Death of an Artisan: A Poem

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The following poem charts part of the fictional life of an apprentice baker, Georges Bertrand.

THE BAKERY GIG

It was my teenage summer job, the last resort.

I left it late and all my friends had nabbed

the waiting jobs, the bar jobs, in short

the jobs with tips and regular hours.

Nobody wanted the bakery gig.

Ridiculously early starts, long shifts,

in a basement, leaving you too knackered

to go out drinking in the evening.

I had decided to hate it

before I even got the job.

My mother saw the advert in a window

walking home through town

getting her groceries one Saturday morning.

Georges, it’ll have to do. I will not tolerate

you sitting on your ass all summer long.

And so, I went along for an interview.

GUILLAUME

He was new in the area,

Guillaume, a pastry chef,

the youngest to achieve

the ‘Meilleur Ouvrier de France’,

but wanted out of Paris

to branch out on his own,

a bigger place for his wife and kids,

fresh air, a house with a garden,

drawn to the heritage of Lyon —

Marie Bourgeois, La Mère Brazier,

Paul Bocuse, the bouchons —

wanted to break away from his boss,

a celebrity Michelin-starred chef

more interested in media appearances,

establishing cheapening franchises,

than the daily grind at the pass.

And so he found himself

in our sleepy, satellite, market town,

living with his family above his bakery,

the bakery he spent the first year renovating,

the old bakery he made the new bakery,

the bakery which, back in the day,

used to be an age-old family-run patisserie

but hadn’t seen as much as a tartlet in years

not since the last incumbent packed it in,

couldn’t stand the competition

from Rousseau’s, the chain

which sold big tasteless loaves —

pain ordinaire —

of bleached white flour with additives

cheaply, and pastry made with margarine and oils

and cakes that tasted chiefly of sugar,

vats mixed by machines in a warehouse

out of town and distributed for retail

in polythene, at a peppercorn price

throughout the province;

but the locals lapped it up,

wouldn’t hear a bad word said about the place,

and who could blame them

with low wages and mouths to feed?

The odds were stacked against him from the start.

Insisting on only flour and salt and water and yeast,

timelessness over trendiness

and everything made on his own premises

he was Le Décret Pain of 1993

before it was decreed.

I remember entering, the afternoon,

arriving at the shopfront,

ducking under the half-closed shutters

to let myself in, no sign of anyone.

I called out, Monsieur? Hello?

I’m here for the interview.

Down here, came his voice, returning

from the basement kitchen,

you’re late before you’ve even begun.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

White is the colour I recall

when I think of it, that kitchen. The walls,

the brick bond tiles, the drums of flours, sugars,

the fluorescent tube lights, aprons, even the tea towels,

and, of course, Guillaume,

too modern for a cravat or toque blanche,

not quite ‘Le Chef de l’Hôtel Chatham, Paris’

in that portrait by William Orpen,

yet in his classic double-breasted chef’s jacket,

the view of the back of his white-haired head,

hulking figure hunched over a counter,

his pallor, his face the shade of wan

unique to the night-shift strip-lit subterranean,

not looking up,

continuing mixing or kneading a white dough,

he called me into his night white underworld

out of my white bright day.

IMPRINT

You must be Georges, he said, looking up

momentarily as his scraper hovered

over a bulk of dough about to be divided. Well Georges,

he said, let’s start at the beginning:

The first rule of the bakery is

don’t wear black. And with his hand

just dipped in a bin of flour

he slapped me on the back.

MISE EN PLACE

Before you learn to make a baguette, he said,

you have to learn to make a loaf, but

before you learn to make a loaf . . .

what? he asked.

I shrugged. Before we learn to knead,

or mix a cake, or contemplate a solitary petit four,

you need to learn to clean, respect

the space you work in, respect the others

in the kitchen, respect the produce, respect

the dough, the bread, the customer. Everything

flows from a clean and tidy worktop.

There is no creativity without, at first, order,

clearing the decks. We clean and arrange our minds

when we sweep and mop the floor. Get to it.

Before long you will see beauty

in a room of spotless stainless steel.

He handed me the brush and I hated him

in the way the ignorant hate those

who only mean them well, who only mean

to teach them, lead them out of their unknowing.

But to me, I’d come to work in a bakery,

and all I would be doing

was sweeping the flour

from the floor.

MOTHER DOUGH

Huge, she resided in a lidded plastic cuboidal container

on wheels in the coldest,

darkest corner of the kitchen, and yet

Guillaume loved her with all his heart,

checked up on her almost every hour —

he’d peak inside, nod to himself and carry on.

Every day it was my job to feed her,

discard yesterday’s growth,

then add equal quantities of flour and water,

give a thorough stir with the 4-foot paddle

to keep her bubbling, alive. Georges, he quipped,

whatever you do, don’t kill my mother!

Without her we are screwed. And plus,

he added, I’ve practically kept her all my life.

Flour, water, and the air’s bacteria in a tub:

beautiful cesspit, sour soul of yeast, years

of attention, addition, adoration,

nail-polish-remover scented sludge

mixed in a massive bucket, miraculous

concoction of barely anything, life-giver

always on the verge of dying, swampy quicksand

keeping the bakery afloat, bubbly beginner

of tang, crust, crumb, flavour, rise — mother.

HOW TO BAKE A LOAF

Stacking the proofing baskets

to dry on top of the deck ovens

I used to watch him, the speed of his hands,

his head bowed, the dough-scraper clacking away,

the gentle

slap of the slab of dough

as he coaxed it out of the proofing container,

cut, portioned, weighed,

manoeuvred each ball

for its second rise, air pockets trying

to break through the tension

of each incipient crust. He didn’t believe

in knocking back the dough too much.

You’ll see some who take their fist and smash

the bulk like a punchbag, he’d say.

They’ve got it wrong. You mustn’t.

Gently, gently, gently, he’d instruct.

What has it done to you? Remember, he said,

the most important element of good bread,

he said, is air and we incorporate it

into everything we do.

Imagine, he said, a loaf so light it floats

out of the oven right onto your carving block . . .

Now, aim for that. Or think, he said, of the swan

in that piece, he said, by Saint-Saëns.

GUILLAUME'S KITCHEN

When most think of a professional kitchen

or bakery they think of a large ape at the pass,

gravel-voiced, grisly, stubbled, sweaty,

shouty, sweary, asserting himself

by reprimanding someone else’s failure

publicly, telling an underling

to do a task again, a picture of disdain.

When most think of a professional kitchen

they think of fire, speed, noise, a kind

of hell, ‘egotism’, ‘masculinity’ might come to mind,

but when I think of Guillaume’s kitchen

I think of a calmness akin to a garden

on a summer’s night, a full moon

fully visible, fat on its flat pond, how

as the last batch baked he’d mop the floors

himself, I think of the steady purpose

with which fruit ripens on a tree in the dark,

a certain sunlight that makes you walk outside.

Lightness, richness, delicateness;

if mixed, proved and baked right, not a trace

of butter should remain on your fingers.

I think of him teaching me the ways of brioche;

how instead I learned something of manliness.

OVEN

Was there anything as black

as the inside of Guillaume’s electric deck ovens

when the doors were closed and the heat was high

and the breads were baking, the orange pilot light

burning bright? What was their dark art

of light loaves, rise and fall, crusts browned and burst?

Don’t open those, whatever you do,

he’d say, as if keeping it from me, as if he knew.

GUILLAUME'S PASTRY

His life’s ambition

was to roll it out so thin

that through it, on each occasion,

you could read, sans interruption,

his local paper, Le Progrès Lyon.

TARTE TATIN

His favourites were surprisingly simple,

homely, such as Tarte Tatin. He favoured

Cox’s Orange Pippins which kept their shape

and aromatic flavour when baked; they married well

with the caramel. The richness, he’d say,

see the lamination of the pastry,

the evaporation of the butter between layers,

see the colour of the apples in the caramel,

a deep gold. Unearthly gold,

the colour of gold before gold becomes

the colour of burnt, the taste of apple

before it tastes no longer of apple.

See? Guillaume, I can see them now.

SUGAR WORK

It was a lesson in concentration,

focus. Nothing was as bitter as sugar

left too long to caramelize, or cooked

too high, too fast. You’ve got to keep your eye on it.

In a second it could go from golden brown

to black, bubble up like hot tar

and be damned.

There’s nothing like sugar work, he’d say,

to teach you a thing or two about time

and, showing both his hands, how it scalds.

'AND WHAT TIME DO YOU CALL THIS?'

I could talk of the silence, the sky, birdsong

as I whizzed through the empty streets

on my father’s old racer, the chill of the air

as I leant above the bullhorn handlebar,

not even a sign of the street sweeper,

the field of flax flowers long closed over,

but 3 a.m. is the hour of what exactly?

It seemed that time itself was asleep those mornings

as I set out in good time for my shift

belted through the town over

the cobbled square, down the alley

to the bakery’s back door, dismounted,

my heart racing in the dead of night,

of morning, the dead of in-between time,

the dead of the deadest, ungodliest of hours

or whatever the hell you want to call that time,

that time where hands met flour met water

met salt met yeast met time met Guillaume

who’d meet me, every time, with the same old line.

QUIGNON

Twisting off the quignon,

the tip, one of the pointy ends

of a baguette

I’d left to the side

marked the end of my shift,

a day’s weighing and kneading

and cleaning and sweeping.

And nothing tasted like it

every time

I walked outside

to the fresh air, fresh light,

to the fresh, light, on air feeling

of finishing work,

nearing the end of adolescence,

to tear through another afternoon

of my life’s quignon.

ON SIMPLICITY

Just water, flour, salt, yeast and time,

he’d say, shaking his head,

feet up on the bistro table out the back,

eating his afterwork baguette,

considering a slice

like Hamlet

with Yorick’s skull,

as he added,

its open crumb

catching the light,

a web, labyrinthine,

alveolate,

and yet, Georges,

and yet . . .

THE WAY OF BREAD

I’d love to say he found it easy,

how the townsfolk flocked to him in droves,

queued out the door, around the corner

back to the marketplace

for his croissant, baguette de tradition,

how he employed more staff to cope

with surges in demand, how he had to rent

a bigger premises, achieved acclaim

in the community instantaneously

but no, it wasn’t like that at all.

If faith were ever a measurement of time

it was the time it took Guillaume

to turn the town to his way of thinking

which was the way of the hand, the way

of the imagination, the way of a toddler

on a Saturday morning walking out of the shop

with chocolate all over their face, the way

of the early riser and late-nighter, often

it was the empty-handed way, the hard way,

the heart’s and soul’s way, a very human way,

a simple way, the way of bread’s way.

A FIRE

I was near the end of my first year

at university in Paris when I got the call.

My mother phoned as soon as she heard.

A fire, she said, the bakery, she said, Guillaume,

she said. It wasn’t entirely clear, she said.

At least the children made it out, she said.

What happens to the gifts of the gifted

when the gifted go? How Guillaume moved his hands,

flicked flour across the counter,

his swift, angled incisions through the dough

with his grignette to get an enormous ear

on the crust of a pain de campagne

like that, like nobody else in France.

Remember to call when you get back from Paris

were his last words to me,

and what did I tell you about wearing black?

as one last time his floury hand thwacked my back.

THE SINGING BREAD

This morning, nearing my fiftieth year

before I went for a check-up

on that shadow blooming in my lungs,

I left a dough to rise

in the round lined wicker banneton —

one of his grandfather’s —

he’d given me before my move to Paris,

a simple white dough, which I shaped

and proved again when I returned,

then baked, the oven on full, steamed up,

boule on the cast-iron stone, waiting

for the gold and the black and the yellow

of the crust he used to preach about, promised —

patience, he’d repeat, is the difference —

the enormous ear only possible

in a powerful professional oven —

then left it to cool,

listening to its crust contract, le pain qui chante,

the singing bread, as it breathed its heat

on my cheek, then left it to cool again,

then ate with butter, then washed, dried,

tidied away my implements,

swept and mopped the floor,

wiped the countertops

wondering again if I had met his standards,

if he’d be pleased with this effort,

before I sat, sat to sweep and mop

and arrange these memories

of this baker’s life baked into mine,

these words left like semolina on the tray

when the loaf’s ready, been lifted away.