Andrew Jefford
Wine writer Andrew Jefford's travels in France and beyond
Britons living
permanently in France,
as my family and I have
since May 2010,
should expect regular
interrogation. Not
from unsmiling French
tax inspectors (they exist, but can
be kept at bay by a few simple
precautions), but from friends and
acquaintances, all of them curious to
know what the tipping point for
expatriating oneself might be. My usual
summary as to why we moved to
France's south is '40 per cent weather,
30 per cent curiosity and 30 per cent
bread'. Everyone thinks the bread is a
joke. It's not. What else brings intimate
pleasure to one's life, three times a day,
seven days a week? Thirty per cent
might even be an under-estimate.
I'd trade any of France's three-star
restaurants for our local boulangerie.
Finding a house to rent in France back
in 2010 was a struggle, since neither
my wife nor I had a French employer
or salaried job; we ended up, thus, in
an un-picturesque village on the last
northern outskirts of Montpellier. We
quickly discovered, though, that the
village had one irresistible attraction:
Maison Heyer. The clue was the length
of the queue that had already formed
outside the dowdy building near
the church by 7:30 every Sunday
morning. Inside, we found a temple to
wheat and its extraordinary powers of
metamorphosis, once conjoined with
water and yeast, and guided by strong,
French human hands in the small hours
through purgatorial kneading towards
a very hot steam oven. (The church
struggles to compete.)
There are at least half a dozen
Heyer variants on the generic term
'baguette', for example, from the
springy, responsive Tradition through
the crustier, flour-dusted Provençale,
the torpedo-like Tradimeule (always
burnt at the ends) and the rabbit-eared
Fagotte to the Bûche de Prades, a
blasted, Lear-like truncheon of a loaf
made of nothing save crust, and
eventually banned by my wife since
it was impossible to cut without
snowing morsels of crumb over her
scrupulously swept floor tiles.
The Campagnard is a Zeppelin-sized
creation of limitless splendour, though
any family numbering less than 12 will
find it takes some weeks to eat: we
occasionally manage a half, if armed
with a houseful of guests. There is a
Baguette Viennoise for toothless, aged
relatives, as well as maternal, bosom-shaped
brioche loaves for those who
have yet to grow teeth. They even
manage to make a fine wholemeal loaf
(normally beyond French baking
genius) called a Gros Bio.
The moment I discovered Maison
Heyer, I lost any residual fear about
inviting guests to lunch or dinner,
even if deadlines are pressing. The
reason was the meal I've come to call
'Bread And'.
Once, in other words, I've biked home
with a couple of effusively scented
loaves from Maison Heyer, whatever
else I might serve is an afterthought:
the meal is made. A sun-ripened
'ancient tomato' or two, a dish of
olive oil, a roll of butter, a few radishes,
a slice of ham: the courtiers clustering
around King Loaf barely matter.
The bread renders potatoes or rice
with a bit of meat superfluous; the
bread is there to mop up the juices
from a grilled fish. It eclipses both.
Its final virtue becomes evident
when you pull the cork from a wine
bottle. 'Goes well with bread' is a
rarely seen back-label formulation,
perhaps because most bread is a
dismal parody of what it might be, or
perhaps because it seems... obvious.
Sometimes the obvious needs stating.
If you steer clear of a few car-crash
accompaniments (artichokes, bottarga
or Roquefort) great bread is what
every wine dreams of.