Professor Butter Beard and August Sander’s “Pastry Chef”
“Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.” – Oprah Winfrey
I am a very passionate man. So much so, that my passions tend to collaborate best in pairs. First and foremost are my “forever tango partners”: the history of art and baking. Other delicious examples include: Fauré and Sondheim, Vincent and Franz Marc, Dracula and Buffy, Lily of the Valley and Sweet William, summer basil and Chinese Five-Spice, furry and bald (well, it is Pride Month).
But let’s concentrate today on the primary duo. One of my favorite photographs to teach within the Social Documentation unit of my History of Photography class is August Sander’s “Pastry Chef, Cologne.” The photograph, taken in 1928, depicts Franz Bremer, who was the owner and pastry chef of the Café Conditorei, located in the Dürener Straße, in Cologne, around the corner from the photographer’s studio. Sander was a regular customer of the café and as such was able to invite and convince Chef Bremer to pose for this portrait. The somewhat intimidating bear of a chef is depicted here in his pristine kitchen whites while whisking the unknown contents of what I imagine to be a large copper bowl. He is shaved completely bald, wears a meticulously groomed moustache and looks directly at the viewer, allowing his muscle memory to foam the unseen egg whites or heavy cream. He is the sole occupant of his rather dark and somewhat uninviting kitchen kingdom. I imagine his minions scurrying in the shadows, ensuring the chef’s “mis en plas” is perfectly aligned and awaiting the attention of the creative genius.
Sander has been described by his biographers as “the most important German portrait photographer of the early twentieth century.” Born in 1876 and trained by assisting a photographer from Siegen who was also working for the mining company, Sander's work includes landscapes, nature, architecture, and street photography, but he is best known for his portraits, as exemplified by his series “People of the 20th Century.” In this series, he aimed to show a cross-section of society during the Weimar Republic (officially known as the German Reich from 1919 to 1933).
The series was divided into seven sections: The Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, Woman, Classes and Professions, The Artists, The City, and The Last People (homeless persons, veterans, etc.). Though Sander never completed this exceptionally ambitious project, it includes over 600 photographs divided into seven volumes and nearly 50 portfolios.
The photographs are mostly black-and-white portraits of Germans from various social and economic backgrounds: aristocrats and gypsies, farmers and architects, bohemians and nuns. The portraits often include familiar signifiers: the farmer with his scythe, the pastry cook with his whisk, a painter with his brushes and canvas, musicians with their instruments, and even a “showman” with his accordion and performing bear. Sometimes the visual clues to a subject’s “type” are not so obvious, leaving the title of the work and its placement in one of Sander’s categories to illuminate the subject’s role.
“The individual does not make the history of his time, but he both impresses himself on it and expresses its meaning,” Sander explained. “It is possible to record the historical physiognomic image of a whole generation and—with enough knowledge of physiognomy—to make that image speak in photographs.”
As a practitioner of “New Objectivity,” an avant-garde art movement that sought to depart from abstraction and artifice and return to realism, Sander wanted his photographs to expose truths. “Pure photography allows us to create portraits which render their subjects with absolute truth,” he said. “If we can create portraits of subjects that are true, we thereby in effect create a mirror of the times.”
Sander’s work continues to be a source of inspiration for generations of photographers, including Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Rineke Dijkstra. According to Jane Pierce, photography curator at MOMA, “Sander also changed the way many of us think about portraiture, informed the way we see gender and class, and shaped discussions around the archive as art and the idea of the documentary.”
In 1931, Sander himself professed, “Today with photography we can communicate our thoughts, conceptions, and realities, to all the people on earth; if we add the date of the year we have the power to fix the history of the world.”
And there it is – the perfect collaboration of a study within the history of photography initiated by my attraction to a portrait of a Pastry Chef with a visible sense of confidence and pride in his profession. The two inspired me in the kitchen today to morph another of my two edible passions: a lusciously sinful dark chocolate brownie with the hug-like comfort of a chocolate chip cookie. The brownie provides the perfect somewhat-gooey base to support the cookie roof with a soft chewy interior and crisp, lightly salted, crust. Oprah is right. Our passions are naturally filled with vibrant energy every time we commit to focusing on what excites us.
Professor Butter Beard’s “Brownookies”
32 Brownookie Bars
Brownie Layer:
10 ounces dark chocolate morsels
8 ounces unsalted butter (16 Tbsp)
1 2/3 cups granulated sugar
4 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla paste
1 cup all-purpose flour
½ tsp fine sea salt
1 tsp espresso powder
½ tsp chili powder
10 ounces white chocolate morsels
Cookie Layer:
1 ¾ cup all-purpose flour
¾ tsp baking soda
¾ tsp fine sea salt
1 cup light brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
9 ounces unsalted butter (18 Tbsp), room temperature
2 large eggs and 1 additional yolk
1 tsp vanilla paste
10 ounces dark chocolate morsels
Kosher salt to taste (sprinkled on top of the baked Brownookie)
1) Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
2) For the brownie layer: Put the dark chocolate and the butter in a bowl set over a pan of lightly simmering water. Whisk until smooth and set aside to cool slightly. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, espresso and chili powders. Set aside. In the bowl of a standing mixer, beat the sugar and eggs until pale, thick and creamy. Reduce the speed to low and add the chocolate. Add the dry ingredients, mixing only until it disappears in the batter. Remove the bowl from the mixer and fold in the white chocolate morsels. Spread the brownie batter evenly on the prepared baking sheet.
3) For the cookie layer: In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt. Set aside. In the bowl of a standing mixer, cream together the two sugars and the butter. Add the eggs and yolk, one at a time. Add the vanilla paste and then the dry ingredients. Remove the bowl from the mixer and fold in the dark chocolate morsels. Drop the cookie dough by the spoonful onto the brownie and then use a spatula to evenly spread the dough over the brownie.
4) Bake the Brownookie for 30 minutes. Rotate the pan and bake for 10 more minutes, until the center has puffed and is beginning to deflate. Transfer the pan to a cooling rack, sprinkle the top with Kosher salt, and cool completely before slicing.
