Bill Buford uprooted his wife and twin toddlers from their life in New York City, embarked on realising a dream of being in France, training to be a cook, and settled in Lyon, the heart of the country’s cuisine. His plan? To find work in a Lyonnaise kitchen. His excuse? To write a book about it. The reality? No restaurant would take him on. And then, across the street from his new home, he discovered a way in…
Bob’s boulangerie was where we bought our bread. I didn’t know if it was actually the best in the city because we hadn’t eaten anyone else’s, but I did know that we were lucky when we got a loaf hot from the oven, carried it home jugglingly, and ate it with salty butter.
The boulangerie was where the boys discovered the word goûter (from goût, meaning “taste” or “flavour”, and probably the single most important word in the entire language). A goûter was an afternoon snack – eaten universally at 4pm when children got out of school. Most parents brought it from home; we extravagantly bought ours at Bob’s. The boys had discovered Bob’s pain au chocolat and didn’t understand why they should eat anything else.
I wondered if I should do a stage at Bob’s – bread is a fundamental of the French plate, why not? I asked one of Bob’s English friends, Martin Porter, a Liverpudlian in Lyon: Could he make inquiries on my behalf?
“I don’t know,” Martin reported Bob’s saying. “Tell him to come see me one night.”
It was eight in the evening, but I was pretty sure he’d be there. Bob was known for his hours, his light on in the back when the rest of the quartier was dark. And he was there, but only just. He had his coat on and was heading home for a nap.
Bob knew why I was here. He also knew that I hadn’t found a kitchen to work in. So, when I made my proposal, straight-out, no introduction – “Bob, I’ve decided, on reflection, that my book should start with you, that I want to do a stage here, in your boulangerie” – he knew I was lying.
“No,” he said.
He stared. Was he trying to read me?
I come to you, I said, not only to learn how to make bread, but your bread. “It is famously good. What interests me is why.”
His gaze drifted above my head. He seemed to be calibrating, imagining (I imagined) what the consequences of my being in his company might be.
Bob was 44. He was jowly and wide of girth. His hair was brownish and shaggy and usually matted with flour. There was flour on his clogs, his sweater (he never wore an apron), his trousers, and adhering powerfully to his beard. He slept when he could, and didn’t sleep often, and seemed to live by an internal clock set to an alarm that was always going off – yeast, dough-making, the unforgiving speed of a hot oven, delivery urgencies. He was always on his feet. He seemed never to tire. He knew that his bread was exceptionally good. He also knew that no one knew how really good it was.
He was not, in his view, a genius. In a city of food fanatics, he was just a baker, even if a good one. He was, in fact, just Bob. And, of course, he wasn’t even that. His real name was Yves.
“Yes,” he said slowly: Ouiiiiii. He actually seemed to be getting excited. “Come. Work here. You will be welcome.”
“I will see you tomorrow.”
We shook hands. I made to leave.
“You live across the street, right? You can stop by any time.”
I thanked him.
“If you can’t sleep, come over. At three in the morning, I’ll be here. On Friday and Saturday, I’m here all night.”
I thought: If I can’t sleep at three in the morning, I don’t go for walks.
But I understood the message. Bob was making himself available. I’ll be your friend, he was saying.
The picture I had of Bob’s operations was during the weekends, especially Sundays, which were outright wild, owing to a law, still observed, forbidding trade: except for bakers. In Lyon, many boulangeries opened on Sunday. But it was Bob’s where people went.
On Sundays, the boulangerie belonged to Lyon, and Bob worked without sleep to feed it. Late-night carousers appeared at two in the morning to ask for a hot baguette. By nine, the line extended down the street, and the shop, when you finally got inside, was loud from people, and from music (usually salsa) being played at high volume. Everyone shouted to be heard – the cacophonous hustle, oven doors banging, people waving and trying to get noticed, too-hot-to-touch baguettes arriving in baskets, money changing hands, all cash.
The crowd fascinated me, everyone leaving with the same look – suspended between appetite and the prospect of an appetite satisfied. I learned something, I got it, the appeal of a good bread: handmade, aromatically yeasty, with a just-out-of-the-oven texture of crunchy air. This was their breakfast. This was Sunday.
At three on a weekday morning, the boulangerie was different and lonely. Lyon, too. Bob ripped open a sack of flour – he was clearly waiting for me – lifted it without a sign of strain (it weighed 50 kilos), and emptied it into a large steel basin. He grabbed a milk carton with the top cut off, and told me to follow him to a sink – a startling sight, filled with coffee paraphernalia, grounds everywhere, a sandwich floating in something black, a roll of toilet paper. He negotiated the carton to a position under the faucet and ran it hot.
“You arrive at the correct temperature by a formula involving two other factors,” Bob explained. “One is the temperature of the air. This morning it is cold – it is probably two degrees. The other is the flour…”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s the temperature of the air.”
“Of course.”
“These two factors added together, plus the temperature of the water, should equal 54 degrees Celsius.” So, if the air was two degrees, and the flour was two degrees, the water would have to be 50.
“Hot,” I said.
“Exactly.” The water from the tap was steaming. Bob filled the carton. I asked: “Bob, you don’t use a thermometer?”
“No.”
“Do you own a thermometer?”
“No.” He considered. “You know, I might.”
Bob poured the warm water into the basin and started an apparatus attached at the top, a mechanical kneader. Two hooks, looking like prosthetic hands, scooped up the dough very slowly.
“It is no faster than if you did this with your own hands,” he said.
“Then we take some of last night’s dough.” La vieille pâte. It was brown and cakey, wrapped in plastic film. He pinched a bit between his thumb and forefinger and tossed it into the basin. He took a second pinch, scrutinised it, thought better of the quantity, and tossed in half. This was his starter, yeasts still alive from last night that would be woken up in the new batch. It wasn’t the only source. I knew enough about yeasts to know that here, they were everywhere. You could peel them off the walls. You could scrape all you needed from underneath Bob’s fingernails. Here, your breath had texture.
I looked around. On every available surface, there was an unwashed coffee mug. A lightbulb dangled from the ceiling. Another one sprouted from a socket. There were the flickering blue lights of the ovens. The darkness put you on your guard. You could trip here and die. But maybe, this room, with all its sacred history, was what Bob’s baguettes tasted like.
He stopped the kneader and tore off a piece of dough. It was ready. It was thin and elastic. “You can see through it,” he said, laughing as he stretched it across my face like a mask.
Tonight’s dough would be ready the next afternoon. The morning’s baguettes would be made, therefore, from last night’s.
“Let’s get breakfast,” Bob said. An off-track-betting bar opened at six.
The coffee was filthy, the bread was his but stale, and the clientele might be flatteringly described as “rough” (phlegmatic one-lunged hackers knocking back sunrise brandies, while studying the racing odds), but, for Bob, they represented companionship. He introduced me as the guy who was working in the boulangerie to write about him.
Extracted from Dirt: Adventures in French Cooking by Bill Buford (Jonathan Cape, £18.99), is published on 1 October. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020 3176 3837