William Rubel on Bread Ovens in the French Alps
Rachel
The most well known bread from the French Alps is that of Villar d’Arene. Villar d’Arene is on the Grenoble side of the valley that is traversed by a road that ends in Briançcon. The post that you have linked to refers to a village that is near Briançon, and thus at the opposite end of that valley. The ethnographic literature suggests that the breads from the high French Alps were all related and that they all baked them in large batches used throughout the year. In the memoir quoted that you link to the quoted text suggests two bakings a year. But in the books afterward it suggests a single annual baking.
The bread of Villar d’Arene, a rye bread made with boiling water, is baked third week of November. It is called Pain Bouilli in the local dialect. In Villar D’Arene and environs, an annual baking in the month of November — and often on November 1, as described in the post you linked to — was typical of this region up until 1960. In 1960 the ancient life came to an abrupt end. Rye, which was the flour used in Pain Bouilli ceased to be grown, the mills shut down, and as this annual bread had already cost more to make than buy for some time, the villages stopped making it. I’d assume a similar date for the cessation of the practice in the area near Briançon.
We know quite a lot about this bread — at least the version baked in Villar d’Arene, because it was the subject of research by Marcel Maget, one of France’s great twentieth-century ethnographers. He studied the bread of Villar d’Arene from 1948 until 1960, when the village voted to stop making it. His work on the subject, a classic of culinary anthropology, was published as Maget, Marcel. Le Pain Anniversaire À Villard D’arène En Oisans. Paris, France: Editions des Archives contemporaines, 1989.
Maget, along with a few other French anthropologists, brought the discipline of anthropology as they applied it to studying native peoples in French colonies to the study of French peasants.
The space of the bake house was broken up into allegorical spaces. The oven itself was hell, the proofing area, purgatory, and the attic space where he breads were cooled was paradise. I am afraid that my own blog is a mess — the ISP that hosted it went out of business taking the site down and resulting in the loss of material — and I haven’t managed to get it fully back up since — although that was more than a year ago. I have a beautiful picture of the bread cooling. The bread was cooled, as were all loaves pulled from French country ovens for at least several hundred years, but laying them crust side down — bottom side up.
People pick up their loaves when cooled and take them home. When the tradition was alive, families baked enough for the entire year in a single baking that could be as much as one ton of bread. Once cooled and stored in an attic or outdoor structure, the bread froze. It was thus fresh frozen throughout the winter. In the spring, when it thawed, it was cut into tranches which dried in the dry mountain air.
As for climbing into the oven to remove bread, this was done, at risk to the person who climbed in, when the breads stuck together during the bake and couldn’t be removed with the peel. This happened when the rye was damaged, for example, when it rained during the harvest and the grains sprouted in the field. The problem of sprouted grain was a common one in pre-modern agricultural systems in Northern Europe. Baking from sprouted grain makes for a sticky dough. They could have solved the sticking together problem by given the loaves space, but the reason for the annual baking is that these villages are at the tree line. There isn’t enough wood for multiple bakings — so they had no workaround besides the dangerous job of climbing into the oven.
As for the story that you link to, it is a story of village life written by someone who is remembering. Not a trained ethnographer. I am fairly certain that facts are mixed up and the story told is truncated.
For example, “the loser” who drew the first lot and had to fire the oven was more likely the loser because while the wood might have been pooled, the person who drew the first lot probably had to gather enough wood to bring the oven up to temperature. As the ovens in the region are massive, and as it is winter when the firing is done, the ovens are stone cold — in fact, they are close to freezing. The task of firing the oven is itself not onerous. But the task of gathering by hand, without chainsaws, enough wood to bring tons of rock near 0C up to baking temperature when one lives near the tree line was onerous, and the one who did that would, in a sense, have lost the draw.
Emile Carles says, of the initial firing, that “for ten hours or more, you had to load cord after cord of wood into the oven without ever knowing for sure whether the temperature was right.” I am skeptical of the accuracy of this statement. The oven in Villar d’Arene takes about 48 hours to bring up to temperature. One does not exactly load “cord after cord.” These are huge ovens. Initially, one lights a single large fire on one side of the oven. This is built with real logs, not faggots, and does not require constant attention. Also, of course, people who fire bread ovens know when it has reached temperature. Perhaps there were village arguments over this, perhaps her father was particularly nervous about the timing, she is surely remember something, but since today, in the 21st century, the man who fires the oven at Villar d’Arene for its annual baking festival never fails to fire it up exactly right, I cannot imagine that this was a subject of real concern when the tradition was alive and well. In any case, as all those other foods go into the oven first, if the oven was not up to temperature, they would have known that that time and refired or let the oven cool further before risking 6 or 12 month’s worth of their staple food.
As for the breads that were baked in the village near Briançon — the subject of the post you refer to, the author of the memoir claims that the breads baked in one hour. She also describes dishes the women make: “The women took advantage of the oven to turn out cakes, tarts, and cabbage pies. They threw themselves into the task wholeheartedly, each joyously shaping her dough as she pleased before it went into the oven.” What she is referring to are dishes baked in a festival atmosphere after the oven has been fired, but when it is still too hot to bake the main batch of bread. The oven is cooled by being put to use. I am sure that the bread that she refers to that bakes in one hour was a wheat bread baked as part of this oven-cooling festival baking. It was eaten fresh. It was not saved for a year. They might even have purchased the flour for it in Briançon.
The primary grain crop in this region was rye. It was grown on steep terraces. There is a movie from the early 1950s from the Canadian Film Board that documents the process — in Villar d’Arene. In any case, staple breads were baked in as large a loaf as possible as that maximizes the crumb to crust ratio. It also maximizes the oven space. Nobody would fill an oven with little loaves that could be baked in an hour to store them for a year. The rye loaves in the region — made with boiling water — weighed approximately 5.5kg.
Boiling water was a necessity for mixing the starter because the temperature of the water plus the temperature of the flour would, without heating, be too cold to make bread. No further water besides the boiling water was added to the staple rye bread. The Villar d’Arene recipe was roughly 100% of the water called for in the recipe for a starter made with 33% of the flour. And the total amount of water was roughly 50% by weight of the flour. The bread baked for at least six hours.
However, there were differences in the recipes between villages. Different villages went for different taste profiles which were achieved by different ways of manipulating the recipe. Unfortunately, this genre of memoir rarely offers technical insights into the foods described and are essentially useless for extracting usable information. The devil — and joy — are in the details — but the memoir you linked to has no details — just a rosy glow.
As for the question of holes in the wheat bread that was baked first. It very well could have had huge holes. The best image of a cross section of a real French country bread from the early twentieth century that I know of is in Kirkland’s work on baking, The Modern Baker Confectioner & Caterer, London, 1907. Vol 2. That Joe Pastry assumes that the bread described was a “dense-as-pressboard, hunk of whole meal boule” reflects modern prejudice rather than ethnographic fact.
I don’t think we know what that bread was like — but I’d guess it was a white bread. It baked in an hour, it baked along with pastries. I have been in period mills from that area and seen the silk bolting cloths used by the millers. Besides, the wheat flour could have been the same that was used for the pastries, and that could have been purchased for the special occasion.
The rye bread itself was not made with 100% rye flour except by the poorest of the poor and so it is thus a mistake to assume that a wheat bread was made with whole meal. The rye bread itself was made with a 75% extraction flour. That same extraction on wheat produces white flour. Maget is the source for this information regarding rye extraction.
Bread density is a matter of fashion. Breads can be made to have dense or open crumbs separate from grain type and percent extraction of the flour. Rye bread itself can have “eyes,” even made with 100% rye flour. In addition to flour extraction, crumb structure is controlled by flour hydration and by dough handling. The quality of the crumb can have class and ethnic associations. We don’t know enough about the bread of one-hour-baking described in the memoir to know whether it had a crumb we would recognize from a modern fantasy of a French country bread, or not. But I rather think that if I am correct and it was a bread baked with the other dishes before the staple bread — then I’d guess it was a white bread and as light as possible in crumb structure.
All my best,
William
