Falling in love with French pastry
Toronto pastry chef Jill Barber recalls the magical time she spent learning to bake in France
I’ve never had any money to travel — to take a year off and go backpacking — but I wanted to see the world. So after working in Toronto kitchens, I got a visa to the U.K. and ended up in Bristol, the sunshine capital of England. The job, however, was all-consuming and, before I knew it, two years had passed and I was back in Canada having barely seen outside the four walls of that kitchen.
So I took the plunge and enrolled in a French pastry program at the École Nationale Supérieure de Pâtisserie in Yssingeaux, France, which is about 100 kilometres southwest of Lyon. When I arrived, it was so much more magical than I could have imagined. The town is only about 7,000 people and the school is the heart of it, housed in a renovated castle. The students stayed in cabins in the woods. Every morning, we walked through the town up to the château just after dawn as all the roosters in people’s backyards started calling out.
My instructors were all world champions and they knew it; they were not humble. But hon- estly, everyone in the town had an appreciation for the finest ingredients, for pistachios and fruit. All I’d ever really had was North American style cupcakes and super-sweet treats, so in Europe, I was blown away by how amazing pastry tasted when it was made from natural ingredients, when it was a little sweet and a little savoury.
Students could use the pastries we made in school to barter with in town. You might have been able to swap your fruit tart at the butcher shop for a steak — but no one would ever accept a croissant. Shopkeepers would take one look and ask at which hour of the day they’d been baked; if it was more than a couple of hours before, they treated them like garbage. The standard for pastries was that high: Croissants were baked at every hour of the day.
There were no fancy restaurants to speak of in town, but there were beautiful markets. So I bought odd-coloured tomatoes that were the best tomatoes I ever had, and heads of lettuce — more varieties of lettuce than I’d ever seen in my life — and eggs and potatoes, and I went back to my little cabin in the woods and learned how to make the big beautiful salads
“I love pastry in a I-want-to-wake-up-with-you-in-the-morning kind of way; I don’t want to wait for my birthday or for a special occasion to indulge in something over-the-top. Like the French, I want joy and comfort every day alongside my morning coffee.”
the French make so intuitively.
Then, on the weekends, the other students and I — there were people from 17 different countries in the program — went to Paris or Barcelona and ate at every restaurant and pâtisserie we could manage. It was like summer camp for people with a pastry obsession.
That was years ago, but when I opened up my own little bakery Barbershop Patisserie (859 College St.) in December, I kept thinking about those pastry shops in France. Not their competitive spirit, because there is such a supportive community of bakers in Toronto and there is so much pride and room for growth, but rather the French understanding that simple, everyday food should be beautiful.
JILL BARBER