Getting Serious About Rustic Pastries

Looking back to 1989 and the opening of La Brea Bakery, it seems odd that Nancy Silverton started with bread. Not that she isn’t a good bread baker. She is. But when it comes to pastries, Silverton’s so good, she’s world class.

In her new book, “Nancy Silverton’s Pastries From the La Brea Bakery” (Villard Books, $35), she talks about those early days. As a dessert chef at the mother company, Campanile restaurant, she says she had been expected to make sweets when she turned to baking rustic breads instead. Evidently, the move to pastries was a fluke, a byproduct of moving the bread works to larger premises.

Given the room to expand into pastry, she then balked at the thought of refrigerated cases with “fragile cakes elaborately constructed of countless creamy layers.” Instead, she says she wanted pastries in the same spirit as her bread: simple, rustic and “never too sweet.”

Hmmm. Perhaps she’s being a bit austere here. The pastries that Silverton produces at La Brea Bakery, and whose recipes she offers in this book, defy such prim categorization. Whether it’s corn bread, a croissant, an onion tart or a blueberry muffin, it’s hard not to gasp at her mix of craftsmanship, good taste and fun.

Few books resonate with such experience. Recipe after recipe one is struck by how much Silverton loves the interplay of butter and flour. When she explains the value of low protein flours in pastry, and when she warns us to have the flour and butter at pretty much the same temperature when we set out to make brioche, she displays just the right authority. We sense we are benefiting from mistakes that she made and learned from. She even warns us against placing jumping blenders too close to the counter edge.

While she enjoins us to mess up her recipes with food stains, she makes no promises that they will be easy. Her cinnamon buns call for croissant dough and freshly ground cinnamon. Good things, she seems to be saying, come from good efforts. In her exhortations, only once does she stray into what seems like Martha Stewart’s airspace: “Organic farmers’ markets will guarantee the freshest and best-tasting eggs, unless you’re lucky enough to have a chicken coop in your backyard, like I do.”

In spite of her fanaticism about ingredients, Silverton is never precious about pastry. Rather, part of her genius is at un-gilding the lily. Witness this note for a plum tart recipe: “Please don’t even think about ruining it with that awful gooey traditional fruit tart glaze.”

In stripping away fripperies and promoting humble baked goods such as graham crackers, oatcakes and cobblers to patisserie’s formerly elite ranks of meringues, profiteroles and brioche, Silverton is a breath of fresh air. Oddly, it is not just this book’s democratic spirit, but its internationalism that places it as coming from Los Angeles. Where else would a chef combine Guatemalan cookies, jelly doughnuts, prosciutto pie, home-made marshmallows and canelles in the same book, much less pull it off?