It takes a village baker

At Hungry Ghost, people come for bread but stay for the company

September 21, 2005|Jonathan Levitt, Globe Correspondent

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Maffei, 45, who had once owned 1369, when it was a jazz club in Cambridge's Inman Square, was working as the director of an alternative preschool in the Pioneer Valley, where Stevens sent his kids. The two started a friendship, but after a few years began talking about combining their families (Maffei has two girls and Stevens two boys from previous marriages).

Their dream was to build a bakery together, but neither had any money. Maffei's mother lent them about $28,000, from what Maffei calls her ''stack of 20s," and they raised another $8,000 by selling ''bread futures"-- gift certificates for friends and loyal customers to purchase as much as a few years' worth of bread in advance.

As soon as the Hungry Ghost opened, the bakery attracted the locals and over the past year has become a place for the lively conversation usually reserved for a neighborhood pub. On Fridays, when Maffei and Stevens bake late into the evening, they leave the door open, and friends drop by to drink wine and feast on Maffei's sublime thin-crusted pizzas.

Seth Dunn, a Northampton social worker, stops in for a couple of loaves of challah on Fridays. ''You know, in the old days people went to the village bakery. They went there to gather," he says. ''These days, most bread, even good bread, is made in factories. But here the bread is made by hand. I have a relationship with my baker. I can come in, talk politics, have a good kvetch -- and then eat bread."

Northampton journalist Sarah Buttenwieser comes by with her son Ezekiel, a precocious 10-year-old devoted to the rosemary bread. ''Whenever I walk into this place I take a deep breath and just think what a whole bunch of baloney the whole Atkins thing is," she says.

At the end of the night, the exhausted Stevens is still willing to philosophize about his work. ''You know, it's just bread, and we work really hard to make it," he says. ''It's too bad that some people think of good bread as some kind of exalted necessity, as if it were just an accessory for the good life. This bread isn't precious, it's not a work of art or a prop for a fashion shoot. It's just wholesome peasant food, the same stuff made for centuries by barefoot people who never even washed their hands. Really, I mean, you know, it's like they say -- bread is the staff of life."

SEMOLINA-FENNELhas a licorice flavor from fennel seeds; it contains semolina and white flours.

RYE is baker Maffei's favorite, a dense little loaf made with half rye and half white flour.

SPELTWITHC AMOMILEmixes ancient spelt flour, a kind of wheat, with aromatic flowers.

ROSEMARY tastes piney from the dried herb; made with white flour. Maffei likes to grill slices.

BATARD is a simple French bread that looks like a shorter, chubbier baguette.