grew their food, but I really struggle with the "them attitude." Three times in the past month when the subject of  either child labour or Fairtrade has come up I have heard separating phrases about other people, in other counties and one woman used the phrase "those people." Whilst I hold a British passport I am not defined by being British, and I've come to the conclusion that the absolute definition of ourselves geographical and political borders is at the heart of many people's couldn't give a dam attitude. 

The excuse one woman gave to me with this attitude is that we have poverty in Britain.  I do accept that we have poverty here, but when I enquired what she did for British families in poverty it turned out that this phrase was simply thrown out as a free pass to do nothing at all for anyone.   

For me there is no them.  There is no us.  Our identities in this day and age transcend borders.  We are humanity.  There is just the world and nothing conveys this concept better than food.  With advances in communication our world is really just a global village, and yet there is still hunger, poverty, injustice and abuse. Statistics from the ILO estimates that around 215 million children between the ages of 5 and 17 work, sixty per cent of whom are employed in the agricultural sector .. in other words the food sector. 

Nothing conveys our dependence on each other more then food. From kick starting our day with a cup of coffee, to throwing a banana in the children’s lunch box or treating ourselves to a bar of chocolate most of us, in a normal day, can circle the world three times over without a second thought. 

So I wonder would it mean more to you if the people growing, harvesting and processing your food who lived in extreme poverty were British?  Would you be more outraged if local children missed out their education to pick the cocoa beans for the chocolate that you enjoy? Would a fair wage for the workers picking your tea mean more to you if people who picked were from your town? Would it matter to you more if the pineapple growers that lived next door to you were using pesticide that are banned in the European Union and forbidden in the United States? 

I'm not suggesting that people give up or denounce their national identity to save the world, but I am suggesting that by changing our definition of identity and accepting that we are all one world then perhaps we might consider our everyday decisions in a different light.

Do you think that your geographical identity affects the way you feel about people?