Bon Appetit (10 page)

“Bon,”
I agreed.

Désirée walked over to the table, having spied us, I suppose, as she left school.

“My two friends!” she said. “Can I join you?”

It would be nice to have two friends
, I thought.
Wouldn’t it?
But the thought of Désirée as a friend unsettled me somehow.

Friday was our bread test. We spent the first few hours on the written test, covering everything from what happens when we overmix to what happens when we underproof. We filled in the blanks for missing recipes, including approximate weights of ingredients. Then we made them. Each of us was assigned one recipe from a selection of what we’d learned that week. Juju got
pain à la bière
, and the men across the table were assigned sweetbreads. Anne was assigned a
couronne
, and I was assigned
brioche
. Désirée got croissant.

“I’m going to the restroom,” Anne said to me as we gathered ingredients. “Do you need anything from the prep room? I’ve forgotten the salt”.

“Non, merci. “
I shook my head.

The bread room hummed quietly; no one talked. While breads were not the most difficult thing we would learn, it’s hard to imagine anything else more central to French baking. I liked brioche—it was eggy, my specialty! I grinned. I knew I’d do okay.

I gathered everything at my work station, weighed it out, and then, when it was all in front of me, weighed it out again. I combined the ingredients in just the right measure and let the dough rise. I didn’t leave while it rose, as I wanted to watch it the entire time. We’d be serving these for lunch, and I wanted the brioche to be perfect.

I finally put my dough into my number seven pan and delivered it to Monsieur Desfreres’s assistant, who gave me a benign smile and put it into the oven.

I went back to our table. Désirée had delivered her croissant
dough to the proofer and was now pulling it out and taking it to the ovens. Juju grinned over her creation, and indeed, it smelled great.

Anne, however, was close to tears.

“What’s happened?” I asked, coming alongside her.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. It never rose”. I looked at the flabby, flat lump of dough slumping in the bottom of her mixing bowl. “I kept thinking maybe it needed more time, but it never rose”.

Juju joined us. “Maybe it was the yeast, like my problem the other day”.

Anne shook her head again. “I used the same yeast as the rest of you”. She pinched the dough and put some in her mouth. “Try this”.

Désirée appeared and pinched off a piece of dough. “Too much salt,” she said authoritatively after tasting it. Then she walked over to talk with the men finishing up their sweetbreads.

Juju took her bread to the oven. Anne’s eyes followed Désirée as she walked away. “I measured the salt exactly,” she said quietly.

“And that wouldn’t cause it not to rise, anyway,” I said.

“Unless someone added salt while my yeast was proofing,” she said. “Then it would kill the yeast”.

My eyes widened. She was right. And she wouldn’t have noticed, as long as it had happened after the bubbling began.

“Did you see anything happen when I went to the restroom?” Anne asked.

“Non,”
I said. “But I was concentrating on my own bread, so that may not mean much”.

“Perhaps we’d better keep an eye on everything from now on,” she said, watching Juju and Désirée.

Monsieur Desfreres arrived. He looked at Anne’s bowl and sniffed. “This, Mademoiselle, is not a crown,” he said, referring to the shape couronne bread was supposed to be. “It is, instead, a flat tire”.

He marked some notes in his book and kept walking.

Thankfully, my bread turned out perfectly, and I whistled “God Bless America” all the way to the bakery. Then I whistled “La Marseillaise”. I was a true Franco-American.

Simone was tidying up the pastry cases and using her hand broom to brush bread crumbs from the bread cases before they were loaded for the evening bread rush.

“Can I help?” I asked, watching the chair she stood on wobble a bit too much for comfort.

“Merci!”
she said. I held it steady, and she completed her job.

“Perhaps you should get a stepladder?” I suggested. “In case I am late tomorrow”.

She smiled kindly. “I guess this chair is a little shaky. I just haven’t wanted to make a fuss”.

How different from Odious. Unfortunately, I had to spend the day with Odious on both Saturday and Sunday. Fortunately, Maman was letting me help with the bread since I’d had my bread course this week. I planned to bake up a little surprise for Odious. I grinned at the thought of it.

“Lexi, come here!” Patricia barked from the back. I stood, stunned, for a minute. Simone caught it too.

Patricia had called me by the familiar, friendly form of the verb, not the formal form she’d always used before.

“Get going!” Simone shooed me through the door.

Once in the back room, though, things were all business. “I heard you whistling up the street five minutes ago,” Patricia said. “What took you so long?” I saw the softness of her face. She was truly pretty when she let her guard down.

“I was helping Simone,” I explained.

“Well, I’m leaving in one hour for the train to Provence, and I need to give you instructions for the rest of the day. Too bad you’ll be at the village bakery this weekend”. She looked at me intently. “Philippe will be here all weekend, and he could use the help. But you’ll see him at church on Sunday, I suppose. He’ll have someone come in early so he doesn’t miss”. By her sniff, I could tell she did not approve of his choice.

“What about Céline after school?”

Patricia nodded. “That is the
problème
, isn’t it? She’ll be at my
tante’s
house. Simone will be here to watch her today, as Philippe and my papa are looking at the building in Versailles to see if it’s suitable for the next shop”. She paused. “How was your schooling this week?”

“Bon!”
I said, glad to be able to share the truth. “I made brioche—eggy, and just so”. I grinned. “Everyone at the lunch table said it was tender and delicious”.

“
Bon
. Today you will make brioche. Place the dough in the cooler overnight, and I will leave a note for Philippe to bake it in the
morning. Make enough for ten loaves, as many people buy brioche on Saturday mornings”.

What if I made a mistake? The bakery would have no brioche at all. I got the recipe card out and studied it, and began to measure bit by bit. I stationed myself at one of the huge dough mixers. “Can I use this?” I asked one of the bread crew.

“But of course!” he said.

I turned on my iPod and began the Paris Combo playlist. The jazzy, sensual music filled my ears as I began the yeast sponge, making very certain that no salt got in at this point.

I noticed, now that I was alone so much, that I talked with God more often, especially in the past couple weeks. In the morning, because there was no one else to converse with. To ask His opinion later in the day. To share my personal thoughts. Never before had it only been me and Him. I’d always had other people to turn to first.

Lord, please help Anne
, I prayed as I mixed.
She looked so dejected after the failure with her bread today. And help me too. I don’t want to let anyone down with the brioche
.

I envisioned Philippe coming in the next morning, taking out my dough, kissing his fingers into the air at the glossy, perfect sight of it, and baking it up brown and beautiful. Many customers would comment on the perfect, eggy texture. I grinned.

I supposed it was equally possible that Philippe would come in, shout,
“Quelle problème!”
at the greasy, flat tire of dough in the walkin, and have to profusely apologize to his regular customers, who demanded a nonexistent loaf of their Saturday brioche.

I tried to keep that thought at bay.

Céline came in a few hours later and grinned at our two mascots, the shrunken apple heads, perched on the shelf above the dry goods. I turned off my iPod so I could hear her better.

“Goûter?”
she asked hopefully.

“Ask Simone,” I told her. “I’m busy baking”.

“Baking,
beurk,”
she said.
Yuck
. She walked forward to get her treat, and I finished up my dough.

At school, I had let the dough warm-rise in a few hours. Today I’d let it slow-rise in the cooler so it would be ready tomorrow morning. I beat the butter into submission, slapped the dough, wrapped it, and put it in the walk-in. Then I went to the office to talk with Patricia.

“I’m just leaving,” she said, looking vibrant. “I’m going to get my hair done before I catch the train”.

“So you’re very pretty for Xavier,” Céline teased.

My eyebrows raised, but I said nothing. I knew who was the low employee around here.

“Xavier is my … friend,” Patricia explained.

“Her
boyfriend,”
Céline said in a singsong voice.

“Back to work for you,” Patricia told her. “If you are not getting the highest marks in all areas, you are not studying enough. I will be looking at your progress reports very soon”. She tried to be stern but fooled no one, I think.

She closed the office door behind us and handed me a list of things to prep before I took the train home that night.

“Have a good time,” I said.

“I will,” she said. “I’m best in Provence”.

I wondered if that had to do with it being her family home or with Xavier. I simply nodded.

“I have known Xavier a long time,” she offered without my having to ask. “He was so happy when I came back from Seattle to stay. He is ready for someone other than his maman to cook for him,” she said a little wistfully. “But he will not leave Provence”.

Because she’d opened the door a crack, I tentatively offered a question. “And you do not want to move back to Provence?”

“I’d love to,” she said, but nodded her head toward Céline, busy practicing her printing on the other side of the office window. “But who would take care of her … and Philippe?”

She looked at me and held my gaze just a little longer than she needed to.

I
didn’t have school on Saturday, of course, so I worked the earliest shift at the bakery in the village. I was supposed to make petits fours. Cake! My favorite. And I had a little something else in mind too.

The village bakery didn’t have the varied baking rooms of the bakery in Rambouillet, so I found a cool counter space near the walk-in and began to cut and frost tiny squares of cake. I looked at the clock and discovered that I had some time to play with, so I got out the marzipan and adorned the cakelettes creatively. If Maman didn’t like the decorations on top, I could scrape them off and redo them.

I gazed out the window at the approaching autumn. Monsieur Desfreres told us to take our inspiration from everything around us,
that we were not merely artisans, we were artists. I allowed myself to dream.

I thought of Céline and her missing tooth, and created tiny mice out of marzipan. I thought of autumn flowers and fashioned some blood red mums. I sliced thin squares of pound cake and sandwiched them with strawberry preserves, a last good-bye to summer flavors. I cut almond cake and sandwiched it with raspberry crème, delicate and refined. Chocolate cake was dribbled with Grand Marnier, the orange liqueur that originated hundreds of years ago in this very village. I enrobed them in dark chocolate fondant and piped tiny orange pumpkins on top.

After arranging them neatly on long, silver trays, I found Maman. “The petits fours are finished,” I said. “Should you come and look at them before I put them out?”

Maman shrugged, annoyed at being bothered, I think, but knowing she had to check my work.
“Un moment,”
she said, and I went back to the kitchen to prepare tartes.

I thought again of the season and made baby tarte tatins blushing with cinnamon sugar. Then, daringly, I made faux-pumpkin pies out of some tinned squash I’d found in the market.
Très Americaine
, I guessed. But they tasted good and looked pretty, and I hoped they would sell.

An hour or two later Maman came to look at my work. She stared at the pan of petits fours for a minute before talking.

“I know they’re a little different,” I explained. “Monsieur Desfreres told us to take our inspiration from nature and life around us”.
Better if I could pin it on a Frenchman. “The mice are for Céline and her missing teeth”. I knew Céline would visit later in the day with Maman’s husband, whom everyone called Papa.

Maman took one of the chocolate petits fours with an orange marzipan pumpkin. “Grand Marnier, from the village,” she said as she ate it.

I nodded and said nothing.

She took one of the fake pumpkin pies. “Squash”. I watched her eat it and then brush a crumb from her lips. “Bon, Lexi. These will do fine. Except,” she pointed to the petits fours with mums on them, “not these. In France, mums are only for decorating graves on November first, All Saints Day, the day we remember those who have passed on”.