2022: What I've been milling on
“Les Canotiers de Meurthe”, Emile Friant, 1888
The most influential cookbook in modern American bread baking begins not with a recipe, but an image of a painting. Elegant and young French boatmen sit around a table, pouring wine amongst themselves while an eager waiter serves a roast duck. At the end of the table, a burly man slices rustic chunks of a giant miche, the large-format french bread meant to last a family for a week. The miche is dark and crusty with an open, creamy crumb: the type of Old World bread rarely seen in this country ten years ago, but now nearly ubiquitous (if not in size, in style) amongst top bakeries nationwide. It is this painting, Emile Friant’s “Les Canotiers de la Meurthe,” says Chad Roberston in the introduction to his foundational cookbook Tartine, that set him on a quest of learning to bake this rustic, seemingly extinct style of bread.
How dark the crust is, how creamy and open the crumb is: these are now sources of pride, and occasional debate, in the professional baking world; and, especially since the onset of the pandemic, for countless homebakers worldwide. It’s a gorgeous loaf of bread when done right, a sort of ultimate expression of a certain type of finesse. Slow fermentation unlocks wheat’s flavor; preference is given to the creamier lactic acid over the more pungent acetic acid; baking at a high temperature showcases the contrast between the thin, caramelized crust and the pillowy, tender interior. If it hooked Robertson on baking, then it has hooked many of the rest of us as well. Much of the American baking world and beyond now seems to be in pursuit of that sort of rustic Old World bread Friant painted in “Les Canotiers,” an odd sort of nostalgia for a baking tradition the New World never really had on a large scale to begin with.
Sourdough baking, it would seem, is the perfect vehicle for nostalgia. At least through the Tartine method, which has influenced new bakers whether they know it or not. The daily ritual of feeding a starter; the rhythm of a slow, often multi-day fermentation process; the grace of working with your hands: these are all hallmarks of this methodical style of baking, a distinct response to the bread machine, fast-acting yeast, heavy duty mixer type breads of the preceding decades.
But nostalgia is a tricky, fickle thing: easier to selectively choose the past you are trying to recreate than to dig deeper into its subtleties. Friant’s “Les Canotiers de la Meurthe” was received brilliantly by the art establishment of France, a statement piece that displayed a mastery of the thematic phase he was in: everyday scenes of the country’s bourgeoisie. While the scene was no doubt real, and the Miche no doubt real, this was the staff of life likely only for an elite few in France. As Aaron Bobrow-Strain, a professor at my alma-mater Whitman College, writes in White Bread: A Social History of the Storebought Loaf, white flour was rarely available for the working classes of the countryside, as the technology required to mill away wheat’s outer bran was harnessed only by the urban elite. Moreover, white flour, in its very whiteness, its refinement, and its exclusivity, gave the European bourgeoisie a sense that they themselves embodied those values. Whole wheat flour, and the denser (and ironically, more nutritious) bread that it created were then staples of the everyday people; Friant’s Miche, with its creamy light color, was only accessible to a select few; and Les Canotiers de la Meurthe may have been received so well because in it, the establishment could see a serene reflection of themselves.
To be chasing after this style of bread alone, then, shorts us on a wider range of baking possibilities. For Roberston, this loaf led to a deeper dive into rye, ancient grains, and more, as Tartine 3 illustrates. Yet it can often seem like most of the nation is baking that same loaf of bread from the original Tartine: usually, some smaller version Friant’s Miche. Dayna Evan’s wrote brilliantly in Eater of how the white, male power embedded in Silicon Valley has often co-opted the modern baking movement, a craft largely perfected by women for generations, to imbue it with their own white male values of perfectionism, scientific precision, and humblebrag crumb shots. And if this perhaps overly nitpicky critique of Les Canotiers above has something to offer, it's that all of us following in their footsteps might very well be the modern establishment selectively choosing what we want the past to look like, and in the process selecting who and what we want to exclude from that.
In fear that this is sounding too dogmatic, I want to make plain that I’m not harping on Robertson or any baker. Everyone should bake whatever they want to bake, and without Tartine we as a baking culture would be years behind where we are today. But instead I want to suggest that we might blossom further still by rethinking what our standards are. And, for me, that starts with acknowledging a simple fact: wheat is not native here. Most of us baking with it are not of native descent here, either. And most of us are producing the same types of loaves, with the same wheats that have been monocropped across the nation to displace native land. It’s all a bit too circular, a bit too neat, a bit too homogenizing.
Diversifying what we’re baking might not actually change much about all of this–and it’s worth asking who has access to the methodical process of sourdough, as well as who has access to the alternative flours or equipment needed to diversify what we’re baking. But if we’re pursuing older bread out of nostalgia and modernizing it in the process, I’m interested in at least correcting the compass that points backward toward what bread used to be. I still love that Tartine style of bread, and have learned so much from the process, but I’m also interested in the mysterious Desem starter, detailed in Jennifer Lapidus’s new book Southern Ground; I’m interested in the wide world of rye baking, shown in Stanley Ginsberg’s The Rye Baker, and in how other grains like buckwheat and barley were used where wheat wasn’t grown; I’m interested in moving beyond our euro-centric baking to learn what baking has looked like all over the world. Many are already doing this, more and more all the time, and showing us a new paradigm for American baking. May we continue to celebrate and honor the wide and vast traditions brought here from people the world over instead of focusing the bulk of our efforts on one rather white, stagnant standard.
The Walnut Schoolhouse has been on pause for almost two years now amidst the pandemic, and like many others I’ve spent that time resetting and relearning. I’ve been taking a break from baking while I’ve been reading and writing, studying herbalism, running, traveling, and grappling with an ironic gluten allergy I had largely ignored for years. In short, all the things that devotedly running a small baking school in rural North Carolina disallowed me to do. I no longer have interest in running the Schoolhouse as I did at the start of 2020, running from one Sourdough Basics workshop to the next, cramming in a market or two a week, and trying to find the energy for pizza nights all the while. Nor do I have the physical location to do that anymore. I do, however, want to use this virtual platform to further explore a broader array of cooking and baking, and further explore the intersection of food and history, food and art, food and culture, in the way I had hoped to when I first began the business.
I’ll be doing this all solo, amidst travels, and amidst other jobs, so it won’t have the prolific, trendy content that sells best these days. Rather, they will be slow explorations into topics I’m simply curious about. We’ll restart this year with a deeper dive into the regional foods of Europe; specifically, how different global grains like buckwheat and corn were incorporated into European foodways, often in places or economies where wheat wasn’t ubiquitous. There’s a ton of European pastries out there, many largely forgotten amdist wheat’s ubiquity, that are designed to be naturally gluten-free, not just for wariness towards gluten, but because other grains or seeds simply work better for the texture and flavor of the product.
We’ll start there, and turn next to whatever catches my interest or yours. As always, feel free to get in touch with any questions or feedback, project ideas, or workshop opportunities.