When I was a child, my family ate bread at every meal. At breakfast we served ourselves toasted Thomas’ English Muffins. We took to school sandwiches we made for ourselves, generally on soft white bread that was delivered by our milkman. At dinner we were served a light rye and a dark rye from Silber’s Bakery, a chain of Jewish bakeries in Baltimore. I don’t remember whether any of my siblings ate bread at dinner; I did, but only as a conveyance for butter. Only my father, a Swede, wanted bread on the dinner table. The rest of us didn’t care.

Bread was unimportant to my generation. It didn’t have the importance it had in Europe after the War. During World War II, even stateside meals needed a filler, a cheap-to-make food. That’s what bread had been for thousands of years in many, many cultures. Not all cultures, of course, not rice cultures, but we weren’t a rice culture.

But no matter what culture we were, America had always been rich and could afford not to have a cheap food to fill us. And, in any case when we needed a cheap filler, we gravitated toward potatoes, a true American food.

The first time I made bread was in 1957 when I was the assistant cook at a Vermont boys camp.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I really knew nothing. I hitchhiked from the camp to Rutland to the nearest bookstore where I bought the only cookbook on the shelves, Better Homes and Gardens, whose recipe I followed to make rolls for the dinners of the campers.

Even using the cookbook, I didn’t know what I was doing. The cookbook gave me a recipe without an explanation. Probably then, even cookbook authors didn’t understand how bread was made. Making bread turned out to be a solitary chore, requiring working alone early in the morning, kneading with the big Hobart mixer that made a rhythmic noise that reminded me of playing in the dance band of my earlier youth.

And the campers and their councilors loved the warm bread smelling of little but yeast.

I liked making bread. I continued doing it for the next 30 years. I made bread for my dinner parties and pizza dough for my sons. Without bothering to weigh ingredients, I poured flour, water, salt and yeast onto my kitchen table and kneaded by hand. I knew nothing at all about making bread. Sometimes it was dense. Sometimes it lacked salt. When it was good, I was proud; when it wasn’t, I was embarrassed. But I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even realize that I should know something.

In 1989 I decided to open a bakery. I was at my 50^th year and not entirely satisfied by my career. Indeed, I thought my career had ended. After so many wonderful experiences – from The White House to running a copper tubing company, I had done what I wanted and nearly always was excited by my work.

But making bread?

I thought that I knew enough to do it – but I didn’t. At least I knew that I didn’t know how to make bread in large quantities, so I apprenticed myself to Nancy Silverton whose bread was the best I had found. She had opened just a few months before the La Brea bakery in a Los Angeles house Charlie Chaplin had built for his wife. I had found it by touring in order to taste breads being made all over the country.

There really weren’t many then.

Nancy was wonderful and her bread was wonderful. But her ability (or perhaps interest) in explaining how she did things was not so wonderful. The only thing I learned from her was how to make her bread. I didn’t learn anything about the chemistry or techniques.

I looked around for books to continue my instruction. I found very few, Beard on Bread and Secrets of a Jewish Baker. It didn’t occur to me to look for French books. That, I admit, was pretty dumb of me.

I looked for other bread bakeries in the U.S. There were very few of those too: Acme and the Cheese Board in Berkeley, Thom Leonard in Kansas, Jules Rabin in Vermont, Michael London in Saratoga, New York, Bread Alone in Boyceville, New York.

I was looking for bakeries that made truly classic bread, breads made with little or no yeast, breads made from natural levain, sourdough, the kind of bread still made in European bakeries, although even in Europe that kind of bread was disappearing.

By May 1990, equipment had been installed at my upcoming bakery, Marvelous Market, just up the street from my sister’s bookstore, Politics and Prose. My small crew and I were able to begin practicing making doughs and baking them. As it was early summer and there was yet no air conditioning in the space, we had to leave the front door open and roll our shaped dough in racks onto the sidewalk in front of the store.

That turned out to be a good thing.

There was a lot of activity on the sidewalk during the early summer evenings – adults walking to and from Politics and Prose, sometimes with their children. They stopped in front of our door to see what was happening. As we had nothing to do with the loaves coming out of the oven, I gave them away to the pedestrians. Of course, I told them what we were going to be and when we hoped to open.

Marvelous Market opened in July 1990. I watched our customer counts every day. We didn’t have a computerized system then; no business did at that time. But I could see from the cash register tapes that our customer counts were rising each day. I was very happy about our becoming better and better known in the neighborhood.

Then in October, Phyllis Richman, the Washington Post’s restaurant critic reviewed the bakery in her regular Sunday column; then so did the food section of the Post. Every day customers lined up in front of the bakery and bought everything we had been able to make during the night. Our breads became a local celebrity.

I believed at that time that success came to us because we were in Washington. I thought (and still think) that Washingtonians are more sophisticated than people are in, say, Kansas City or Dallas. Many Washingtonians, particularly in Marvelous Market’s neighborhood had lived abroad or came from other countries to work in their countries’ embassies, at the World Bank, or the International Monetary Fund. They recognized our bread and appreciated it. I thought that their sophistication was the reason the bakery was prospering. I don’t believe that even now bakeries that make traditional bread can sell, as we do, 800 baguettes a day.

I thought at the time that good bread had not taken hold in America. I knew there were bakeries in citied around the country – Italian and Jewish. Some of them were pastry shops, but lots of them made bread. But I had learned by then that they were not making the authentic versions of Italian and Eastern European breads that we were making. They were trying to make the breads of their memory, but few of them had come to America as bakers. So, most of them were trying to make the breads they remembered, even though they didn’t know how to make the breads they remembered.

In 1993, I was invited to join a brand-new organization, the Bread Bakers Guild of America; indeed, I was asked to be on the board even though I had been a baker for only three years. I was flattered certainly, and perhaps a little scared. I didn’t know the other bakeries who had so much more experience than I did.

Our first meeting was in Las Vegas where a number of us had gathered for the International Baking Industry Expo. I remember that two bakers got into an argument about who was the more authentic baker.

“I don’t use any commercial yeast in my baking.”

“I don’t either. I have never had yeast in my bakery.”

“Me either.”

“I started my levain we use for every bread in 1984.

“Oh, I started mine in 1983 when I returned from my time with Poilane.”

And so on.

The board met again in Chicago half a year later. We invited Julia Child to join us, and she did. She spoke to us about traditional bread and the importance of bread in healthful diets. Then she asked me, I suppose because I was the oldest man in the room, if I would guide her around the baking equipment show.

That turned out to be one of the moments I will never forget.

She put her hand under my arm, and for next hour we walked around the show. It was so wonderful.

Everywhere we went people would look at her and say, “Oh, my god.” I had never before walked with anyone so completely recognized. Thirty years earlier I had worked for Howard K. Smith, the television news commentator, and from time to time he was recolonized by someone on the street.

But everyone recognized Julia Child, and many wanted to tell her how important she had been to them. A few people asked her to autograph something, a book for example, and she said, “Oh no. I just don’t do that.”

Later she said she was tired, and asked if I would show her to a taxi. That was another moment I will never forget. We walked onto the escalator, and as we descended to the door leading to the taxies, bell hops and doormen gathered below us, and all were smiling at her as we reached the bottom of the floor. They fought with each other briefly, each one wanting to open the door and escort Julia to a taxi.

All this is a good story, I think; well, good for me. But it’s beside my point.

My bakery was pretty far out of the mainstream of 20^th Century American baking. I knew that and was proud of it. I thought that bakeries like mine came from the edges of what was then traditional American baking. I thought that most bakeries like mine were owned by hippies like the Tassajara and Brother Juniper were. I thought that the mainstream bakeries were big and national like Entenmanns and Pepperidge Farm.

I knew of course of pseudo-French bakeries like Vie de France and Au Bon Pain but they were café companies and did no real baking in their stores. We were a real bakery. We were operating in a small store, 1500 square feet in a long rectangle, and had no space at all for a café. We didn’t even have enough space to hold the customers who lined up outside the front door.

Nevertheless, Marvelous Market was getting a lot of attention, and a lot of people were visiting from other cities to see what we were doing and to ask my advice about starting their own bakeries in their own cities.

I really didn’t know what to say to them. I was not qualitied to help them. I was still not capable of helping even myself. I barely understood what we were doing. When a batch of bread failed, I often didn’t know why.

I had only one piece of advice for the people who asked for my help.

I referred all of them to Michel Suas, the founder and owner of Consulting and Marketing Services of San Francisco, later called TMB Baking. I hadn’t known Michel when I opened Marvelous Market in 1990. I don’t remember when and how we met. He was so self-effacing when I first met him that I didn’t realize how much he knew about baking.

It was really he who started the proliferation of small traditional bakeries in the US. He was at that time the only U.S. consultant who knew how to design bakeries and choose equipment and advise new bakers. His advice made it possible for people like me to open bakeries.

He was the Johnny Appleseed of American baking. He had moved to the U.S. from France in 1976 to work as a pastry chef in the Chicago Ritz and then for Jean Blanchet at his legendary restaurant Le Francais in Wheeling, Illinois. He moved to San Francisco in 1986. His dream was to open a baking school and to spread the gospel of Raymond Calvel who had single-handedly revived traditional baking in France.

Michel did that for the U.S. He made possible the spread of my kind of baking throughout the country, responsible for the opening of more than 100 bakeries here.

Why did Americans flock to the bakeries of traditional breads? They didn’t. They haven’t. There are now perhaps 300 bakeries of traditional European breads in this country, nearly all of them in major metropolitan areas. It’s not surprising that they are clustered in cities since cities are where the best educated and best traveled people live.

But I cannot even tell you how many of those educated people eat the best bread. I don’t know that. No one does.

I forget most of the time, particularly when we sell out of our 800 hand-made baguettes, that we are in a rarified neighborhood whose neighbors really appreciate what we do. I hear so often from customers that they are glad that I decided to open Bread Furst, my second bakery, and that the bakery makes such a contribution to their lives.

But I do know that eating good bread at home continues to be something done by a very, very small number of people. I wish it were otherwise.