6/2/2004. La fête du pain normand

Dominique Duclos has a lot to smile about. For one thing, he has two adorable sons following in his footsteps as a pioneering maître boulanger. For another, he is responsible for revitalizing the art of baking bread in his region, returning it to its authentic roots while simultaneously stimulating creativity within the bounds of tradition. He has organized a solid vertical chain of productivity in upper Normandy, including wheat growers, a local mill which combines the best of old and new technologies, and a bevy of excellent bakers, many of whom served their apprenticeships under his kind but astute surveillance. Finally, maybe the fact that I'm his biggest fan accounts for just a bit of that smile too, as there I am, photographing him...again.


In his own bakery, Mr. Duclos never rests on his laurels but is always creating new and seasonal breads, all the while respecting traditional methods. As the year unwinds, there's always something to look forward to at the Duclos bakery. When we make our ritual stop at the Duclos bakery in Yvetot on our way to the country house, I always have a moment of delicious suspense as my eye scans the shelf haunts of my favorite breads, greedily looking to see what's left. (Sometimes not much, if we arrive shortely before closing at 8 p.m.)

There's a chestnut bread in fall, made with organic chestnut flour; a cider and apple bread; a muesli-apricot bread, a Beaujolais nouveau bread (during the brief season of that wine), a lusty mixed rye loaf made with the wine itself and studded with chunks of roselle sausage. Once in a while there's the brioche grandmère, whose homely loaf-shape (not the glorious crown of the traditional brioche) belies the fact that it is the most feather-light, perfect brioche you ever put in your mouth. And then there are the classic hallmarks of the Duclos realm: the pain d'autrefois, or "bread of yesteryear", a rustic loaf of rye and stoneground wheat flours, starter-leavened, somewhat flat and irregular and incredibly toothsome. The pavé d'Yvetot, a shade lighter, its loaves cut from already risen dough and having roughly the shape of a brick paver. And of course, the famous pain normand (see below) in many shapes. There are chewy benoitons figue-raisin, fat wholegrain sticks studded with figs and raisins. Hungry yet?

And finally, there's my own all-time favorite: les petits pains noix-noisette. This is the first bread I look for when I arrive, and the first one I point out to the lady behind the counter, so that no other customer can buy them out from under me while I'm admiring the rest of the bread. These small crusty rolls are absolutely jammed cheek-by-jowl full of hazelnuts and walnuts. If there's only one of these left, I'll sorrowfully tell Denis they were out of noix-noisettes so I can have my fix in secret. Meanwhile, I'll innocently share a figue-raisin with him instead. We always eat some of Mr. Duclos' bread the moment I get into the car with it. That's why Denis' Saab is knee-deep in crumbs.

But back to the master baker himself. For the last several years, Mr. Duclos has been organizing a local fête du pain, or bread festival. Last year, his bakery produced a gigantic brioche which had to be carried by four men into the church, where a special mass was held to bless the planting of the wheat and the coming season. After the priest blessed the brioche, the congregation shared in the lovely communion of devouring it.



An awards ceremony was held for the best young bakers of the region, during which all the young and aspiring bakers--many of them adorably shy--assembled on a stage to be applauded. And of course, Mr. Duclos' fabulous pain normand was being munched on by all. This bread is the French baguette returned to authenticity, made with only starter, water, salt, and unbleached locally milled flour.





Le pain normand begins as a wet dough which, as it goes through a long, cool fermentation, springs to life with the force of the levain, or starter, which is a mixture of wild yeasts and acid-producing bacteria.
It has a deep, satisfying crust and a creamy interior full of the uneven holes that are the signature of a good levain--or sourdough--bread. Part of Mr. Duclos genius has been to devise standards for its production and create a label for it.





This year's incarnation of the bread festival--anticipated for weeks by Denis and me--was different. Mr. Duclos informed us that they would be firing up the old wood-burning bread oven at Flainville for the celebration. Le pain normand would be the star as usual, but as the oven cooled, a big batch of brioche would follow it.

There would also be croissants and pains au chocolat, or pastries made from croissant dough filled with a bar of melting chocolate. But these weren't going to be just any old industrial croissants; they would be made the old-fashioned way, by hand, and using Normandie's finest butter, the butter of Isigny.
Now, I usually never indulge in pains au chocolat, as I don't appear to have the correct French gene for eating such things without gaining huge amounts of weight. But I admit that when I clapped my eyes on the luscious, buttery layers of these pastries--so different from the homogenous pastry turned out by the truckloads in Paris--I caved in and wolfed one down. Only one.



The heart(h) of the event was of course the oven itself. In Normandie of old, each village and each chateau had its own brick bread-baking oven, dome-shaped and usually free-standing in its own thatch-roofed structure. Today, only a relative handful of these beautiful and richly symbolic structures remain. Time was when the village oven was as much at the center of communal life as the common well. People came not only to buy the bread of the baker, but also to have their own pastries baked. To take advantage of every last bit of heat as the oven grew too cool for baking bread, villagers would bring their crocks of beans, roasts, and terrines to bake for hours as the oven went slowly cold before its next firing.



The bread oven at Flainville is a perfect example of a classic Norman oven (photo right). Fortunately, its thatched roof has been beautifully rebuilt. The roof is essential to protect the oven from Normandie's insistent winter rains, and without it, these old ovens quickly fall into ruin.

It was still dark out on early Saturday morning when Mr. Duclos and his helpers fired the Flainville oven for the festivities. By the time we arrived, conveniently around lunch time, the sun was brilliant and high in the sky and the mouth of the oven was grinning with red hot coals. Mr. Duclos was showing his younger son how to test its temperature by flinging a handful of flour over its floor and observing how quickly the flour browns or burns.



The Flainville oven has quite a bit of workspace where Mr. Duclos fellow bakers were busy forming the "dough normand" by hand into baguettes, which they were placing in cradles of heavy linen canvas (made from locally grown flax) known as souches. Supported by the folds of cloth, the baguettes would go through their final rise in the warm confines of the oven building. Behind these bakers and to the side of the oven itself was a baker's rack of golden mounds of brioche dough rising in tin plates. Brioche is a traditional breakfast bread that is rich in eggs and butter which make it brown more quickly than simpler bread. For this reason, it is baked after the main batches of crustier bread, to take advantage of the cooling oven temperatures.



It is dark inside the fournil, or oven-room, but outside, the sun illuminated a delightfully bucolic scene. Tents were set up where you could buy various wonderful breads, the afore-mentioned croissants, as well as freshly baked pizzas made with--what else?--pain normand. dough and topped with sliced fresh tomatoes, local organic goat cheese, and generous sprinklings of herbs and olive oil. At a different table, a local lady was serving sandwiches of slow-baked pork breast (local Norman pork, of course), reminiscent of how meats used to be slow-roasted in the cooling bread oven. Mmmmm...



Meanwhile, the oven never ceased to be a beehive of activity, with helpers ferrying the hot loaves out to the hungry public, who stood or sat about as if stunned by the sunshine, chatting amiably, their mouths full of delicious bread, their eyes admiring piles of crusty, golden brown, downright voluptuous loaves.




Denis and I were of course as rapturous as anyone. We wandered from oven to tent, to tent and back to oven, imbibing as much as we could of the priceless atmosphere of the village oven brought back to life. Of course we imbibed a lot more than just atmosphere. I think between the two of us we tasted just about everything that was offered on that beautiful May afternoon. I returned from a long chat with Mr. Duclos to find Denis sitting under a tree. Now, can anyone tell me why this man is smiling?

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