Food
Bee Wilson digs deep to buy Poilane
Published 25 November 2002
It's the world's most delicious bread, but you'll need plenty of dough
Lionel Poilane, the baker who died in a helicopter crash off the coast of Brittany on 31 October, aged 57, was Salvador Dali's favourite Frenchman. Like many others, including Charles de Gaulle and Robert de Niro, Dali was addicted to the resilient, blackened sourness of PoIlane's famous bread, and in the 1970s created a whole suite of furniture from loaves of Pain Poilane, including a sourdough chandelier complete with electrical fittings.
But Poilane didn't need Dali to turn his product into art. It was art already, this huge, earthy circle of sustenance, with its scored, floury top, which PoIlane had learnt how to make under his father's tutelage from the age of 14. Pain Poilane was the only bread that could challenge the iconic status of the baguette in France. It smells of the fire and tastes of the soil and consists of just four ingredients: the finest wheat flour, Breton sea salt, yeast and water from a well.
The French are right to mourn Monsieur Poilane, who never compromised his signature loaf and who was so purist that he even regretted being persuaded to sell croissants and tarts in his shops in addition to bread. He was also a philosopher and historian of bread, having collected more than 2,000 books on the subject.
At nearly £10 a loaf when purchased in Britain, from either Waitrose or the Poilane shop in Belgravia, Pain Poilane may sound like Marie Antoinette-ish frippery. For any other loaf of bread, £10 would be obscene. But for 1.9 kilos of dense nourishment that will last for a week and make every meal at which the loaf is produced, however frugal, a kind of feast, it looks less unreasonable. Once you have seen the charms of Pain Poilane, you can understand the New York millionaire who paid Poilane $100,000 to ensure that his children and grandchildren would receive a loaf of his bread every week for the rest of their lives.
Some foods are straightforwardly cheap (such as dried pasta, herrings or lentils). Some are straightforwardly expensive (such as white truffles or Dover sole). But many others fit into the more ambiguous categories of the cheap end of expensive, and the expensive end of cheap. Cheap-expensive foods, like cut-price champagne, are almost always objectively bad value: cut-price supermarket fillet steak, the fattier slices of badly farmed smoked salmon. Expensive-cheap foods, on the other hand, can be superb value - for example, the old trick of buying underrated cuts of meat from the very finest butchers: breast of lamb or liver from Selfridge's food hall. In this category I would also place bread of the Poilane calibre, because for the cost of a junky takeaway pizza you can briefly make your table the equal of the finest in the world.
I am currently suffering withdrawal symptoms from a dark crusty loaf of boule de meule. It came from a rare trip to Baker and Spice in Queen's Park, north-west London, and cost £3.60, which seemed a lot, until we discovered that for as long as the bread was in the house, we were happy to accompany it with nothing but butter, soup, the odd slice of Parma ham and fruit. Every chewy mouthful was a pleasure. We felt healthier. It even made Lurpak Spreadable taste like Beurre Escure. The minute I had finished eating bread for supper, I would be looking forward to having more for breakfast.
Baker and Spice, which has been purveying its excellent baked wares - such as dreamy £2 almond-chocolate croissants - for the past seven years, would be a nationally protected institution if it were French. Instead, the shop has just been kicked out of its main branch in Walton Street, Knightsbridge, by the Wellcome Trust. No one has made much of a fuss. But then, we are not a nation that appreciates the art of expensive-cheap food.
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