OPINION: READING NOOK

While many of us are stuck at home, with time to read as we compulsively stress-bake and feed our sourdough starters, may I make a suggestion? Get a copy of French baker Apollonia Poilane’s cookbook, which will happily address your baking concerns as well as what to do with all that bread.

Poilane: The Secrets of the World-Famous Bread Bakery came out in October and is the first book in English from Poilane, the granddaughter of Pierre Poilane, who opened the family bakery in 1932 on the Left Bank in Paris. If you read the New Yorker, you may already know her story: how her parents died in a 2002 helicopter crash when she was a teenager, leaving her to run the family business — from her Harvard dorm room.

After a foreword by Alice Waters, the first recipe is, of course, for the sourdough boule that made the bakery famous. Apollonia Poilane takes you through

the process, which includes making starter from scratch (she uses yogurt), proofing, shaping, scoring and baking (in a 12-inch lidded Dutch oven).

Poilane is a patient teacher, taking novice bakers through the steps, providing encouragement for instructions that many might find daunting, and including marvelous tips on technique, flours, “baking with all your senses” and stories about growing up and learning how to bake by herself.

More surprising, however, is that this is not a wonky book, written by one master baker for other master bakers. Rather it’s a gentle, user-friendly cookbook that provides recipes which are sometimes utterly, beautifully simple. Sure, you’ll find stuff on decorative flourishes and laminating dough, but this book is also a paean to loaves and even single slices of bread.

There are also wonderfully useful tips for storing and refreshing bread, what to do with stale bread (make ice cream), where to find baking gear (directly from Poilane) and how to make good croutons (spice and fry them). The thick catalog of recipes includes as many for what to do with your bread as for the breads themselves, such as bread chips, bread granola, whipped cream made with cream steeped in brioche, simple dishes made with all those bread crumbs and a recipe for, yes, perfect toast.

“A recipe for toast? You may scoff,” she writes. “But my father was onto something with a little trick he had.” (Spoiler: You toast the bread in pairs.) And so the pages accumulate, shuffling recipes for crouton salads, meatloaf (made with bread crumbs) and bread-and-butter sandwiches with more elaborate chef-y ones for croissants, puff pastry and a massive, intricate galette des rois. The range is spectacular and often playful, with welcome accompanying recipes such as those for oat milk, cultured butter and flavored jams.

This is a pragmatic book about the most basic, even profound, of all staple foods, a fitting read for a time when we have actual bread lines again.