The workroom where pain bouilli is mixed showing the wooden mixing tubs.

The story of Pain Bouilli, the traditional bread of the villages around Villar d’Aréne in the French Haute Alpes, is an incredible one. From the 18th century until 1960 the villagers baked bread once a year in late fall. The bread is the story of a fantastically close relationship between the people of the area and their environment. The bread was made out of the rye they grew in their high mountain fields. Because wood was scarce they could not afford to repeatedly fire the bread oven. The cool dry mountain air preserved the bread in a dessicated state — and so it was possible to get by with a single annual firing.

Pain Bouilli was thus inextricably tied to the unusual circumstnaces of the isolated life the high mountains. As we no longer associate rye bread with France it comes as a surprise to find a French bread that is identical in all ways to rye breads made in Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and the other rye areas of Northern Europe.

In this detail view of the mixing tub and tools you can get a sense, first, for the amount of bread baked at one time. I think it worth noting the amount of dough left on the sides of the tub and on the tools.

This is a photograph of the mixing room in Villar d’Aréne taken in 2002. This room is adjacent to the oven. The room itself is rich in yeasts and the kind of bacteria that sour leavening requires. The wooden troughs are clean, but a film of flour from the previous baking remains on their sides, enough to help inoculate the next batch of flour. The last traditional baking was in the early 1960s. After a lapse of some years a modern baking tradition has been established. The bread is now baked as part of a village festival at the end of November. It is the same bread, but, of course, it is not the same bread. The ties to the bread that were formed by dependence on the weather, the immense labor of growing the rye on steep fields, the relationship with the local miller, the cutting and hauling of wood to the oven are, of course, no longer part of the baking. And the ultimate tie — that of necessity — is also missing. The contemporary Pain Bouilli is not a staple. The local residents freeze the bread so they can eat it fresh throughout the year. I say all this not out of nostalgia for back-breaking, life-shortening labor, or out of nostalgia for the limited diet of poor mountain villagers, but only as a reminder that our relationship to food is different from that of subsistence farmers and that this Pain Bouilli is something that we can only visit at a distance because none of us are any longer enmeshed in the social context in which the bread was made.

What is so interesting about Pain Boiuilli is that the bread is so tied to the historic circumstances of the village where it was made that in many respects the recipe can no longer be recreated. Our sweat will not be in the bread we bake, nor our dependence on a single annual baking. To read about the bread and to learn the recipe in its finest detail, read Marcel Maget’s Le pain anniversaire a Vilard d’Arene en Oisans, published by Editions des Archives Contemporanies, Paris, 1978.

But a great deal can be learned by making this bread — and the full description in Maget’s book illucidates details baking in a wood fired bread oven that have rarely, if ever, been previously recorded.

Bouilli means “boiled” in the mountain dialect of Villar d’Aréne. While using boiling water is not the one single standard practice in the Northern European rye belt — it is one practice — so this recipe both gives you an historic French bread — but also a bread of Northern Europe.

Historically, the flour for this bread would have been milled shortly before it was baked. Fresh milling does make a difference to the taste. The preferred flour is freshly ground rye flour that is sifted to remove the coarser bran and impurities. You should sift out 25% of the bran and impurities by weight.

The recipe, reduced to a baker’s formula is as follows:

Rye flour at 75% extraction, 100%. Water heated to a simmer, 50%. Salt is discretionary. Mix 1/3 of the flour with all of the water. Stir this batter until it is thoroughly mixed, and then cover and let rest for 11.5 hours in a warm place. Remove the cover and add another 1/3 portion of the flour. If working by hand with a large quantity of dough, use your fists and forearms. When the flour is thoroughly mixed, slowly add the remaining flour. This makes an exceedingly stiff dough. Marcel Maget goes into great detail to explain how to add the flour when working by hand with large quantities of dough. If working with large quantities of dough, divide the dough into smaller units, and work each one, and then bring them all together and knead into a smooth homogeneous mass. This mixing period takes 4.5 hours when done in the quantities desccribed in Maget’s book. When working with small quantities of dough it will not take nearly so long. When mixed, smooth out the surface, and cover. If you spent 4.5 hours mixing a large quantity of dough, then let it rest 11 hours. If you spent thirty minutes mixing a smaller amount of dough, then let it rest 15 hours. The total time from when you begin mixing until the following step where the loaves are formed should be approximately 15.5 hours. After the dough is rested, form into brick-like loaves. Maget describes loaves weighing 10 to 11 pounds (10 et 11 livres). Of course, you may make smaller loaves if you wish. After forming the loaves let them sit 45 minutues to an hour before baking. A bread 10 to 11 pounds takes approximately 6 hours to bake at approximately 350F. Smaller loaves take less time, but as this is a dense bread, I don’t advise any baking time less than 2 hours.

If you don’t work with baker’s formula, then a three-pound loaf — going into the oven — is made with 2 pounds of flour and 1 pound of water (.91kg flour, .45 kg water).

As with all bread made with 100% rye flour, let the dough rest for at least a day before serving, and ideally let it rest two or three days. The flavor will improve for at least a week, and the flavor will hold for approximately one month. The villagers of Villar d’Aréne now freeze the bread after it is baked so it is always “fresh.” I find that cutting it into thin slices and drying them in the oven provides a wonderful cracker — and a ready source of dried bread to use in a variety of recipes. Drying the bread to preserve it is also in keeping with the original tradition of Pain Bouilli.