If this were any other year, dear friends, I’d have a veritable book in me tonight. I like to celebrate my heroes in a manner that befits them, and if ever there were a hero who deserved celebration, it would be Lionel Poilâne, the two-fisted champion of the great, grand, long-fermented, darkly-baked French sourdough loaf. If I had my own way, I would drop about 5,000 words about those loaves, and about the bakery at 8 rue de Cherche-Midi from which they emerge; about the global business he built, sending fresh miches to bread lovers around the world via FedEx, about the bread-dough-based working chandelier he made for his good friend Salvador Dali, and about the anonymous New York customer who paid him $100,000 in 1997 to deliver a loaf of bread a week to his children and grandchildren for the rest of their lives. It is a grand story of a grand life, but, time-pressed as I am, I cannot tell it tonight.
What I can do is share a few links with you, and ask you to take a moment on this festive night to remember M. Poilâne and his wife, Iréna, who died five years ago today, when the helicopter M. Poilâne was piloting crashed off the coast of Brittany. Their daughters are carrying on the family business. Even if you are not a breadhead, or if you are not a fan of big dark rustic loaves, even if a trip to Paris is not in your immediate future or if you have no plans to mail-order a loaf of pain Poilâne, please do consider following the links; if you do, you will find captivating and inspiring thoughts from a baker I still miss, and still mourn.
Discover Paris’s obituary for Lionel Poilâne
A 2001 interview with Lionel Poilâne in Fast Company
A remarkable interview with M. Poilâne in the Stars and Perfumes column in Osmoz
A truly lovely essay by Lynelle Scott-Aitken in the Sydney Morning Herald