Chapter 4: The Feeding

The ritual had a shape. Like bread it had a shape, and the shape mattered because the shape was the thing that held everything else together, the structure around which the rest of the day organized itself the way gluten organizes itself around the pockets of gas that fermentation produces — without the structure, the gas escapes, the dough collapses, the bread is flat. Without the ritual, the days collapsed.

Four-thirty. The alarm. Not the digital alarm on the phone that Jean-François had bought her but the old alarm clock on the nightstand, the wind-up kind with the twin bells on top, a clock that had belonged to her mother and that Marguerite had taken from the bakery after the stroke because her mother was not using it and because the sound it made — a mechanical shrieking that could not be snoozed, that stopped only when you physically reached out and flipped the switch on the back — was the sound of the bakery, the first sound of the day, the sound that began everything.

She dressed in the dark. Wool socks, long underwear, jeans, a flannel shirt, a sweater over the flannel, the layers necessary because the walk from the house to the bakery was three hundred metres and the bakery itself was cold until the woodstove had been running for an hour, and her body needed protection the way the dough needed protection, both of them vulnerable to temperature, both of them functioning best within a narrow range. She did not shower. She would shower later, after baking, after the flour and the sweat and the oven heat had coated her skin and her hair with a film that smelled of bread and work and smoke, a smell that Jean-François said he liked, that he said he had always liked, the smell of his wife at midday, a baker's smell, a specific smell, a smell that belonged to her and to no one else.

The walk to the bakery. Three hundred metres through the dark. The streetlight on the corner of rue de la Grève cast a circle of yellow light on the asphalt and she passed through it and out the other side and into the dark again, the dark total, the sky overcast, no moon, no stars, the houses along the road dark because it was four-thirty-five and no one else in Kamouraska rose at four-thirty-five, not the farmers who rose at five, not the dépanneur owner who rose at five-thirty, not Père André who rose at six, no one, and this solitude was not loneliness but sovereignty, the road hers, the dark hers, the cold hers, the village hers in a way that it would not be at any other hour, and she walked fast, her boots loud on the frozen ground, and she arrived at the bakery door and turned the key and entered.

The bakery smelled of yesterday's bread. This was always the first thing — the smell, the ghost of the last bake lingering in the stone and the wood and the cloth, a smell that was faint by morning but still present, still detectable, the way the scent of a person lingers in a room after they have left, and she breathed it in and it was both comfort and rebuke, the comfort of the familiar and the rebuke of the absent, because this smell was also her mother's smell, the smell of Thérèse's bread, and her mother was not here and would not be here and the smell was fading, day by day, being replaced by Marguerite's smell, Marguerite's bread, a different bread, a different smell, not worse but different, the way a daughter is different from her mother, the genetic material shared but the expression unique.

She lit the woodstove. Kindling first — small pieces of spruce, dry, the bark peeling — then larger pieces, birch, the fire building quickly, the stove drawing well, the chimney pulling the air upward and the flame responding, growing, the heat beginning to radiate from the cast-iron surface into the room. She left the stove door open for five minutes to establish the draft and then closed it, adjusting the damper to slow the burn, the fire settling into a steady rhythm, a low roar that would become the background sound of the morning, a sound she had grown so accustomed to that she heard it only in its absence, the way you hear your heartbeat only when it stops.

Then the starter.

She lifted the cloth from the crock. This was the moment. Every day this was the moment — the first look, the first assessment, the first reading of the culture's condition. She had been feeding it daily for two weeks now and it had recovered from the two-day neglect, the hooch no longer forming, the smell shifting from sharp vinegar to something rounder, more complex, a layered scent that she parsed the way a sommelier parses wine — top notes of fresh yogurt and green apple, middle notes of yeast and warm flour, a base note of something earthy, almost mushroom, that came from the lactic acid bacteria and that was, according to her mother, the mark of a mature culture, the sign that the microbial community was balanced, the yeasts and bacteria in a ratio that produced both rise and flavour, both gas and acid, the dual products of a healthy fermentation.

She looked at the surface. Bubbles. Not the large lazy bubbles of an underfed starter — those were the belches of distress, gas produced irregularly and expelled in random bursts — but small, uniform bubbles distributed evenly across the surface, a fine foam that indicated steady gas production, the kind of production that happened when the organisms were well-fed and working in concert, each species doing its job, the yeasts breaking down sugars and producing CO2 and alcohol, the bacteria converting sugars to lactic and acetic acids, the two metabolic pathways intertwined, the waste products of one organism becoming the food of another, a closed loop, an economy, a miniature ecosystem contained within a two-litre stoneware crock with a hairline crack.

She discarded. Two hundred and fifty grams — half the culture — scraped into a bowl that she would use to make pancakes for Jean-François, or crackers, or nothing, or that she would simply throw away, the discard being the necessary waste of the system, the pruning that kept the culture vigorous, the same principle that applied to orchards and forests and relationships and lives: you must cut away to create room for growth. Her mother never wasted the discard. Her mother made crêpes or galettes or mixed it into the dog's food, the dog being a German shepherd named Brume who had died three years ago and had not been replaced because Thérèse said one death at a time was enough, a joke that was not a joke, and the bowl of discard sat on the bench now, unclaimed, and Marguerite looked at it and felt the waste of it, the abundance of the starter producing more than could be used, the culture's generosity a daily reminder of the gap between what the bakery could produce and what the bakery was producing, the gap between sixty loaves and ten.

She fed. Two hundred and fifty grams of flour, two hundred and fifty grams of water, stirred into the remaining culture with the wooden spoon. The water today was at twenty-seven degrees — she had heated it, measuring the temperature with a digital thermometer, the precision deliberate, because she was learning that precision was not the enemy of intuition but its foundation, that her mother's ability to judge temperature by feel had been built on decades of precise measurement, the conscious practice preceding the unconscious mastery, and Marguerite was at the conscious stage, the stage where every number mattered, where every degree and gram and minute was tracked and recorded and analyzed, and she accepted this because she had no choice, because she was twenty-three years into her apprenticeship and her teacher had just been taken from her and she was alone with the culture and the oven and the dough and the vast accumulated weight of what she did not know.

She stirred until the flour was incorporated. The culture was thick, a paste, the consistency of thick pancake batter, and the spoon moved through it with resistance, the flour absorbing the water, the starches swelling, the existing organisms encountering the fresh food and beginning, immediately, the work of colonization, the old culture spreading through the new flour like a rumour through a village, and within minutes the fresh feeding would be indistinguishable from the old culture, the newcomers absorbed, the colony expanded, the population adjusted, the starter continuing, always continuing, seventy years of continuing.

She covered the crock and placed it on the shelf. She wrote in the log.

1 décembre. 4h50. 12°C. Farine S-P mélange. Eau 27°C. Bonne activité. Bulles fines et régulières. Odeur: pomme verte, levure, champignon. Le lever — environ 5h. Culture en santé.

She read the entry back. The handwriting was not her mother's — it was larger, less precise, the letters slanting slightly to the right — but the format was the same, the data the same, the French the same clipped functional language that Thérèse had used, and Marguerite wondered whether this was homage or mimicry and decided it did not matter because the purpose of the log was not expression but record, not art but science, the daily data points building over time into a portrait of the culture's life, its rhythms and fluctuations and seasons, and a log that was precise was useful regardless of who wrote it.

She began the dough.

Today was a baking day — Wednesday, the busiest of her three days, the day she made four loaves instead of two, the demand having increased slightly as word spread that Marguerite was baking, the neighbours telling other neighbours, the chain of information following the same paths that it had always followed in Kamouraska, from kitchen to kitchen, from church to church, from the post office to the dépanneur to the hair salon in Saint-Denis where Marie-Claire Pelletier — who had been cutting hair for forty years and who knew everything about everyone and kept none of it to herself — dispensed information along with permanents. The demand was small but it was real, and Marguerite felt it as a pressure, gentle but constant, the pressure of people who wanted bread and who had come to depend on her for it, and this dependency was both a gift and a weight, the weight of obligation, the obligation of the baker to the village, of the culture to its keeper, of the living to the living.

She weighed flour. Three kilograms of the stone-milled blend from Saint-Pascal. The flour was fresh — she had picked it up two days ago from the farm, driving the back road through Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pocatière, the truck loaded with fifty-kilo sacks that she wrestled into the bakery by herself because there was no one to help, Jean-François at work, the sacks heavy and awkward, the flour inside shifting like sand, and she had stacked them against the east wall where the cool air kept them stable and covered them with a cloth and felt, briefly, proud of herself for managing this physical task alone, the pride small but real, a bubble in the dough of her new life.

She weighed water. Two kilograms one hundred and sixty grams. Seventy-two percent of the flour weight. She heated it to thirty degrees — warmer than the feeding water, because the dough needed to reach twenty-five degrees to ferment properly, and the flour was cold, stored against the cold east wall, and the ambient temperature of the bakery was only twelve degrees despite the woodstove, and the warmer water would compensate for the cold flour and the cold air, the temperature of the mixed dough being a function of all three — flour temperature, water temperature, ambient temperature — each contributing roughly equally to the final number, and the calculation her mother did instinctively Marguerite did with arithmetic, subtracting and dividing and arriving at thirty degrees, which was close enough.

She combined the flour and water in the big stainless-steel mixing bowl — her mother's bowl, dented on one side from an incident that Marguerite did not know the details of — and mixed with her hands, plunging them into the mass of flour and water, the dry flour resisting the water at first, clumping, refusing to hydrate, and then yielding, softening, the clumps dissolving as she squeezed and folded and turned, the dough coming together slowly, unevenly, the way a thought comes together, not all at once but in stages, the idea forming and dissolving and forming again until it holds, until the structure is there, and she mixed until the flour was fully hydrated, no dry spots remaining, the dough a shaggy mass that looked nothing like bread and would look nothing like bread for hours yet, and then she stopped.

This was the autolyse. The rest. She covered the bowl and left it for forty minutes, and during those forty minutes the enzymes in the flour — protease, amylase — did the work that her hands had begun, breaking down the proteins and starches, the proteins unfolding and beginning to form gluten, the starches converting to sugars that the organisms in the levain would eventually consume, the whole process happening without her intervention, without her hands, the dough transforming itself, the chemistry self-directed, and this was the lesson of the autolyse that her mother had tried to teach her and that she was only now beginning to understand: that the baker's most important skill was not action but restraint, not doing but not doing, the willingness to step back and let the dough do what dough wanted to do, which was to become bread, given time, given the right conditions, given a baker who knew when to intervene and when to stand at the window and watch the dark sky lighten over the river and drink coffee and wait.

She waited.

At five-thirty she added the levain — three hundred grams of the active starter, scooped from the crock and deposited onto the dough — and mixed it in by hand, the squeezing and folding technique called la méthode du pincement, the pinch method, her fingers piercing the dough and then folding it over itself, the levain distributing through the mass, the organisms meeting their new environment — a vast plain of flour and water, an abundance, a feast — and beginning immediately to feed. She could not see this. She could not feel it. But she knew it was happening because it always happened, the levain colonizing the dough as surely as spring colonized the land, slowly and then quickly, the first hours barely perceptible, the last hours rapid, the dough rising, the bubbles forming, the transformation underway.

After ten minutes of mixing she added the salt. Sixty grams. Two percent of the flour weight. The salt was the last ingredient because salt inhibited yeast activity, and adding it too early would slow the fermentation, and adding it with the levain would stress the organisms at the moment they were most vulnerable, the moment of transition from the old environment to the new, and so the salt came last, after the levain had had ten minutes to establish itself in the dough, and the salt served multiple purposes: it strengthened the gluten, tightened the structure, slowed the fermentation to a controllable pace, and of course it provided flavour, the salt being the only ingredient in the bread that tasted like itself — flour tasted of flour, water tasted of nothing, the levain tasted of acid and yeast, but salt tasted of salt, of the sea, of the mineral world, and without it the bread would taste flat and sweet and wrong, and Marguerite had once forgotten the salt — early in her apprenticeship, fifteen years ago — and the bread that resulted was edible but joyless, a bread without dimension, a flat grey landscape, and her mother had tasted it and said simply Le sel and Marguerite had understood and had never forgotten again, the lesson written in her body, in the muscle memory of her hands reaching for the salt canister at exactly the right moment, after the levain, before the first fold.

She mixed the salt in. The dough changed immediately — the texture firmer, the surface tighter, the gluten responding to the salt by contracting, organizing, the structure becoming more defined, and she could feel this in her hands, the dough going from slack and sticky to cohesive and elastic, still wet, still high-hydration, but with a backbone now, a framework, the salt doing its work the way the salt of experience did its work on a person, adding structure, adding resilience, adding the ability to hold shape under pressure.

She covered the dough and began the folds.

The first fold at six o'clock. The second at six forty-five. The third at seven-thirty. The fourth at eight-fifteen. Each fold the same: wet hands, slide them under the dough, stretch the north side up and over the centre, then the south, then the east, then the west, four stretches, the dough building strength with each iteration, the gluten aligning, the bubbles redistributing, the structure developing. Between folds she did other things — fed the woodstove, swept the floor, washed the bannetons from the last bake, checked the oven temperature if it was a firing day, drank coffee, looked out the window at the river, which was becoming visible as the sky lightened, the grey water appearing first as a lighter shade of grey against the dark land, then as a distinct surface, flat and wide and moving east with the current, the current invisible but implied by the movement of ice crystals near the shore, small white fragments drifting in the grey water like thoughts drifting in a grey mind.

Between folds she also worried. She worried about the money. The bakery's income had dropped to almost nothing — ten loaves a week at five dollars each was fifty dollars, barely enough to cover the flour, nothing for the wood, nothing for the electricity that ran the refrigerator and the lights, nothing for the insurance or the property tax or the maintenance that the building constantly required, the old stones shifting, the mortar cracking, the roof leaking in the corner above the woodshed, the list of repairs growing the way a starter grows, fed daily by the building's age. Jean-François's income covered the household — the mortgage, the food, the heat — but it was a carpenter's income, seasonal, reduced in winter, and the bakery had always been the second income, the supplement, the margin that made the difference between comfortable and tight.

They were tight now. They would be tighter.

She worried about her mother. She worried about the bakery. She worried about the phone number on the receipt on the shelf, the smooth voice of Claude Bergeron, the words projet touristique and la propriété de votre mère, and she did not call him and she did not throw away the receipt and the receipt sat on the shelf between the salt and the photograph like a question she was not yet ready to answer.

She worried about the bread. Every loaf was a test, every loaf was a judgment, and the judge was not her mother — her mother could not judge, could not taste, could not speak — but the neighbours, the customers, the thirty or forty people who came to the back door with cash and expectations, and their expectations were set by fifty-three years of Thérèse's bread, and Marguerite's bread was not Thérèse's bread, and some of them knew it and were kind about it, saying C'est bon, Marguerite, c'est très bon, and some of them knew it and said nothing, which was worse than saying it was bad, the silence a judgment more brutal than words, and Marguerite knew because she was not stupid and she was not deluded and she could taste the difference herself, her bread and her mother's bread side by side in her memory, and the comparison was unfavorable and would remain unfavorable for a long time, possibly forever, because twenty-three years of apprenticeship had not been enough, had not been nearly enough, and the gap between knowing and doing was the width of the St. Lawrence.

At eight-thirty she divided the dough. Four pieces, each roughly a kilogram, weighed on the scale to within ten grams. She pre-shaped, letting the rounds rest on the bench for twenty minutes, the bench dusted with flour, the dough relaxing, spreading, the gluten unwinding from the tension of pre-shaping. She shaped — the letter fold, the tight roll, the seam sealed with the heel of her hand — and placed each loaf in a banneton and covered the bannetons and put them in the refrigerator for the overnight proof.

Four loaves. Tomorrow she would score them and bake them and cool them and wrap them and sell them from the back door.

She cleaned the bakery. She washed the bowl and the bench and the scale and the thermometer. She swept the floor. She hung the bannetons on their hooks. She checked the starter — it had risen, nearly doubled, the surface domed and bubbly, the smell of green apple filling the shelf, and she looked at it and felt something that was not pride exactly but was related to pride, a cousin of pride, the satisfaction of having done a thing correctly, of having maintained the contract, of having fed the living thing that depended on her and having it respond with vitality, with life, the culture saying in the only language it had — the language of fermentation, of rise and smell and texture — that it was well, that it was healthy, that the feeding had been sufficient, that the keeper had kept well.

She covered the crock. She wrote in the log. She turned off the lights and locked the door and walked back to the house in the grey morning light, the village now awake around her, a truck passing on the main road, smoke rising from chimneys, the dépanneur open, its light spilling onto the sidewalk, and she walked through the village that was her village and smelled her own bread on her skin and felt the cold on her face and watched the river, now visible, now grey, now moving, always moving, and the feeding was done and the day could begin.