French Peasant Bread
Joe Pastry’s come up with a wonderful quotation on French peasant bread. A must read.
- Poi and the Vegefication of the United States
- Smartening up the Chicharrón Technique. And Italy too.
Joe Pastry’s come up with a wonderful quotation on French peasant bread. A must read.
I must admit that sheep and bread are not normally linked in my mind. How interesting.
Something to try, don’t you think? Stale bread. Well shut it up with the animals for a while so that it can soften.
Rachel,
I’ve actually been to this village in the French Alps. The communal oven is enormous, men would have to run with the peel to gather the momentum to place the uncooked loaf in the back of the oven and, when cooked, someone would actually climb into the oven to remove the large heavy loaves. Yes stale rye bread, that became hard as a rock with time. I can’t imagine a porridge of grated rye bread and milk, a porridge of necessity.
I’d love to know a bit more, Sonia. Was it still in use or was it a museum piece, a tourist attraction? And was the bread left in the oven until it cooled? How else could you climb in? The stale bread doesn’t surprise me quite as much as there’s a literature on this.
Rachel — a more direct question to whether the baking is a museum piece or tourist attraction. The custom of baking the village baking the bread died out in 1960 when the village voted to cease the practice as I explained in my previous post. For a few years after that a few families continued to make the bread, but then it stopped entirely until it was revived again, I think in the early 1980s, but I don’t recall the date. In Villar d’Arene the organization that runs the bread oven organizes a communal bake the third week of November. As I mentioned in my previous post, other villages bake on different days, Le Chazelet, for example, on November 1. People buy shares in the bake by the traditional unit of measure, the setier. You can buy a fractional share, too, like a half or a quarter. This is a time when the village comes together. Villar is the most well known of the villages who bake and there are a few tourists who come, mostly for the Saturday bake. The baking goes on on twelve hour cycles — shifts — so there is baking activity twice in every 24 hour period — some very late at night — for several days. The tourists who come are generally the handful who always come so while outsiders, most are not quite complete strangers. I doubt there are any outsiders at Le Chazelet.
There is a tourist baking of a wheat bread on August 14.
William