The wood-burning
oven |
The Bread Road |
Sarrians,
Vaucluse, 5 o'clock in the morning ("You'll easily find
us, near the top of the village."), following our noses up
to a faint glow dancing behind an ageless glass front.
Frédéric Boyer has worked without a break throughout
the night. The last embers glow on the hearth of the oven. That
which, since 1713, has never gone out. Without doubt it gave out,
like countless others, some hiccups when the Vichy governemnt imposed,
to better control production, just one type of bread, but the oven
and bakery haven't changed. Just the addition, in the Thirties,
of a shop. In winter, it's freezing cold despite the embers, so
they light the fire in the fireplace. In summer, it's a furnace.
In 1991, Frédéric, 38 years old, took over from his
employer, Marius Dumas, whom the village had nicknamed Monsieur
Tourton. "The tourton {a meager bread, hollow in the centre],
is our thermometer: if it's baked after 5 minutes, the oven
is ready." |
 |
 |
The
lazy kneading machine |
Frédéric has kept everything
as it was. Everything. The iron shafts above
the oven which hold the shovels for putting the bread in the oven,
ageless. The imposing scale, which still recently determined the price
of the bread before the eyes of the customers on the sidewalk, the
heavy boards where the kneaded bread is spread out, the yellowed photos
of his predecessors, and the incredible lightbulb, encompassed in
an old, shaky and rusty cylinder that he cautiously carries around
inside the vault, at the risk of electrocuting himself.
But his biggest pride is his "pétrin
corse" ("Corsican kneading
machine"), object of so much desire because it's so rare, which
folds and kneads the dough with its two slow paddles. "Why Corsican?
Probably because it turns very slowly. They say that the Corsicans
are not really hard workers". Back in the shop, Nathalie whispers
to me as she wraps a round beaucaire bread (a marvel), "It's
not a "pétrin corse", but a Gorse, it's engraved
on it." The baker of Curel has the last word in this story: It's
an invention by Ernest Corse, a building engineer in Cavaillon. |
| To
the customers who ask for his famous olive oil fougasse, "I reply
: You have to wait for Christmas or the New Year. It's true, you know,
they want it all year-round. You have to give them the taste for tradition".
Clear-headed, Frédéric knows he could produce ten times
more, but to what end? |
"To
be a baker means working the dough with your hands, you have to
feel the contact, it is living. When it decides to rise, it rises.
You have to watch it, never take your eye off it" He talks
about his bread as though it's a growing child changing so quickly
under his astonished gaze. A child sensitive to the slightest draft,
collapsing in stormy weather, wanting nothing to do with bad flour,
a bit clinging, that's true, but so endearing. |
 |
|
