My name is Uliks Fehmiu. The guys on the previous page are my friends and my partners. Former and present. We have known each other for most of our lives, and now they have entrusted me to write a book about the bread that kept us together through the good times and bad.
Pain d’Avignon is an artisanal bakery that started on Cape Cod and expanded to New York City. We baked our first loaf of bread in 1992. At the time, we had no professional training. Not one of us had worked a single day in any other bakery but our own. And yet, now, we provide bread to restaurants with three Michelin stars, high-end hotels, and specialty food stores. We are among the pioneers of artisan bread baking in the Northeast.
I’ve wanted to be an actor since I was five years old, when I first visited my father’s movie set in Rome. He was filming a melodrama called
The Last Snow of the Spring. I was spellbound by the set, the people, the energy, and his beautiful costar, the Italian actress Agostina Belli. It was a new world, a different world that excited me endlessly. Years later, I decided to apply to the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, despite my father being hesitant and warning me of the perils of an actor’s life: “You will always depend on others; you will never be your own boss like a painter or a sculptor. In theater and especially in the movies, you are just a color on someone else’s palette. Your work? It can be altered over and over again by others,” he explained. It was unpredictable. It was unstable. It was not secure. Every time we had this conversation, he would end it with the same anecdote.
When he was ten years old, he had apprenticed with a shoemaker. He learned how to stitch the fabric, meld the sole, stretch the leather, and polish the shoe. He knew how to use his hands to
make something. He had a skill that he could always depend on, a trade that would always support him. No matter the circumstance, he could depend on himself. “If you learn a craft, you will never be hungry,” he advised. “Learn to do something with your hands.”
I was sure my father had no idea how to make shoes, and that this was one of those exaggerated lectures parents give in an attempt to scare their child away from something. Of course, I did not listen. In 1988, I began attending the Faculty of Dramatic Arts. I eventually became a professional actor and worked alongside my then girlfriend, now wife, Snežana, in theater and film. But, as it turned out, by the early ’90s, the world we had always known collapsed. The Yugoslavian War was tearing our home apart. So, Snežana and I decided to leave the country and our careers in protest of the war.
We arrived in a new country that was unknown to us, and where I did not speak the language. Acting could no longer support us. We needed to find a way to survive, and in a strange string of events, I found myself learning how to do something with my hands. Circumstance pushed me to learn the craft of bread making so I wouldn’t go hungry. Back then, I saw it as a skill for survival that I could always depend on. I had yet to discover it as an art.
The fact that my friends and I somehow opened a bakery upon arriving in America with no prior knowledge of the craft still surprises people today, but that it all began in as unlikely a place as Cape Cod shocks them even more. What were a bunch of twenty- something kids from Yugoslavia doing baking bread on the Cape? We had zero experience in baking, not to mention in running a business. Necessity, luck, naivete all played a role.
Our hope is that, despite our unconventional path—or perhaps because of it—you will take advantage of the knowledge we have acquired through trial and error, the generosity of passionate bread bakers, and our own desire to bake the very best loaf of bread.
Ideally, our recipes and techniques will take you confidently on your own bread baking adventure. But let’s hope it is less of an odyssey than it was for us and more of a grand tour. The methods we’ve developed have helped us survive—and thrive—for over twenty-five years. Not only have we learned how to run a business and create something that we are proud of, but most important, we have found our home.
I often walk through our bakery, looking at the breads on the shelves, and wonder, “Is this real? Do we really know how to make bread? Is this an accident?” And then, I close my eyes. I take a loaf in my hands. I squeeze it. The crust is dark and thick and thin and crackly. I rip it apart. I bite into it. The interior is silky and moist. It’s so good. I open my eyes. And I no longer wonder.
The last Yugoslavian war ended over twenty years ago, but at the time of this writing, it seems that the nationalism that fueled it was never vanquished. The fear of the “other” is still present and is used by those in power to stay there indefinitely. Instead of nurturing diversity and inclusivity, humanity is heading toward fear of the other and further separation and isolation. We thought that America was immune to this disease, at least internally. I hope we were not wrong.
I’d like to think that a good loaf of bread has the power to bring—and keep—people together, wherever they may be. That is certainly the case for us, now that we call the US our adopted home. Because home is wherever you break—or in our case bake—bread together.
Copyright © 2022 by Uliks Fehmiu with Kathleen Hackett; Foreword by Chef Mario Carbone. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
