U Can't Touch This

Aside from doing the Chef’s Table, this week I’ve been working in the bread shop for the fancy-pantsiest of the fancy-pantsed restaurants at the hotel. The top guys are all French, while the bakers are Croatian and Moroccan, so most conversations involve some degree of charades, pointing and special effects noises to convey meaning.

It hasn’t been the most exciting rotation because, as the sweet young French guy in charge of me (whom I'll call M) put it, "I prefer you no touch ze bread." Hey, I can understand. If you’ve got someone paying $400 for a meal, you don’t want their dinner rolls to be gummy or crooked or anything but perfect. They have been very nice, however, in giving me the scraps to practice with, so I get to go off in a corner of the bakeshop and work on rolling and sealing and such.

As a bonus, M lets me bake off the scraps and then take them home (I have a freezer full of saffron brioche and basil focaccia and no, you can’t have any). So I do sometimes feel a little like a kindergartener, but to be honest, it could be much, much worse, since I’ve heard horror stories about externs getting locked in a basement doing nothing but peeling carrots for their entire externship.

And besides, on Thursday, when there was a sudden rush, the French guys all left the room to deal some, I dunno, quelle crisis! and the Croat guy tossed me a piece of dough with a wink and let me try doing the dinner roll for real. By the time the French guys came back, I had half a sheet tray done. M said "first time, very good" and, more importantly, allowed my little baguettini to be baked along with everyone else’s, and sent for service.

People were served bread I shaped! The thrills in my new life are odd, but no less satisfying than, say, seeing my name in print.

I love working with M whether I’m allowed to egg wash his pain au lait or simply told to stand and watch and not touch anything, because M is very, very special to me. He is the first left-handed baker I have ever met. Now, this may not sound like a big deal, but trust me, when you are trying to learn a skill to which you do not come naturally, trying to learn it from someone who is other-handed makes the task that much more difficult. So, within seconds of watching him shape a baguette, I realized that all along it had felt so foreign to me because I was moving my hands in the wrong direction as I made the bottom seam. Duh!

Working with M also has its moments of hilarity. He is just off the boat, or the plane, as the case may be, and only moved here from France a couple weeks ago. Sometimes he’ll tell me to get something, using the French word, and when I say I don’t understand, he’ll repeat it, louder, which makes me laugh. Or there was the time when I asked where to put my tools, my very first day there, and he said "on ze floor."

"On the floor?" I asked, thinking I hadn’t heard right. No way could the cleanliness-obsessed French tell someone, even a student, to put her tools on the floor.

M made a pained expression and said "on ze... floor. ze fleur... put it on ze flo-o-or. Ze flow-er. Flow-er. Flour."

Oh, I realized, put it on the flour, as in the bag of flour under the sheeter. I said ok and did so, but M still stood there, repeating the word as if to retrain his Gallic mouth muscles.

"Floo-or. Floooo-or. Flour."

This went on for more than a minute.

Then there was the time he stepped out to go to the bathroom, he said. When he came back, looking very concerned, he gestured out the door, the way he had come, and asked the Croat baker "Hey, how many time you touch?"

We stared at him.

"This week, how many time you touch?" he asked again, a little more urgently.

We were all thinking the same thing, the Moroccan, the Croat and I, which was, what the hell? Weren’t you just in the bathroom? What were you doing there? No wait, don’t tell us.

"In two weeks, how many time you touch?" M demanded. "Me? One thousand. You?"

The Croat, who is saucy to begin with, lost it at this point and began howling with laughter, suggesting that if M was "touching" a thousand times every two weeks, perhaps he had a problem and needed a girlfriend.

It took about ten minutes to decode M’s Frenglish and figure out he had gone, on the way back from the bathroom, to pick up his first paycheck and, having miscalculated his wages based on the exchange rate, found it to be smaller than expected. I’ve since learned that "touch" is his default verb, which slips in whenever the verb he wants eludes him, usually without him realizing it. "How much do you earn?" become "How many time you touch?"

Of course, while M grumbled the rest of the day about being able to earn more in France working fewer hours (he puts in at least 12 a day here), every five minutes the quiet of the bakery was interrupted with a chuckling Croatian purr asking no one in particular "Hey, this week, how many time you touch? Me? Thousand times."