The Gift of Bread

Francis H. (Frank) Cabot

Related stories:

A Visit to Quebec

The Mill on the Rémy

Boulangerie La Rémy

The Meteorite

A Quebec Story

Frank Cabot: A Man with a Passion

The taste of a madeleine crumbled in a spoonful of tea suddenly brought back to Proust whole sections of his past previously hidden from his consciousness and In Search of Lost Time was born. Stretching things a bit, it could be argued that Frank Cabot whom I met during a recent trip to La Malbaie, Charlevoix County (Central Quebec), had the opposite experience. He recalled vividly how life was in the area in the twenties and thirties ("Food-wise it was a paradise, just like France. But everything changed after World War II. Nothing tasted the same afterwards") and what he wanted back was that taste.

Moved by a deep affection for Charlevoix County where his family has been living/summering for nine generations, and very much aware of the fact that, in this corner of the North Shore of the Saint-Lawrence River , the past was being erased not only from the culture but also from the landscape, Frank and his wife Anne founded Heritage Charlevoix, a land trust whose sole raison d'être was to preserve the county's heritage by buying and restoring its old buildings. One of the buildings thus saved from neglect and ultimately destruction was the "moulin de la Rémy" (the mill on the Rémy River) in Baie-Saint-Paul, 50 km (31 miles) south of La Malbaie.

Moulin de la Rémy, today fully restored and in operation

See The Mill on the Rémy

The building hadn't been selected at random. Mills make flour and flour makes bread and bread is more than a basic necessity. It reflects a culture and its traditions. The cardboard bread to which the area was becoming addicted bore no relation to the fragrant loaves which Frank remembered. Along with some of its landmark buildings and vestiges of the past, what Frank and Anne Cabot wanted to restore to the region was good bread.

Boulangerie La Rémy

They found a beautiful old farm building in a nearby village, bought it, had it transported next to the mill and transformed into a bakery (with housing upstairs for the bakers). Equipped with two brick wood- fire ovens and using flour milled at the mill, Boulangerie de la Rémy now produces up to 420 loaves a week in season. Customers flock in throughout the day, some of them coming from as far as Quebec City to stock on bread, viennoiseries and flour.

See

Boulangerie La Rémy

The bread of yesteryear is back in Charlevoix County but the golden loaves which come flying out of the door are not necessarily the same as the ones Frank remembers from his childhood. Whether or not hazelnut-cranberry bread or crunchy baguettes were made in Baie-Saint-Paul before World War II doesn't matter though. More than the actual taste of bread, what Frank wanted to give modern days inhabitants of the county is a taste for the real thing, so that they would care enough to support local artisan bakers and they do. There are other bakeries in the area, some of which may have pre-existed Boulangerie de la Rémy, and more are opening up. Bread is multiplying and Frank and Anne can only wonder and rejoice. They certainly had a hand in this miracle.

For all practical info regarding the mill and/or the bakery, please refer to the Moulin de la Rémy's website.

Frank Cabot: A Man with a Passion

Photo by Richard W. Brown

Reproduced by courtesy of Frank Cabot

Related stories:

A Visit to Quebec

The Gift of Bread

The Mill on the Rémy

Boulangerie La Rémy

The Meteorite

A Quebec Story

A man with a cause (see

The Gift of Bread

) is generally a man with a passion. Frank Cabot is no exception. Bringing good bread back to Charlevoix County was a worthwhile cause and he made sure he achieved his goal, spurred on by his wife's unfailing enthusiasm and support. But he isn't a bread warrior. For him, the bread issue is part of a larger rescue operation: preserving the legacy of the past in the county. His true passion lies in creating gardens.

A self-proclaimed romantic when it comes to landscape and food, Frank became a gardener when he married Anne Perkins, herself fascinated with plants. Their garden at Les Quatre Vents in La Malbaie, Quebec, has been acclaimed as one of the most beautiful gardens in North America. It wouldn't belong on this baker's blog however except for the link between Frank, Anne and

Boulangerie La Rémy

.

I first met Frank through the book he wrote about his garden's history, The Greater Perfection: The Story of the Gardens at Les Quatre Vents, a fair portion of which can be read online courtesy of Google Books. (For the passionate gardeners among you who simply must have the book despite its cost, please note that Hortus Press sells it for less money than amazon.com).

The Greater Perfection - which Frank calls the garden's own autobiography - makes for lovely reading (a friend lent it to me and I couldn't tear myself away) and when I met Frank and had a chance to hear him talk about the mill and the bakery, I was struck by the similarity between his approach to bread as part of the larger culture and his conception of the garden as part of the larger natural landscape. He clearly knows where Man stands in Nature. He is also very aware of the fact that for a society to keep its identity overtime, the Past must leaven the Present. The same holds true for a person or for a garden.

Les Quatre-Vents was 75 years in the making and while very much bearing the signature of its current owners, it clearly remembers the previous generations: the horizontal lines that anchor the house to the landscape, the tree-lined drive up to the house, the carpet of plain green lawn, the framed vista of the distant hills, all were dreamed up by previous stewards of the land.

I like to imagine Frank looking at it as one looks at a photo album, recalling loved ones, distant countries, reluctant plants, forgotten memories but wondering at the blank pages waiting to be filled. What will they hold? Who will browse through them?

Anxious that the garden should continue to exist and not "deteriorate once the shadow of its patron no longer hovers, until it becomes what French writer Colette referred to as "le débris d'un rêve" (the remnants of a dream)", Frank and Anne have put in place a legal mechanism, the Charlevoix Trust, that will carry it into the final quarter of this century. To their deep satisfaction, their son Colin has agreed to take responsibility for Les Quatre-Vents when his turn comes. Again this doesn't have much to do with bread and yet in my mind, there is a link.

When I feed my levain, morning and night, inhaling the complex and rustic fragrance of the freshly milled grains, I feel my hands come alive with the gestures of countless generations of women who have been baking bread in my family over the centuries. When our grand-children help with the scaling and mixing or simply when they tear eagerly into the loaves I make for them, I know that, on another continent and in a different language, they are acquiring the taste of bread and, beyond bread, being handed a thread of their past to weave into their present and their future. It feels right. I imagine that, on a much larger scale, Frank and Anne have the same feeling when they look back at what they have achieved.

For all practical info regarding the mill and/or the bakery, please refer to the Moulin de la Rémy's website.