17. Milk, Bread, Butter, Chocolate
It was one of my more notable detours in a lifetime of impractical diversions on the road.
Last summer, on the way from Lourdes to the airport in Biarritz, I made a hasty exit north off the A63 for Bayonne, a riverside city in the Pays Basque, just inland from the glittering beaches of the Atlantic coast. In truth, the whole route had been a detour. Good sense would have dictated that I fly out of Pau that day, which was much closer both to Lourdes and to where I had been staying for a week on the edge of the Pyrénées. Plus, I was not overly eager to pass through hordes of chi-chi vacationers inching through airport traffic on a summer evening on the Côte Basque, of which Biarritz was the de facto capital. Although I risked being late for the 8 p.m. flight to Paris—the first leg of my trip back home—this was no ordinary pitstop. I could anticipate the constellation of sorrows and regrets that were all but certain to engulf me if, because of some airplane reservation, I lost my chance to pull over for Chocolat Toast at Cazenave.
I had finished my work in the Pyrénées, a story on a magnificent rare peach that harvests during a short week in July. I had gone to seek perfection and had found it, plucked pink and ready by the bushel in the Béarn. Not that I was dreading home exactly, but I was reluctant to pry myself away from southwestern France and the markets filled with lavender soaps and ripe summer fruit. No doubt I would miss the feathery lightness I experienced on the drives past fields of Jurançon grapes, and the acres of sunflowers that tinged with yellow the visible expanse of the horizon. Rather than watch my fortnight in France dribble away on the lackluster highway to the plane, I sought a resounding conclusion to it. A moment that would buttress me for the journey home and the work that awaited me.
Shifting gears in my little Citroën, I began to collate the chores by category, none of which I had thought about for even a moment since I had been away. The abrupt mental switch made both the car and my heart rate accelerate. A couple of appliances in disrepair, taxes to be filed, a broken attic window to be replaced. Did the outdoor spigot get fixed yet? Was there half and half for our coffee in the morning, indispensable for our treasured routine with oatmeal? Must fill the fridge. I visualized a vast leafy matrix of weeds obscuring the flowers in my garden, stunting their growth. In twenty-four hours, I would probably be down by the pond deploying my hedge trimmer, cutting back the wall of green brush that would certainly be marching toward my back porch.
This was the life that I cherished and accepted in full as mine, replete with duties domestic and otherwise. I was as efficient looking after the needs of my home as I was looking after my husband, children and dog. The demands of our overgrown world suited me, now that I had not lived in a city for well over a decade. Mark was deep into a big commission, and I was excited to learn the details of his progress—of his carving, hammering, slicing, fork-lifting. Our daughter was home for the summer and I longed for her company. It was time to sit down with my notes, and weave the many bits of string gathered for this story into a narrative. Yet I knew by now that the distance between sweet reentry and the urge forgoing could, sometimes, be perilously short. Above all, there was no telling when I would return to the Pays Basque.
Every great food city has its emblematic dish: Singapore has chili crab, New Orleans has beignets, Brussels has moules frites. The singular aspect of Chocolat Toast, though, is that this signature Bayonnais concoction is served only at one place in town, Cazenave, a third-generation family-owned shop on the Rue Port Neuf.
Its construction is simple: a cup of foamy hot chocolate as thick as Greek yogurt with a stalagmite of whipped cream on the side, two slices of buttered brioche toast and a generous pitcher of ice water (presumably to cut the blood fats swirling around after ingesting this achingly rich combination). Served at breakfast, at l’heure du thé, or right before closing time, the Chocolat Toast ritual is perhaps the sole obligation of the visitor to Bayonne. This may be an especially forceful coda for departing pilgrims, like I was: spent from praying for miracles at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, craving the earth’s most heavenly comfort food.
“People often stop here because it’s a tradition, which is both because of Cazenave itself and also because of the history of chocolate in Bayonne,” owner Pantxoa Bimboire later told me. A child of the Basque country, his grandmother had been a waitress at the salon de thé in the rear of the chocolate shop. In 1930, she convinced her husband to sell his jewelry store and buy Cazenave. Even then, a tray laden with Chocolat Toast was the iconic specialty of this small city on the banks of the Nive and Adour rivers, the ancestral home of the cocoa bean in France, which had journeyed there from Mexico, via Spain and Portugal.
The Cazenave shop window is a rainbow of chocolate bars in gem-hued wrappings, arranged like boxes of Crayola crayons. Normally, I’d stop to swoon over the stylish packaging, but it was late that July afternoon, and I only had a two-hour window to return the Citroën and catch my plane. I half-raced through the store to the tea room. As a Bayonne landmark, it is ravishing.
Lined with smoky, century-old mirrors, the vestibule is suffused with Belle Époque glamour, the kind unfortunate restaurateurs in the New World try pathetically to mimic. To further the sensation of being ensconced in a jewel case, I seated myself under the milky white and gold stained-glass dome, installed in the 19th century. Not wanting to rush, I cast the briefest glance at my watch anyway. As the server quietly placed a simple white tray before me, I imagined the fanfare that could—and maybe should—accompany this hallowed ritual. Instead, I rearranged the components, all of which, except the glass pitcher of water, were served on delicate, rose-speckled china. I spooned a heap of whipped cream as thick as butter onto the chocolate, and gently stirred. Gulping my first mouthful, I felt a stab of pleasure that rendered me motionless. An onlooker might have wondered about my beatific countenance, why my eyes closed and my lips curved upwards.
There is nothing terribly complicated about the recipe, mostly unchanged since long before my first time breakfasting and ruminating on Chocolat Toast thirty years ago. Yes, the chocolate tablets are now made from organic beans grown in Peru or Ecuador, but the hot milk poured over them is still from cows who pasture in the hilly Pays Basque, as is the cream for the thick chantilly. The brioche toast is sliced from a special golden loaf, created by a local baker only for Cazenave. Most unusually, the foam that provides a tantalizing lid to the hot chocolate is still whipped by hand using a wooded mousseuse—beater—fashioned from boxwood. “It will always be the same,” says Bimboire, “because this is the heritage of Bayonne.”
And, I decided, it is somehow my heritage too. Almost half a lifetime ago, I took a train to Bayonne, in search of a cheaper hotel than the one I had booked near the beach in Biarritz. What I found there was some kind of culinary perfection, and a dish I have, since then, now and again, physically craved. This time, I was drawn to this gilded refuge not simply for the fat and sugar, cream and cocoa, ice and water convened on a tray in sheer gustatory harmony. Indeed, it is almost mathematically pure. Sweet chocolate compliments savory toast, chilled water tempers steaming cocoa, whose creamy smoothness is startled by the crunch of buttered brioche. No, it was something else. Here one simply encounters the most elusive, essential, and even miraculous of virtues: balance.
Often, when I traveled, I pondered which of the beautiful but imperfect of my two existences—the home one or the away one—was real and which was the response to it. At this moment, I was suspended in that anticipatory space between both of them, making a beeline for what will sustain me and fortify my journey back to the people I love. On this summer day, in this tea room, I was not merely satisfied. I was also, for the briefest moment, still.
