In 2002 Dorie Greenspan, a friend and one of the leading authorities on the art of baking, asked me to help put together a video of "possibly the most famous baker in France." His name: Lionel Poilane and he'd agreed to let us shoot him making his signature sugar cookies.
I know nothing about cooking, baking, recipes -- I don't care - and yet I was absolutely transfixed by his hands - they moved across the dough like a violinist's on strings. "You don't knead the dough," he said "you caress it gently." It was an extraordinary evening.
Barely three months later Lionel Poilane was killed.
His daughter, Apollonia, just eighteen at the time and about to start college suddenly found herself running the family business.
Eight years after her father's death I went back to meet Apollonia and learn how she has continued a tradition so lovingly handed down through three generations of her family.
