Ooh La Petite Boulangerie
-The refrain from a jingle for a bakery in Thousand Oaks, CA that I heard on the radio about a thousand times between July 1983 and May 1985.
Bread Baker.
Sometimes I’ll watch Anthony Bourdain’s show No Reservations, where he travels around the world and across the country sampling local cuisine and culture. I’ve seen him in Cuba where he toured a cigar factory and on Ted Nugent’s ranch, the one in Texas, where he ate, well I’ll leave it to you to guess what he ate. But the show, or the part of a show that I remember most is when he was in Paris, not the one in Texas. On that show he didn’t sit in a café on the Champs-Elysees sipping absinthe and flinging quiche at the wait staff, or whatever they do over there, he instead visited a bakery, presumably several blocks off "The most beautiful avenue of the world.” All they made at this bakery was bread. No éclairs, no croissants, no petit fours, just bread. They baked baguettes by the hundreds and sent them off to city’s restaurants and markets.
What more noble endeavor could there be than creating the bread that is the birthright of every Parisian? It’s like being the guy who supplies the beef for sandwiches in Philadelphia, the guy who delivers shrimp to restaurants in New Orleans, the guy who cuts the ribs in Kansas City, or the guy who makes the rice at Las Cazuelas Mexican Restaurant in Fresno. (It’s the best rice in town and therefore the best Mexican restaurant in town.)
What I know about baking could fill a business card, on one side. I can cook but I need to have exact directions and at least two mulligans. I only have a very vague idea of how flour turns into bread. It is flour right? I know bakers get up early, very early. I know bakery floors are a bitch to clean because my brother who has lived everywhere, including Paris, and done everything cleaned one to pay for stuff for awhile. But I think at the end of the day, knowing I made something as essential as oxygen is to humans and wrecks are to the success of NASCAR, would make it easier for my head to hit the pillow each night. Even though it would come right up off the pillow again in the time it takes to fly halfway from Paris, France to Paris, Texas.
That job cleaning the bakery was satisfying, for the floor looked better on the way out than on the way in. When you get one of those four a day jobs, let's plan a bakery crawl in Paris.
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