Tastes, or maybe just particular foods, evoke home for me. Pimento cheese and barbeque means North Carolina in general; peanuts, peeled apples and honey my grandfather, pound cake my grandmother, creamed mints and cheese sticks are Elkin. It goes on.
Yesterday, however, here in Paris, I went home in the 11th arrondisement where the bakery, L’Autre Boulange, sits at 43 rue Montreuill. It is the place where an NC State professor of Philosophy spent a sabbatical learning about true sourdough bread maybe twenty years ago. From him I got the starter I use weekly in making bread. Unsure of the details of its real origin, this is as close to seeing its birthplace as I might get. In my battered French, I managed to make it clear that I knew David, and that I baked with the levain imported from their bakery. Peggy, the daughter of the couple David studied under, nodded. It’s been over fifteen years, I said, conscious that my measure hardly registered next to their generations.
The place itself equates tools with decorations, blends handcrafted breads into backgrounds of rubble walls, and stripes its whitewash with extra long bannetons (the linen lined baskets where breads do their final rise). You could almost smell the passage of time in the decades of crust.
Does this mean I can call Paris a home?
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