The truth is that baguettes are like wine: all differ depending on the baker, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet
8:14PM BST 22 Aug 2013
The dreaded Anglo-Saxons are French-bashing again – and this time, they’re
after our very bread. Stirred from their mid-August torpor, Libération and
Le Figaro are shocked, shocked that The New York Times, The Wall Street
Journal and even, I’m ashamed to say, The Daily Telegraph have mistaken a
perfectly reasonable campaign to encourage people to keep buying bread, of
the kind that the Milk Marketing Board puts on for dairy products at regular
intervals, for an admission of nothing less than the death of the proper
French baguette. Cue a denunciation of the “deplorable trend in the
Anglo-Saxon media to disparage France on just any old pretext”, which “seems
to have intensified in recent months”.
The charges are these. French people buy far less bread than 50 years ago,
because they’re richer and more diet-conscious. Even when they do, they have
the gall to fork out for the wrong kind. These Anglo-Saxon “experts” tell us
that une baguette pas trop cuite – as I regularly request from my excellent
bakery on rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré – is in fact a travesty of what your
proper crusty baguette should be like. It’s not been baked enough. It’s
white, doughy, soggy, tasteless. It is, as Monty Python would say, an
ex-baguette.
To which I answer: “Piffle!” The truth is that baguettes are like wine: all
differ depending on the baker. You patronise the one whose product you like
best. And the sheer gall of trying to compare any kind of French baguette –
not least the heavenly petits pains served in Michelin-rosetted restaurants
such as Ducasse or Arpège – to the terrifying, sickly hued, sugared-up,
watered-down, plastic-wrapped, rubber-like objects that pass for bread in
Britain or America makes my temper rise like Poilâne sourdough.
Even the figures implying an inexorable decline in the baguette consumption
are as cherrypicked as a political party broadcast’s. Yes, the number of
bakeries has gone down from 54,000 in 1950 to 32,000 today. But the number
of bakers has risen slightly, to 160,000. This isn’t attrition: it’s
consolidation.
From the first price controls and regulations as to what constitutes lawful
bread – passed under Charlemagne at the very beginning of the ninth century
– to the bread shortages that sparked the French Revolution, “bread” in our
wheat-growing country has really meant “food”. That’s why it was so
devastating when Marie-Antoinette was falsely accused of quipping: “If they
don’t have bread, let them eat cake.” When the king and his family were
forced from Versailles to Paris in July 1789, the mob’s joyous cry was: “We
have brought back the baker, his wife and the baker’s boy.”
For a millennium, the price of bread was decreed by law – one only lifted in 1978. The Confédération Nationale de la Boulangerie-Pâtisserie Française is happy to tell you that a day’s work at the minimum wage will enable you to buy 65 baguettes today, as opposed to 10 in 1950. (In 1800, it got you 16: Napoleon wanted to keep the price low.)
To this day, Parisian bakeries, like pharmacies, are obliged to keep to a holiday rota, so that even in the midst of August, at least one stays open per quartier (one fourth of an arrondissement). Bread is still seen as a vital staple, necessary if not to survival, then at least to the French way of life. And its quality, if anything, has risen, with regular competitions such as Best Baguette in Paris, won this year by the Tunisian-born patron of a Montparnasse bakery. We’re not expecting to crown an American or Brit any time soon.
I wonder why that is?
© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013
For a millennium, the price of bread was decreed by law – one only lifted in 1978. The Confédération Nationale de la Boulangerie-Pâtisserie Française is happy to tell you that a day’s work at the minimum wage will enable you to buy 65 baguettes today, as opposed to 10 in 1950. (In 1800, it got you 16: Napoleon wanted to keep the price low.)
To this day, Parisian bakeries, like pharmacies, are obliged to keep to a holiday rota, so that even in the midst of August, at least one stays open per quartier (one fourth of an arrondissement). Bread is still seen as a vital staple, necessary if not to survival, then at least to the French way of life. And its quality, if anything, has risen, with regular competitions such as Best Baguette in Paris, won this year by the Tunisian-born patron of a Montparnasse bakery. We’re not expecting to crown an American or Brit any time soon.
I wonder why that is?
© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2013
