The baguette is back

Steven Laurence Kaplan
GOOD BREAD IS BACK
A contemporary history of French bread, the way it is made, and the people who make it
376pp. Duke University Press.$27.95; distributed in the UK by Combined Academic Publishers.£16.99.
978 0 8223 3833 8

To be a baker’s boy in eighteenth-century Paris must have been pretty close to hell. You were effectively a slave, both to your master and to the intricate demands of sourdough fermentation. The working “day” began close to midnight. Wearing rough, uncomfortable underwear made from old flour sacks, you were forced to knead as much as 200 lb of dough at a time, using nothing but your hands and – in desperation – your feet. This kneading took place not once but many times over the night, usually in a clammy cellar too dark for you to see what you were doing, and so hot that the dough sometimes melted before it had risen. The baker’s boy in charge of kneading was known as le geindre, the groaner, on account of the blood-curdling noises he made as he worked. When you were finally granted rest, sometime in the morning, you were obliged to sleep in the blinding heat of the bakery. After three hours, you were forced to wake up again, to minister to the sourdough starter, which, like a newborn child, required round-the-clock feeding. In 1788, the journalist Louis-Sébastien Mercier described how unhealthy bakers’ apprentices looked. Unlike butchers’ boys, who were robust and ruddy, bakers’ boys were flour-coated wretches, huddling in doorways, haggard and white.

All this misery was required to serve the panimania of the French. Bread signified more to the French than it did to other nations. It was not just subsistence; it was a sacred matter, as well as an affair of state. The Communion wafer was holy, but so was the ordinary white sourdough loaf of everyday life. To turn a loaf upside down was considered bad luck, akin to sacrilege. Before eating, it was customary to trace the sign of the cross over the bread using a knife. In 1789, the Encyclopédie méthodique noted that “most people” in France “believe[d] they would die of hunger if there [were] no bread” – even if other food was available. The “tyranny of bread”, as Steven Laurence Kaplan has it, tied the French together.
Kaplan, who probably knows more about French bread than anyone alive, does not make enough, perhaps, of how the French approach to carbohydrates differed from that of their neighbours. By 1789, the Italians were swapping the crustiness of bread for the slipperiness of pasta. Across the channel, the British were abandoning bread in favour of sugar. During the eighteenth century, British sugar consumption increased eightfold, to 16 lb per person per year. With all these sweet calories, bread was no longer so vital, especially since much British bread now came adulterated with alum, an astringent chemical which could make white porous loaves out of poor quality flour. In France, though, bread remained relatively pure – and essential. Life without bread was unthinkable. To have “lost the taste for bread” was synonymous with losing the will to live. By the end of the nineteenth century, the average Frenchman was still consuming close to a kilo of bread per day. And “bread” for the French had extremely stringent and precise connotations, well crusted with an alveolated crumb, kneaded from white flour and made by a slow and arduous process of fermentation and baking. All consumption has its costs. While the cost of Britain’s sweet tooth was the slave-driven sugar colonies, the cost of France’s passion for bread was the terrible life of the baker.

Eighteenth-century bakers were under threat from all sides – from their customers, who, dependent on them for their subsistence, often treated them with an unwarranted hatred and suspicion; from millers, whom the bakers viewed as thieves and scoundrels, creaming off a portion of the wheat they sent them to mill; from the State, which fiercely regulated the price and weight of a loaf, sometimes setting impossible standards on the bakers, such as the requirement that all loaves be of a certain weight, not allowing for the fact that the same weight of dough will bake up to different weights of bread; and from their competitors, for however miserable it might be baking bread, they still wanted to sell as much of it as they could. Kaplan has already written the definitive history of ancien régime bakers – The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700–1775 (1996). Good Bread Is Back covers some of the same story from a different angle. A magnificent combination of polemic and scholarship (marred only by an inadequate index), it asks how the superlative French bread of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave way to the disappointing industrial loaves of the 1960s onwards; and how these, in turn, have been happily supplanted by a new generation of artisanal baguettes, batards and boules.

Kaplan recognizes that the yearning of the French for “the good bread of yesteryear” is often an exercise in nostalgia. This kind of wishing and dreaming about bread can actually be counter-productive. It was exactly this kind of nostalgia that enabled the post-war baguette to become so debased:

       "During the Second World War the only bread available to the ordinary citizen in France was a heavy, coarse, and sticky dark bread (pain bis) of dubious quality and thoroughly unappetising. The resultant nostalgia for white wheat bread led to the development, after the war, of a new method, that produced a voluminous and very white bread, light and attractive but “washed out”, “denatured” and essentially tasteless. This is for all practical purposes the bread that most French people continue to eat today."

This new whiter-than-white baguette was a grotesque simulacrum of the old pre-war white bread, but this didn’t stop consumers from buying it; they had forgotten what good bread tasted like. So grateful were they not to be eating the “bread of deprivation” of wartime, that they did not care at first how over-puffy the crumb was on these new loaves, how the crust had no heft, and how it staled after less than a day. The bakers had finally yielded to the mechanized, over-kneaded bread which France had held out against for so long. They had succumbed to the cheap, speedy ways of yeast.

Many factors determine the perfect loaf of French bread, and Kaplan anatomizes them in great detail: the choice of flour, the gentle rhythms of kneading, the shaping of the unbaked loaves – or pâtons – and baking when the dough is “at the peak of its exaltation”, in an eighteenth-century phrase. But nothing was as important as the way that the bread was “fermented” from a sourdough culture. No less than winemaking, French baking depended on a fine balance of fermentation. It was this, as the chemist Antoine Parmentier observed in 1778, that made bread-making such a “painful enslavement”. The sourdough starter or “chef” created solely from the wild yeasts present in the atmosphere, needed to be refreshed almost constantly, and contributed to the extremely slow rising time of French bread. By contrast, the yeast baking of Britain, where the by-products of brewing were transformed into “ale barm” or later, brewer’s yeast, was fast and easy. For all that, Parmentier could not countenance the use of brewer’s yeast as a leavening. Sourdough fermentation was “the soul of breadmaking”. It contributed to the wonderful floral complexity of the crumb and the deep chewiness of the crust. It was just a shame that this gastronomic perfection could only be bought through the sleeplessness and sweat of the bakers’ apprentices; Kaplan suggests that sweat must have been like an extra ingredient in pre-industrial bread, “enriching (or infecting) the dough”. Such was “the hellish rhythm of a society that lived on bread, that could not get along without it for a moment”.

“Stop being a slave to dough; be its master instead”, urged a French advertisement for the Frigidaire refrigeration system in 1939. It would be a decade or so before significant numbers of French bakers made the switch to industrial methods, but the appeal was obvious: no more sleepless nights; no more sweat. The Thirty Glorious Years of post-war France saw high-speed mechanical mixers, dough leavened with quick-rise yeast instead of tricky sourdough, frozen partially cooked loaves – all of which made the business of baking far easier. It was just a pity that what was produced by all this industrial innovation no longer counted as “bread” in the old sense, but white soulless pap. Supermarkets opened up “hot spots” where preformed frozen loaves could be finished in the oven, deceiving the customer into thinking that the bread had been made on the spot – “artisanal mimickry”, in Kaplan’s words: false bakers’ boys “made” bread all day long in a theatrical ambience; the bread was always hot and fresh, and the air was infused with the pleasant aroma of baking.

Compared to their genuine counterparts in the eighteenth century, at least these fake apprentices had a relatively easy life. On the other hand, their labour was lacking in dignity. These new bakers’ boys could no longer claim responsibility for what they produced; why would they want to, in any case, since the cheap baguettes they hauled from freezer cabinet to oven were so insipid? Bread-lovers began to despair of bakers, who produced baguettes “without joy, without feeling, without appetite”, as the actor and gastronome Jean-Pierre Coffe complained in 1992. French bread consumption plummeted – from the high of 900 grams per person per day at the start of the twentieth century to a low of 150 grams. The status of the boulanger plummeted too. Gone were his proud, independent, artisanal ways. Working in a boulangerie became the career choice of total no-hopers – bakers were “big, strong and stupid”, as the cliché went. Bakers who came of age in the post-war period observed a “degradation” in the profession. As Kaplan writes, “Poorly trained and badly counselled, bakers languished in a sort of anomie, turning in desperation to millers, equipment salesmen and purveyors of improving additives in the hope of finding a way out”.

The death knell for French bread was sounded many times in the national press; prematurely, as it turned out, because it is now possible to buy bread of the finest artisanal quality again, all over Paris; bread whose crust crackles with the aroma of honey and gingerbread and which does not lose its charms after only a few hours. Good bread is back, as Kaplan’s title says. In the end, the symbolic pull of bread was too great for the French. The State, long regarded as an oppressive force by the bakers, came galloping to their rescue. The so-called Raffarin decree of 1995, named after the charismatic Minister of Commerce Jean-Pierre Raffarin, and an amendment of 1998, gave the artisanal baker proper legal recognition at last. As Raffarin himself commented, “It’s humiliating for real bakers to see people who sell bread manufactured elsewhere passing themselves off as bakers”. Under the law of 1998, it became illegal for a “boulangerie” sign to be placed except where professionals had been “personally involved in the kneading of the dough, its fermentation and its shaping”. At no stage of production were the products to be “deep-frozen or frozen”. This law gave a huge boost to the baker as artisan.

Meanwhile, from the mid-1990s, a new generation of bakers were giving fresh dignity to the profession. Their inspiration was Lionel Poilâne, who had never stopped making bread with integrity, practising what he called “retro-innovation”, developing new techniques for making bread in the old traditions. Poilâne’s signature loaf was the miche, a splendid sourdough orb. The new retro-innovators such as Eric Kayser and Dominique Saibron, both bakers with shops on the rue Monge in the Latin Quarter, turned their hands to reinventing the baguette, making slow-rise versions without additives, using industrial mixers but set to a gentle speed. One of Kaplan’s best chapters is devoted to these new baking “mavericks” who combine a love of the old ways with a knowledge of modern science.

Kayser has even invented something which Parmentier in the eighteenth century only imagined – a sourdough ferment which is gastronomically ideal without enslaving the baker. “Fermento-levain” is a liquid leaven machine which churns out a constant flow of reliable sourdough, giving Kayser’s baguette its “delectable” qualities – the toasty crust and hazelnutty crumb. Whatever yearning one might feel for the bread of the eighteenth century, the bread made by Kayser and his contemporaries is better. It is probably the best bread that France has ever tasted, because it is made by thinking men and women who have not sacrificed themselves to the tyranny of dough. As Kaplan concludes, “It is worth recalling, in the end, that good bread depends above all on the quality of the men and women who make it”.

_________________________________________________________

Bee Wilson is writing a history of food adulteration. She is the author of The Hive: The story of the honeybee and us, 2004.