COUPE

A few years after I joined the bakers at King Arthur, Jeffrey encouraged me to try out for Team USA, which would compete at the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie. The Coupe, as we call it, is the world cup of bread and truly the highest summit in competitive baking. Team members are superheroes in the baking world—we raise them and praise them and they deserve it. Dubbed the “bread Olympics” by my kids, the Coupe occurs every four years in Paris. I knew the multiyear effort required, and when I considered family needs, the time away from home, and, honestly, my own short experience with the trade, I didn’t feel ready. But, returning from Italy, I was in a different place; the Coupe felt like the right race, the right motivation to force me to become something bigger and better even if, when I put my toe on the line, I couldn’t be sure of finishing.

I quietly submitted the initial application with the required formulas, pictures, and recommendations and a healthy serving of “Who knows,” “Why not?” and “Let’s see what happens.” When asked by friends, family, and colleagues what I was up to, I was sheepish, hesitant even to mention my Coupe bid. It was a long shot of half-court proportions, a bold move that suggested a confidence that did not exist. Still, I threw myself into every detail—I made beautiful breads; Julia Reed took gorgeous pictures; and I received recommendations from Jeffrey, James McGuire, and my friend Richard Miscovich, three of the best bakers in my world. I made a deal with myself, committing to the ideal that, win, lose, or draw, I would come out on top, as the training would force me to continue growing and challenging myself to be a better baker, deepening my relationship with my craft. And so I was off, moving at quite a clip.

I was accepted and scheduled for a slot at the semifinals in Providence, Rhode Island. I became a machine, training as I would for a long race, logging piles of miles each week. I looked everywhere to find inspiration for flavors and shapes, but also worked at the basics, making baguettes every day for weeks on end. I built countless spreadsheets with eight-hour schedules, dividing mock competition days into ten-minute blocks, each booked with overlapping processes. Mix this, scale that, get water for this, divide that, shape those, bake this one, chill this dough, and on and on: eight hours with one four-minute break in order to complete the necessary number of loaves and rolls on time without penalty. I haven’t worked in a hospital, but I imagine the complexity there to be something akin to this scenario. Multiple patients ring the call button all at once, all day. I will be right with you! You can wait . . . room three is in arrest! Crap, am I burning something? Managing these separate processes was a new skill set and entirely different from simply making breads with innovative forms and flavors. But it’s all part of a successful bid.

I headed to Providence after an ice age of preparation during which my knack for obsessing and working was on full display. By the time I stood in the actual competition space, I had completed enough practice runs that the order of events was second nature. I was organized down to the smallest details; my dough containers and tools were packed like science experiments headed to a space lab, stacked in reverse order of use, with nothing overlooked. The timed one-hour setup went so smoothly that I was sure I must have missed something as I completed it in record time and headed to day two and the full eight-hour period feeling perfect. If I had enjoyed a little celebration after I left that night it would have been good, because after the following full competition day there would be no dancing.

There were mistakes and flubs that I had never made before, I was behind on my timings for the first time since my early practices, and the nail in the coffin was some bum yeast, which left me with baguettes that mostly failed and other loaves that didn’t rise well. To say that I felt horrible doesn’t quite sum it up. My family, friends, and colleagues had supported me endlessly—a poor performance reflected poorly on the quality of support I had received. I was ashamed. After packing and cleaning I sat dejected in the car for what seemed like hours. The dark lot was empty and windswept, a perfect match for my mood.

But I wasn’t the only one who struggled—it is damn hard to walk into a new bakery with different mixers and oven, with a foreign arrangement of benches and sinks, and perform at the top of one’s capability. And this is exactly the point—the person chosen for Paris would need to do exactly this, but under even more difficult conditions. This is stressful, even painful—bakers bake for beauty and flavor, and when either one is suffering, so are we. During the six-week wait for the announcement of the finals I decided to pretend (or at least prepare for the possibility) that I was going to them. The time gap between the announcement and the contest would be very short; if any of us wanted to show different breads we would need to begin the long development and practice process immediately in order to have a shot. Names were announced in a bland e-mail that offered thanks to all who had worked so hard, and there, written on the page, was my name . . . I was going on!

If the pace of preparation and focus had been intense before, I turned the dial on the amplifier up to eleven. I needed a new lineup of more innovative, more beautiful shapes, with flavor combinations that perfectly harmonized grains, fermentation, and additions; and I needed all of this immediately.

Bakers are largely traditionalists. We like our innovation in bits; small bites of change spread on large slices of tradition. I think of the Japanese Kaiseki master, Chef Murata, who advises us to look with one eye forward to innovation and with the other back to tradition. I searched high and low for this balance, but nothing would stick. . . . Everything I created was too cerebral, too planned, too conscious. I found new combinations, techniques, and shapes, but nothing felt honest or truly organic. If my creations were blocks stacked one atop another, the tower always leaned; it was ungrounded and tentative. I was flailing in this space, lost, spinning my wheels, worrying as days fell off the calendar and the time remaining before the finals disappeared rapidly.

Reaching out for help, I called Chef Mitch Stamm, an instructor in the baking and pastry department at Johnson & Wales University. I had known Mitch for years. He had seen me teach and speak to young bakers, he understood my heart’s connection to my craft, and he had been one of my judges at the semifinals. It was just like Mitch to recommend Black Elk Speaks. He is connected to the heart and soul of what we do. After some coaxing and apologetic hesitancy on his part, he said it; he identified the thing that I was trying to find. In his Alabama drawl he said, “Martin, the breads were good but you weren’t in them; they weren’t you. You need to add your heritage, your narrative.” And that was it. With his simple reminder and direction I saw everything from a different angle. I now had a guide, something to direct me, a mantra, a road sign. We have but one story, you and I. It is the closest, most powerful material we can access; our heart is in this space, it is where we live, it’s what we come from. In order to get to this place I tossed everything and began anew.

And when I restarted, I began with home, looking for things that resonated, combining ingredients from long ago with my home of today. There is sweet and there is bitter, whole wheat and white, molasses and salt, all of it going into the bowl. Here is some of what I found.

Frances Harriet Chamberlin, daughter of Martin Chamberlin, was born in the 1880s in Chapin, New York, and wed Samuel Rainey, an Episcopalian priest who was the son of an Irish immigrant from Rhode Island. Momie, as she was known, was the baker, host, and cook that her position required. Ready to soothe or celebrate with a pie or a pot of soup, a loaf of brown bread, or fresh doughnuts, Momie was quite a baker. Momie’s daughter, Carolyn, was my grandmother and passed Momie’s recipe for brown bread down to me, lines of script from her sweet hand, on a recipe card. Brown bread, a staple in Irish communities in New England, was traditionally made with equal parts of rye, cornmeal, and whole wheat flour with a touch of molasses. It was soda-leavened and steamed in coffee cans. My grandmother preferred it baked rather than steamed, and that is the version I came to know.