I do not know what the secret to good French bread is. In France, croissants and chocolate in the afternoon are called “goûter” (a taste or snack). So you would say in French, “Ma fille mange son goûter à 16h.” Or, “My daughter eats her afternoon snack at 4 p.m.” And it is just like that, a tasty treat to get you through the slump in the afternoon. I am certain that a fresh loaf of French country style bread, “à la campagne”, makes my heart sing. Perhaps it is the soil.
When I was a student living in Paris and attending classes in Roman History at the Sorbonne, I passed by a French bakery every evening near the Place des Vosges. I cannot recall its name; but I do remember the aroma, the scent in the air, of fresh-baked bread. The French make all kinds of different shapes and sizes of bread. The bakers display them in the windows of their shops. My favorite is the “Pain de Campagne,” which means “country-style bread,” because it reminds me of the Bohemian rye and caraway seed bread my mother baked on Saturday afternoons. The kitchen smelled of rye flour, yeast, and butter. The heat from the oven warmed the space near the table. Mom had her “mother source” of yeasty flour from the previous batch she baked. She got fresh unsalted butter to put on the warm bread. It melted and mixed with the soft chewy inside. The crunchy outside of the bread broke into little pieces in our mouths as we sat around the table and wolfed our hefty portions down, in the silence of satisfaction.
But a close second is the baguette, a narrow loaf of bread shaped like a stick and having a crunchy outside and a chewy inside. Baguettes taste good with fresh butter and homemade jam, or ham and camembert cheese.
Then there are croissants. Again, buttery, crunchy and shaped like crescents with a fluffy layered inside, they taste great with coffee in the morning. There is an art and skill in baking croissants. My daughter tried to bake croissants with me one Saturday afternoon. She studied the You Tube videos, learned the steps, had a good wooden board, lots of flour and fresh butter; but somehow they turned out to be as hard as hand grenades - tasty hand grenades, buttery rolled and layered clumps, all toasty but too hard on the inside. Nonetheless, the hard work of raising the bread, punching it down, kneading the dough, rolling it out and doing it all over again about three times, through the course of an afternoon, taught a very important lesson. The best things are often the hardest to have.
Sometimes I would buy croissants with chocolate inside and that is a really tasty treat. Some people like to dunk their croissants in their coffee. It is all a matter of taste.
When I was a student, my budget was tight. I did not eat much all day to save money to buy a couple of baguettes and some croissants so that I could have a sandwich for dinner and a croissant or two for breakfast the next morning. I faltered the first times I ordered I French. But then each time I came in and ordered, it got easier. The baker began to recognize me and knew what I wanted. I ordered two of each so that I could share with a fellow student when I got back.
And then there was that special day when I ordered the bread and the words flowed out of my head and off my tongue like honey. I didn’t have to translate from English to French. It went like this:
“Bonjour, Monsieur.”
“Bonjour, ” Monsieur le Boulanger a répondu.
“Deux baguettes et deux croissants au chocolat, s’il vous plaît.”
”Dix francs.” (The Euro hadn’t been created yet.)
“Merci beaucoup.”
“Merci.”
Triumphant, I paid and put the treasures in my cloth sac and went out the door. I knew that they knew I was American, but they also knew I was trying to speak their language. I felt like William the Conqueror slaying my fear of not being understood. If I made a mistake, well, I would be corrected. But that made the baker and his wife feel proud of their language.
Sometimes I would break off the crusty end of the baguette and nibble it on my way to the dorm. The tip of the baguette is called a “croton.” Young children are known to fight for it. But for me it was as if this great French bread were speaking to me – offering me a simple joy and a comfort far from home.