Annabelle Hickson: A Day in the Country
ON A TRIP TO PARIS, ANNABELLE HICKSON FELL IN LOVE WITH FRENCH BREAD.
I’M IN PARIS, staying in a chain hotel with a sign in the lobby asking guests to not bring their handbags to breakfast for security reasons. There’s a drawing of a handbag crossed out in red in case you didn’t understand the warnings in French, English, Italian and German. I tell you this so you get the sense, as I did, that this hotel is pretty crummy. In Australia, a crummy motel means a breakfast of cold toast in a paper bag, with accompanying margarine, jam, tea bags, instant coffee and UHT milk, delivered into a chute in the wall next to the door. As such, I made assumptions and decided that, for my first breakfast in Paris, I would eat out. No crappy brekkie for me — not in the home of gastronomy. At 6am I was up and about. But because I was in Paris, n0-one else was. After an hour of walking, all I found was a Starbucks. And not even they would let me in. With a waggle of the index finger, the waiter told me: “Sept heures et demie”. I headed back to the hotel, resigned to eat whatever merde an establishment such as this would offer up for breakfast. Well, I’d completely underestimated the budget hoteliers of Paris. The buffet was an oasis of croissants, pain au chocolat and crunchy loaves of bread. Good simple food, real butter, lots of jams and wonderful bread. No toasters, because why would you toast such good bread? No sad-packaged anything. It made me wonder why we have such low expectations of what food can be. I’m not talking about in the cities, but in small rural towns. In crummy motels. Australia produces excellent-quality hard wheat, which is perfect for making bread. And yet, you can sit in a café in a town in the heart of the wheat belt and find nothing other than sliced white bread or that awful supermarket Turkish bread that is parbaked on the other side of the world. And that’s the fancy option. How can a terrible hotel in a nondescript neighbourhood of Paris offer bread of such outstanding quality, while we, we out in the country who actually grow wheat, are happy to put up with awful, mass-produced fast-rise cardboard for bread? Australian farmer Jane Smith, who lives on a sheep station east of Broken Hill, gives me hope. She regularly rises before the sun to bake sourdough loaves in her wood oven. Some she keeps, others she delivers to The Silly Goat café in Broken Hill. “I bake because I love the routine and constant challenge of trying to produce a better loaf,” says Jane. “Baking gives my life structure and requires organisation and planning. “On the mornings I deliver bread, I rise at 4.30am when the house is dark and still, and I’m completely alone and uninterrupted. It’s just me, the dough, the oven and a pot of tea. I quickly clear out the ashes from the oven, then methodically score each loaf with a razor blade. The loaves go into the oven and the door is slammed shut. All going to plan, the loaves come out half an hour later crusty and golden. “My immediate reward for the morning’s work is coffee and breakfast at the café once my delivery is complete. The long-term reward is in the connections that bread has created for me. Only recently, our lovely neighbours gifted me a large bag of baking flour, which was completely unexpected. The next time I baked, I left a fresh, warm loaf in their roadside mailbox as a thankyou gift.” And it’s with Jane in mind, as I fly home from Paris, that I think how lovely it would be to bake some good bread for my family and my neighbours. It may not be at the French frequency of every day. Probably more like once a week. But that would be a good start. Annabelle Hickson lives on a pecan farm in Dumaresq Valley. Follow @annabellehickson on Instagram. Read Jane Smith’s blog at theshadybaker.com or follow @theshadybaker on Instagram.