[N]ORWICH — Martin Philip, head bread baker at this town’s King Arthur Flour Co., recalls the time New York Times best-selling author Jodi Picoult sought his help while researching a culinary novel.
“We spent an afternoon making challah, bagels and bialys,” he says, “chatting, laughing and fully stuffing ourselves.”
So when the Arkansas boy turned New York banker turned Vermont baker asked her to review his attempt at penning the first pages of his hopscotch game of a life story, she reciprocated by taking a look — and, surprisingly, giving him the name of her agent.
Philip has done many things in his nearly half-century on the planet, from studying music to surveying the East and West coasts before settling in New England as a husband, father and occasional ultramarathon runner.
Writer, however, wasn’t on his resume. HarperCollins nonetheless so appreciated how Philip mixed reminiscences, reflections and recipes into a 400-page illustrated manuscript, the publisher is releasing his first book, “Breaking Bread: A Baker’s Journey Home in 75 Recipes.”
“My path to this good place hasn’t been straight,” he writes in the first chapter. “I’ve been lost; I’ve moved from roots, heritage and home before heading back again.”
“All of it,” he continues, “began with drop biscuits.”
And so Philip shares the recipe — straight from his mother’s kitchen in the Ozark Mountains city of Fayetteville — as well as the format of what’s to come.
“We all have these memories, recollections, which, when summoned, can transport us,” he writes. “Food traditions have a way of leaving marks, indelible ink the whiff of which yanks us whirling and swirling to lands beyond and long gone.”
“This wasn’t the first time,” he notes, “that love was served on a baking sheet.”
Subsequent travel in Europe is represented through instructions for French baguettes, focaccia and filone di sesame, while time in New York City is told through bagels, muffins and, in one 2005 glimpse out his glass office, a haunting memory.
“The bent, twisted, buckled sections of the World Trade Center’s windows and its girders, which had held so much high above the clouds, had been hauled away,” he writes, “but Ground Zero remained — a scar, a dividing line between before and after, a silent encouragement to do something while there was time.”
Ruminating over his future, Philip recalled the past.
“There once was a time,” he writes, “when lives were linked to tangible trades and physical connections — the crush of a hammer between arm and stone, palms on spinning bobbins of cotton warp, fingers dragging across fresh-sawn staves in a cooperage, a baker’s arms bent at the dough trough, pulling and kneading — once, we lived at the intersection of our hands and our materials.”
And so Philip started making bread. A novice at best, he applied three times to King Arthur Flour before he was hired.
“What idiot with a wife and kids and a comfortable life in Manhattan would accept a job in food service in rural Vermont?” he writes. “I had no clue about the money, no idea whatsoever, and really didn’t care. Money hadn’t made me happy, maybe the lack of it would. I had a feeling that those things would sort themselves out, but, still, we were jumping with no clear landing.”
Today, Philip wakes before dawn to work, then takes his book, banjo and a loaf or two of bread out after dusk for a series of public readings.
“I was hungry for this,” he recently told a hometown audience at the Norwich Public Library.
“Breaking Bread” is reaping notice from publications ranging from the Boston Globe to his childhood Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
“Particularly toward the end of the book, the recipes are not for the faint of heart,” the latter newspaper cautions. “Preparation times can be nearly a full 24 hours, including the time it takes for dough to rise.”
Even so, Philip — who offers more advice on his website — encourages readers to try for themselves.
“What could go wrong?” he says. “You can eat your mistakes.”
