Zoé had asked for the same birthday present two years running: to spend a whole day at Aunt Marion's bakery. Not a visit. A real day, from beginning to end.
This year Aunt Marion had said yes. She had only added one sentence: “You do know my day starts at four in the morning?”
Zoé knew. Well, she thought she knew. At ten to four, when the alarm rang in complete darkness, she understood that knowing and living are not the same thing.
Her father dropped her off in front of the lowered shutter, in a completely empty street. There was no light anywhere at all, except one, right at the back of the shop, and that was the bakehouseThe room in a bakery where the dough is made and where the oven stands..
In the bakehouseThe room in a bakery where the dough is made and where the oven stands. it was already warm and it smelled wonderful. Aunt Marion gave her a white apron far too big for her and showed her a large bowl filled with a soft grey dough.
“This is Gaspard,” said Aunt Marion seriously. “He is my sourdoughA living dough that is kept and fed, and that makes bread rise. starter. He is twenty-six years old. I feed him every day, like an animal. If Gaspard dies, my bread has no taste.”
Zoé looked at the bowl with a great deal more respect. Then she learned to kneadTo work dough with your hands, pushing and folding it over and over.. It looks easy from a distance. Close up it is hard work: you push, fold, turn, and start again a hundred times.
Aunt Marion took out a big notebook covered in stains and showed her the timings: loaves at four, pastries at five, shop at seven. “If we slip by a quarter of an hour, everything after it collapses,” she said.
By five o'clock her arms were burning. By six she had flour in her hair, in her ears and a streak across her nose. By seven the first loaves came out of the oven.
And at five past seven the shop door opened on the first customer of the day: a man in work clothes, not properly awake, who said almost nothing.
He bought a baguette, broke off the end outside on the pavement, and ate it right there with his eyes closed. Zoé watched him through the window the whole time.
The bread came out of the oven almost golden, with cracks across the top, and it made a very faint noise as it cooled, a sort of tiny crackling. “That,” said Aunt Marion, “is the bread singing. It is the only moment it does.”
“He does that every morning,” said Aunt Marion. “That is why we get up at four. Not for the bread. For that bit of pavement.”
By midday Zoé was asleep on her feet, with flour up to her elbows. She had kneadTo work dough with your hands, pushing and folding it over and over.ed twelve loaves, burnt one croissant and broken a brioche tin.
In the afternoon everything had to be cleaned, the trays scraped, the floor washed and Gaspard fed for the next day. Zoé had assumed the day ended when the shop closed. She was a good two hours out.
On the way home her father asked whether she wanted to be a baker one day. Zoé thought about it for a long time. “I don't know yet,” she said. “But now I know why people do it.”
The end, sweet dreams.
