Free Confessions of a French Baker by Peter Mayle Page A

told me. I could have the freedom of the bakery while it was still calm and uncrowded. He suggested that I turn up for work, like everyone else, at four a.m. He could guarantee I'd have no trouble parking.
    Cavaillon at four on that August morning was cool and ghostly. There were no cars, no noise, no people, no hint of the heat that would come with the morning sun. I was aware of hearing sounds one seldom hears in a busy town: the ticking of my car's engine as it cooled, the wailing of a lovelorn cat, the click of my own footsteps. I walked past shuttered stores and groups of cafe chairs and tables that had been chained up on the pavement for the night. It felt strange to have the street to myself.
    Gerard was waiting for me at the end of the Cours Bournissac, standing in a pool of light outside the entrance to his bakery. He was more cheerful than any man had a right to be at that time of the morning.
    “We've already started,” he said. “But you haven't missed much. Come on in.”
    It was still too early for the addict's fix, the warm and heavenly whiff of just-baked bread. That would come in an hour or so, filling the bakery, drifting out through the door, causing nostrils to twitch in anticipation. The very thought of it made me hungry.
    For the first time, I saw the bakery in a state of undress, the shelves bare. By six a.m. those shelves would be filling up with loaves—tall and thick, long and slender, plump and round, plain and fancy, whole wheat, rye, bran, flavored with garlic or Roquefort cheese, studded with olives or walnuts—the twenty-one varieties that are baked and sold each day. (If none of these is exactly what you want, the Auzet bakers can also supply made-to-order breads; these include bouillabaisse bread, saffron bread, onion bread, apricot bread, and, for those who like nibbling monograms, personalized bread rolls. You name it, they bake it.)
    Gerard led me past the naked shelves and down a ramp that took us into the baking area, a large, airy room, bright white under the fluorescent lights. In one corner was a dough-kneading bowl the size of an infants' paddling pool, and 50-kilo (110-pound) sacks offlour, from the ultranne to the coarser, almost gritty stone-ground; against the walls, stainless steel three-decker ovens six feet tall; between the ovens, steel work tables on which roughly formed
boules
of dough had been arranged in neat lines. There was no decoration, no stool to sit on, no concession to comfort, nothing that wasn't necessary for the making of bread. It was a functional room, saved from sterility by the earthy, reassuring smell of flour, and by the smiles and whistling of the bakers who were working the early shift, from four a.m. to noon.
    That morning there were three of them, dressed in white T-shirts and shorts, their fingers and hands already pale with a dusting of flour. They started to work while I watched. I was at first surprised, then fascinated.
    I was surprised because I had always thought that the standard loaves were formed mechanically, by some kind of molding process. I imagined a conveyor belt with dough going in at one end and
baguettes
coming out at the other—
baguettes
of identical size, identical weight, identical color, identical markings. I'm sure there are bread factories where this is exactly what happens, but it's not the way they do things at Auzet.
    Every loaf is formed by hand,
faconnage a la main
, and it's a wonderful sight to behold. The preweighed lumps of dough (250 grams per
baguette
—a little more than half a pound) are taken, one by one, and slapped, rolled, squeezed, folded, and tweaked until they assume the familiar shape—if not yet the familiar color—of a loaf you would recognize on the shelf. It's like highspeed sculpture. The shaping of each loaf takes no more than thirty seconds, and after watching a dozen or so, you would swear that there are no differences between one loaf and the next. But of course, there are: the tiny