Legs, the cat who moved in shortly after I started the microbakery in 2007, finally died and we burried her under the apple tree in the garden. It was just before we celebrated our 47th aniversary of living together and we thought, why not just bugger off to France for a few days? So we did.
We weren’t self-catering so poking around Arcachon market was more for entertainment than shopping. There’s a couple of very unexciting bread stalls one of which, to my amazement, had a miche style bread labelled “Pain Grand-Père” (Grand-Dad Bread). You could see that it was just bog-standard dough but I was shocked that the French would belittle their own baking traditions.
And, to laugh at myself, I thought, I’m still making this style of bread, how dare they call it Grand-Dad Bread. Until I remembered my age and realised that, with me in mind, they’d be calling it Pain Arrière-Grand-Père (Great-Grand-Dad), maybe even Arrière-Arrière-Grand-Père …
The PArtisan Baker 