The goods arrayed in the window of Poilâne’s unassuming little storefront in the sixth arrondissement are typical of what you’ll find at any bakery in Paris: pains au chocolat, tartes aux pommes, small shortbread cookies called punitions. But proudly set out on a green turf mat, next to 11 cookies arranged in a 3-4-3, sits the real pièce de résistance: a full-sized regulation soccer ball, complete with light and dark panels, and made of nothing but bread.
A delicious World Cup discovery: SOCCER BREAD
Soccer is the food of life in more ways than one.
The store has been there since 1932 and has seen the neighborhood gentrify, the buildings transforming from monasteries and convents to a row of fashionable shops and eateries. Inside, the front room is tiny but warm, large enough for maybe a dozen people to crowd in if they don’t mind some uncomfortable touching between strangers. To the right, more punitions, along with smaller sliced loaves and jars of jam. To the left, several rows of enormous sourdough rounds, the top shelves displaying lavishly decorated crusts, including one designed, again, like a soccer ball. There are soccer ball punitions as well, for sale in plastic sleeves or by weight. In the window display, the punitions look like pawns gathered around the throne of the queen of the bakery, the bread ball.
Simply calling it a bread ball is to do it a disservice; it’s a dense, solid ball of milk bread that requires a custom cast-iron mold to create. Lugging it around requires a commitment to hauling a dead weight of at least a good three or four pounds, while resisting the temptation to dropkick the thing into the sky. As I was fortunate enough to be gifted one of the balls, I had the chance to taste it, and it is possibly the most fortifying bread in existence. This is not the kind of bread that leaves you hungry half an hour later; it is close-textured and filling, the perfect foil for a smear of jam or cheese, and it will sit solidly inside of your stomach while you tramp up and down the steps of a stadium or wander for miles through narrow stone-paved streets.
At a café a few blocks over from her bakery, owner Apollonia Poilâne tells me they prefer to bake several of the balls at once in their vintage wood-fire oven, because the completely enclosed nature of the mold means they never know if they’ll get a good result until they actually crack it open. Even though they’ve been making the balls for 21 years now, there’s still an element of uncertainty.
The balls originated as a collaboration between the French sculptor César Baldaccini and Apollonia’s father, Lionel Poilâne, during the run up to the 1998 World Cup, hosted in, and eventually won by, France. One of César’s enormous metal sculptures stands close to the bakery on Rue du Cherche-Midi, a centaur-like man with — clear as day — two big metal balls dangling from his horse end. It’s clear that Poilâne is a place that welcomes artists; in the office just off the front room, paintings of Poilâne’s bread line three of the four walls, starting around waist-high and stretching to the tall ceiling. The fourth wall is dominated by an elaborately detailed frosted glass window allowing anyone in the back office to peek out and see the customers lined up for the day. Pierre Poilâne, Apollonia’s grandfather, used to let art students barter the paintings for his bread, although today many artists simply send in paintings and sculptures gratis, inspired by the quality of Poilâne’s bread.
If the art students honed their technique by painting bread, Lionel and César were also students, practicing their technique to create new bread. And, like students, there was much trial and error at first. “My father and César made a first mold that didn’t quite fit the entrance to the oven,” says Apollonia, “So they had to remove a part of the entrance of the oven and a few other technical details which were not details when they were being done, obviously. And the first soccer ball’s dough was so strong and powerful that the mold itself came apart in the oven and almost destroyed the oven.”
It’s not that Lionel or César were soccer (apologies, football) fans, exactly; at least, not to Apollonia’s recollection. “My father and him had in common an interest in doing funky things where they would just be excited about doing something in a different way than what most did. And I think soccer must have been one of those objects of that, that filled that box,” she says.
Apollonia doesn’t particularly engage with soccer either, but she understands it. Soccer, like food, brings people together. It builds and strengthens communities. It’s nourishment — sometimes bland, sometimes indulgent, but always elementary. Before 1998, Apollonia viewed soccer as something they talked about on the news as a place where hooligans engaged in violence. “The image of it was, soccer equals people who are absolutely extreme in their behaviors,” she says. But after the creation of the ball, she understands better how soccer, like baking, is something that brings out the fundamental joys of existence in people. It’s part of why she likes that France is hosting another World Cup, even if she’s still not a huge fan of the sport. For her, she gets to enjoy both sides of her Franco-American heritage, especially with the United States and France heavily expected to clash in the quarterfinals. And she has the opportunity to learn about other countries and footballing cultures, in a different, healthier context than the hooligan news reports of her youth.
“In doing this collaboration with an artist,” she reminisces, “It wasn’t only about a fun experience between a business owner and a few bakers and an artist. It was also discovering the passions of the different members of our team and therefore creating some meeting ground. I love that soccer ball because it actually brought out different interests [in our team] with that same passion in common for the product, for the know-how, and that’s what’s remarkable.”
As Apollonia describes how the bread ball is a marriage of craft and science, it becomes clearer and clearer she could just as easily be talking about soccer. She nods understandingly when I explain the current VAR controversy to her, and how it seems to be leeching the soul from the game. “Sometimes if you practice the science behind some of the baking,” she says, “you take off a little bit of the magic of bread baking. But there’s more magic to it anyways because the ingredients are so intrinsically linked with our environment, literally the weather it is outside, that it’s never quite exactly the same.”
Soccer, too, is a combination of technical perfection and loving artistry. The great players are able to blend the two seamlessly, so that the first touch, the dribble, the through ball become the brush strokes on a canvas that, over 90 minutes, reveal the introspective power of a Frida Kahlo or the unflinching disruption of an Artemisia Gentileschi or the masterful synthesis and adaptation of a Lois Mailou Jones.
Take 11 players. Put them in the same formation with the same game plan. Little variations — an imperfect move here, an environmental factor there — will accumulate over time. You can start 10 games the same way and get 10 different results; you can mix the dough the same way 10 times and get 10 different loaves. A 10 percent change in humidity can sway a game or ruin a rise. Practice the technical elements, learn the rules, but leave room for magic. In the words of Yuki Nagasato, soccer needs your heart and humanity too.
“What I love about my craft,” says Apollonia, “is that you have a clear idea of the parameters at large, but fine-tuning it to make it the most perfect product takes experience, takes know-how, and attention to detail. And of course a lot of love and passion for the craft.”
She explains that several of her employees who are good at baking loaves are soccer fans, and so one of them made something that combined their loves: the sourdough round with the soccer ball design on top. It is as glisteningly majestic as any showstopper that a frantic baker on the Great British Bake Off has had a panic attack over.
“I think for me, whether it’s sports or food, it’s about bringing people together,” she says. “There’s this French word that I love to refer to because I find it just so powerful and so significant: the word copain. It’s the person with whom you share bread. It’s a buddy, it’s a friend; you can use it in all sorts of contexts.” We aren’t just fans, sitting in the stands together, our gasps and groans timed exactly to the fortunes of 22 painters on a grass canvas. We are copains, people deliberately sharing something together. Like the breaking of bread, once we have all taken into ourselves a piece of a larger whole, there is an expectation of commiseration, of shared generosity, of community.
Apollonia does not let me leave our interview empty-handed; she hands me a large bag stuffed with brioche loaves and a hefty sack of punitions. The sack contains the generosity of a host, the proud display of an artisan, the concern of someone who has made it her literal business to feed many, many people. I’m not sure if this puts us on the level of copain, but we’ve shared bread, and a little soccer, and so at the very least there’s an English word for that: friends.
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