Three Bakeries

Part Two: The Night Baker 

My tenure at the second bakery I worked at spanned one of the richest and most dismal times of my life. Dismal because I was living in Boston, which I hated almost from the moment I set foot in it. Rich because I first became a real baker, a bread baker, at this bakery, and because it became what for me shall always be that emblematic best place, the only job I’ve ever loved, the only place I’ve ever worked that keeps me thinking, even now, even twenty years later, that there is such a thing as good work, though I have not experienced that feeling since, and most days do not expect to again.

The Clear Flour Bakery was housed in an old pharmacy building in Brookline, Massachusetts, close to the Coolidge Corner neighborhood, just on the Allston-Brookline border. It was in an old commercial block, between a mattress warehouse and a laundromat. The last shop in the block, which fronted a gracefully curving intersection just off of Commonwealth Avenue, was a bodega run by a Cuban exile, a gentle Castro-hater named Eddie. We had no commerce with the mattress warehouse except to stand inside its cavernous loading dock entrance to smoke on rainy days, but we made frequent trips to Eddie’s for candy and cold drinks, popsicles and Choco-Tacos, and always for cigarettes. At least every other day one of us was in charge of washing and drying a load of dirty aprons at the laundromat. It was here that I sometimes felt most blessed, watching the clean-shaven young men unloading and hanging their dress shirts just so, dressed as I was in cut off chef pants and a Clear Flour T-shirt and sneakers. I felt my life to be gloriously unencumbered, and I confess to feeling a little smug, though I’m ashamed of it now, especially each weekend when I’m hanging my dress shirts to dry, thankfully out of sight of some young punk like me.

In those first years, Christy the owner, and later Debbie, would come in at five A.M. and mix the dough for the five kinds of bread that we made, and then later in the morning two more of us would join her, me and Debbie, or me and Melissa, and sometimes Abram, Christy’s boyfriend and business partner. We would first tie on an apron and pull back our hair and break out the music we’d brought for the day, on cassette tape. We’d make a cup of coffee, and then commence cutting and scaling and shaping the five-hundred or so loaves we produced each day. Our specialty was sourdough French, which we made in several classic shapes: the baguette, the batard, which we called simply the long, and the boule, which we called rounds. We prided ourselves on this lack of pretentiousness. We made plain French bread as well, leavened with commercial yeast, and walnut wheat loaves made with imported French walnut oil, and the most delicious pumpernickel I have ever tasted, and pumpernickel raisin. I loved it when the Jewish Russian émigrés, who had just begun to turn up in Brookline, would find us and come from a long way off to buy our pumpernickel and enthuse about it in their two dozen words of English. This bread, good. I bring my friend. This bread like home. Good, like home. How much this bread is?

What I loved most about the work is impossible to say—I loved almost everything about it. I loved that the work had to be done in small groups (many hands making light work) and that the work itself, though highly skilled, was for the most part mindless. All of the skill, all of the intelligence needed to make a well-made baguette, was in the body, and in the hands, and so the mind was left almost entirely free, and we used our minds for conversation. Another thing I loved was that not a single person there in those early years ever acted like someone at work. Not everyone loved it the way that I did, but I don’t remember anyone trying to get out of doing his or her work or complaining about having to work. Sure, people were happy to be getting out into a beautiful day when their shift ended, but their joy was not about escaping the bakery. Just as often the baker due to leave would offer to make a cup of coffee for the baker coming on and would stay and go over the state of the various breads, what needed to be done first, or to repeat the best story of the day. Melissa might offer to leave a book for me to read, or Debbie might linger and ask us what she should make for dinner. Christy and Abe seemed to live there, always experimenting with new recipes or tinkering with a noisy piece of equipment or going over the endless charts of who was to get how many of which kind of bread.

Because Christy was trying to make extraordinary bread at a time when there really was no such thing in Boston, she would not hire most bakers, who all came, in her experience, with bad habits hard to break. She much preferred to hire passionate amateurs, and so we were writers and readers and dancers and lovers of good food and sculptors, and later musicians and singers and painters as well. But in those early years, there were just the five of us, and the conversation that took place over those tables while we shaped hundreds of loaves of bread was some of the most sublime conversation I have ever been part of. Everyone knew something different than and deeper than everyone else. Abram was a sculptor and was coming into a period of making room-sized installations, many of which operated on a coin box. The viewer had to insert a coin to activate the piece. You would, for instance, enter a small, darkened room and drop a quarter into the slot on the illuminated face of the box, and a light would switch on illuminating a small dory mounted on a blue wall, its bottom painted white and facing you. The dory would begin a very slow, creaking descent from the wall and finally, after as much as forty seconds or so, the outer gunwale would reach your chest level, and you could peer inside to see a wave of blue-dyed water breaking from the far side of the dory and then slapping against the side of the boat just below you, and then would be revealed the brilliant blue interior of the boat, painted like the reflection of open, blue sky. Abram’s great ambition was to stage an entire production of Hamlet in an indoor arena, and each character was to have been portrayed by a demolition derby car with a loudspeaker on its roof to broadcast the spoken dialogue of the actors within.

Melissa was an ex-English major like me, and a poetry lover, and she and I admired many of the same poets at the time. Her younger sister was studying with Naomi Shihab Nye, who I had met a few years earlier at my undergraduate college, and we both were reading Louise Glück and Sharon Olds, and I got her to read James Wright, patron saint of Ohio poets, who she had read, but not deeply. She loved W.S. Merwin above all others, and I read him carefully for the first time at her insistence. I urged on her William Matthews and Peter Handke, whose The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld my poet-sister Rose had sent me for my seventeenth birthday, thinking more of me than I was yet worthy of. I remember Melissa stopping into the bakery on her day off after she had been book shopping, and making herself a cup of coffee and reading aloud to us the poem “Fish Fucking,” by Michael Blumenthal, whose poem “Letter of Resignation” was already pinned above my writing desk. “Dear Boss:” It begins, “Some mornings on my way to work I stare / into my rear view mirror and the world cries out/like an abandoned lover whose only wrong has been / fidelity.” It is above my writing desk still.

Melissa was a creature who I had not known until then existed—blond, Texan, Jewish, English major—whose father had become wealthy as a pioneer in wireless communication, which in the early 1980s meant beepers and pagers, mostly for doctors. I can only imagine their wealth now. Honestly, I could only imagine it then, it was so far from anything in my experience. Still, Melissa and I became friends, even close friends for a short time, and this friendship could only have happened over those shaping tables. The first time we worked together we baked for just a few hours on a Sunday morning and then delivered bread through the early morning streets of Boston and Cambridge in her Audi, a car her father had bought for her upon her graduation from Bard, and this car inspired our first real conversation about class difference, but which was really about the chip on my shoulder about work, and on hers about privilege (mine was heavier). We would have never gotten over this first, tense, conversation except for poetry and sourdough bread.

Debbie was from rural New Hampshire and a punk rocker, and she lived with one of the first truly strange men I had ever met—I had met many artists by then, many of them strange, but their strangeness always seemed in large part an affectation. Allan was truly and deeply odd, brilliant, and a painter, and for a while the bakery’s delivery driver. I was astonished to learn that he and Debbie drank at least a bottle of wine, sometimes two, with dinner most every night. Debbie came in one day and told us that the night before they had tried out a new set of very expensive wine glasses, a gift from Abe and Christy, very thin-walled, and that when they were washing up Allan was air-drying one of the glasses by waving it through the air, and just the resistance of the air sheared off a large piece of the glass, and the shard buried itself in the meat of Debbie’s thigh and stuck there and sprouted blood along its edge. Debbie I did not know as well as the others—our shifts rarely overlapped by more than an hour or two, and even when they did she was the mixer, the best mixer among us other than Christy, and I was primarily a shaper and a baker, and these aspects of the work happened mostly at different times of day and even in different rooms once the bakery grew into an upper level and a lower one.

Christy was perhaps closest to me in temperament and background, both of us from the Midwest, but she too was from a higher socioeconomic stratum than I was, though this was either negligible or simply didn’t get in the way of what we loved best, which was bread and baking. She was an extraordinary teacher, one of the two or three best I’ve ever had, in any subject or setting. I remember the day, early on, when she taught me how to shape a sourdough round, which had to be coaxed into an absolutely smooth-skinned and tightly-formed ball, its only surface blemish a small, puckered mouth that was placed down on the cornmealed baking sheet. The trick was to form the loaf very tightly so that it could sustain a long, slow rising, but not to over-stress the surface tension and tear the skin of the dough, which would destroy, eventually, the crust of the baked loaf. I’d been shown this skill before, always by men, all of whom felt the need to at least allude to the woman’s breast metaphor, as if that were at all helpful, but I’d never mastered it until Christy showed me, patiently and in a manner that I can only describe as narratively what it was to make a cohesive, beautiful round. She took a piece of scaled dough, eighteen ounces, and kneaded and folded it against the shaping table, standing directly across from me while I approximated the same. Next came the art, the gentle wedging of the dough again and again with the heel of the hand against the floured surface while slightly turning it with each push, keeping the pressure equally forward and down, using the left hand as a brace or a wall against which the loaf slowly rose and stood on its own. She watched, and each loaf of mine rose a little higher, stood a little taller, had a smoother surface, and she did most of this with language:

“It should feel like it’s slightly pulling away from your hand as you push it—that’s its resilience—but it shouldn’t resist your touch or you’re pushing it too hard and it will start to tear.”

“Use a little more flour if it’s getting sticky, but take it easy, tension is your friend in this.”

“Don’t push back with that off hand, just brace it and guide it.”

“You probably want to be a little more balanced on your feet—don’t lean into the shaping, stand back a little on your heels so you’re receiving it as much as pushing on it.”

Finally, after perhaps twenty minutes of this, “Perfect—that’s a beautiful loaf! You’re going to be good at this. I knew you would be when I met you.” This persists as one of the finest things anyone has ever said to me, about anything, but especially about work.

Christy was an ex-dancer and had lived in New York City for a few years and even knew some of the dancers I had gone to school with in Ohio—New Yorkers who for her represented all that was wrong with modern dance, and the reason she was an ex-dancer. She told me of the night she watched as my friends from college, Annie Iobst and Lucy Sexton, cofounders of a now infamous dance performance duo called Dancenoise, swung above the audience—this was probably at PS 122 or The Kitchen or a similar performance space of the time—on rope swings, wearing tutus and army boots, and splattered those below with buckets of fake blood. This was not only distasteful to Christy, but practically unholy. Lucy and Annie would have agreed, I’m sure. They were out to skewer the holy, or to at least critique the notion of holy, whereas Christy would have only wanted to uphold it. She loved beauty, and grace, and was not embarrassed to talk about either. And so she turned to bread.

Christy loved good bread, artisanal bread, though this was before the term was co-opted by corporate marketers who used it to describe shopworn products in the bakery sections of supermarkets across America and thus rendered it meaningless. She and Abe also loved good food, and jazz, and wine, and after a few years I grew uncomfortable with their focus on good taste and gracious living; but in those early years Christy was one of the most authentic people I had ever met, I thought, someone who had somehow brought her passion for something real, something essential, into the world of commerce, had started a bakery, as if it were a batch of pumpernickel, from scratch, and had grown it into an increasingly successful little enterprise.

Near the end of my first year at Clear Flour I volunteered to be the night baker when we were approached by a new client who wanted as much bread for themselves each day as we had been making for seven smaller clients up to that point, and so we quickly had to double our capacity and add a shift. Everyone else had a husband or partner to go home to, and since I did not, I became the night baker. Immediately I learned that I loved working nights and having my days free, and though I missed the conversation, I came to love baking and the art of the “oven man” even more than I had the shaping of the loaves. I would come in at four P.M. when almost all of the bread was shaped and had been proofing already for a few hours. The sourdough would be in the proofing cabinet under steam in winter, perhaps in the walk-in refrigerator in the summer, and I would make myself a cup of coffee and begin the night-long orchestration of bringing along each twenty-pan rack of bread at the right moment, trying never to have an empty oven, but neither wanting to rush any unready loaf into the oven’s heat. We all took this very seriously, this quest for perfection, but the fact was, and I was keenly aware of this, that although many distinct things had to happen just right throughout the day for a loaf to work—it had to be mixed perfectly, raised patiently and at the right temperature, punched down at just the right moment, cut and scaled only when it was ready, shaped tightly, but gently—it could all be negated by my carelessness or impatience. If a rack of bread were ready twenty minutes before I had the oven space for it, the entire rack might over-proof, and the resulting flaccid baguettes would shame me throughout the night. Conversely, if I rushed and put a batch in twenty minutes early, the loaves would burst when they first hit the oven’s heat and rip open, destroying the crust that was our trademark.

I worked with my back to the large, six-shelf, rotating-rack oven, prepping on a large, wooden counter five sheet pans of six baguettes each, or six rounds, or four longs. Each loaf received a quick brush with an egg-white-and-water wash to give the finished crust a deeper, golden glaze, and then each loaf was scored with a razor blade so as to control for the first burst of yeast activity when the loaves went into the oven’s very high heat, called oven spring in the trade. Without these scores, the crust would burst in unpredictable ways, and so the scores were both decorative and functional. Each baker had his or her own slight variation on a few classic themes. Mine was usually the alternating, radiating slashes that would, when open, suggest an ear of wheat. Once these five pans were loaded, I’d take another five from the proofed rack, prep them, load them, and so on, until the oven was full.

I would keep this up, frantically most nights, always racing, unloading an entire oven of a hundred and fifty baguettes and rolling them over near the open double screen doors to cool, and then egg-wash and score another hundred and fifty, and quickly load the oven so as not to lose too much heat through the open oven door, and then twenty minutes of counting, sorting, bagging, sweeping before it started again. On summer nights this was best, with all of the doors open and something good on the cassette player loud—for me this was Richard Thompson’s Hand of Kindness for an embarrassingly long time— and hundreds of loaves cooling on the fans, their crusts making a barely audible crackling sound, and the smell wafting out onto the street and permeating the neighborhood. People would walk by on their way from the Commonwealth Avenue T-line and be taken by it. You would hear them exclaim to one another about how good it smelled, how they were lucky to live in such a neighborhood, and often they would stand in the doorway and ask, “You don’t mind if we just stand here for a few minutes and smell this, do you?” Sometimes they would plead through the open screen door to be allowed to buy a fresh loaf, though the retail operation closed at six P.M. It was satisfying to turn away the wealthy residents of Brookline, used to getting all they wanted, and thrilling to occasionally make the fine gesture of letting the homeless guy from the Allston side have a baguette for nothing. He did not come often, knew better than to push his luck, but when he did turn up at the door and shouted into the lighted bakery, “Hey, brother, can you spare a loaf of that tasty French stick?” it was deeply satisfying to flick the latch on the screen doors and pass one out into the night to him.

And in the summer, just before Eddie’s closed at eleven P.M., I would go next door and buy a single bottle of Bass Ale and climb up with it onto the stacks of hundred-pound bags of King Arthur unbleached white bread flour, up high near the ceiling, and eat a hot baguette with sweet butter and drink that cold beer and look down on close to a thousand loaves of bread cooling or standing upright in emptied flour bags waiting for the drivers to come and get them at five A.M. and take them out to the waiting city.

It was the last time that I knew perfection, knew what it was to work willingly, even enthusiastically at something, knowing as I did that perfection was possible every day. It was only possible because there were just five of us, and we all loved the bread and one another. It was only possible because there were only four or five ingredients—flour, water, salt, yeast, maybe something sweet. It was only possible because Christy had convinced us it was possible and taught us how to mix and shape and bake it in order to make it happen. And it was possible every day. It didn’t happen every day, but it was possible every day. And mostly, and this is what breaks my heart, it was possible because we all—even, I swear to god, me—believed it was possible.