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    About the Baguette: Exploring the Origin of a French National Icon
    About the Baguette: Exploring the Origin of a French National Icon
    About the Baguette: Exploring the Origin of a French National Icon
    Ebook344 pages1 hour

    About the Baguette: Exploring the Origin of a French National Icon

    By Jim Chevallier

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    Where did the baguette come from? A simple enough question, but this search for an answer ranges from the long breads of Babylon and Egypt to the first long (but wide) breads in France to the gradual evolution of long narrow breads from the eighteenth into the twentieth century, resulting in both the roll-sized "flute" and the gigantic jockos of the nineteenth century. Along the way, the reader will learn more about the fendu, the porteuses de pain, the influence of Viennese baking on French methods and a wide range of shapes and sizes of bread, as well as the most common tales of how the baguette came to be. Adventurous bakers can try one of several period American recipes for making breads that, if not yet baguettes, were very baguette-like. The book also includes looks at how Parisian bakers made their bread, at another type of "baguette" they used and at two of the baguette's cousins.
    Whether you are interested in the baguette itself (a surprising number of people are), French baking, nineteenth century Paris or baking history in general, this new look at a classic symbol of France itself has a wealth of discoveries to offer.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJim Chevallier
    Release dateJul 14, 2012
    ISBN9781476118802
    About the Baguette: Exploring the Origin of a French National Icon
    Author

    Jim Chevallier

    Jim Chevallier is a food historian who has been cited in "The New Yorker", "The Smithsonian" and the French newspapers "Liberation" and "Le Figaro", among other publications. CHOICE has named his "A History of the Food of Paris: From Roast Mammoth to Steak Frites" an Outstanding Academic Title for 2019. His most recent work is "Before the Baguette: The History of French Bread". He began food history with an essay on breakfast in 18th century France (in Wagner and Hassan's "Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century") in addition to researching and translating several historical works of his own. He has been both a performer and a researcher, having worked as a radio announcer (WCAS, WBUR and WBZ-FM), acted (on NBC's "Passions", and numerous smaller projects). It was as an actor that he began to write monologues for use by others, resulting in his first collection, "The Monologue Bin". This has been followed by several others over the years.

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      Book preview

      About the Baguette - Jim Chevallier

      About the Baguette

      Exploring the Origin

      of a French National Icon

      Jim Chevallier

      * Chez Jim Books *

      Copyright © 2012, 2014 by Jim Chevallier

      Published by Chez Jim

      Any questions or comments can be addressed to the publisher at jimchev@chezjim.com.

      All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in any form.

      Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure the accuracy and completeness of this translation and any additional information contained in this book, we assume no responsibility for errors, inaccuracies, omissions, or any inconsistency herein. Nor do we make any warranty regarding the recipes reproduced from other sources nor guarantee that favorable results will be obtained in using them. We no obligation or liability in relation to them to the fullest extent such obligation or liability can be excluded by law. Nor are we responsible for any domestic accidents or fires, nor any food borne disease, allergic reactions or food poisoning that could result from the preparation of these recipes.

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      Definitions, official and other

      Its composition

      The word

      Sticks, long breads and pains baguettes

      Long breads of the past

      Long narrow breads appear

      Flutes

      Longer and longer

      Rolls vs. loaves

      The Viennese influence

      Pains de fantaisie and the law of 1863

      The once-familiar fendu

      Breads at the end of the century

      Myths, claims and maybes

      Napoleon's soldiers

      Love of crust

      Pain viennois

      Bakers' hours

      Evolution

      Some modest proposals

      Conclusions

      Epilogue: beret/baguette

      Appendices

      Appendix A – Old American recipes for baguette-like breads

      An 1874 recipe for French rolls

      An 1884 recipe for a fendu

      An 1899 recipe for jockos

      Paul Richards' recipes (1918)

      A 1920 recipe for French bread

      Appendix B – Parisian bakers' method

      Appendix C – The wooden baguette

      Appendix D – Baguette variations (the bâtard and the ficelle)

      NOTES

      Introduction

      The French Wikipedia is not alone in identifying the baguette as one of the most well-known symbols of French culture worldwide. This status alone might make it worth investigating, as might the fact that, like the croissant, it long ago went from being a distant foreign emblem of that country to being familiar and available to consumers worldwide. A glance at the (albeit scattered) literature on this subject shows, further, that there are connoisseurs of the baguette, who speak with longing of certain years and lament the bread's decline.

      Of the many forms of French bread, this one has its own peculiar importance, and so its origin is of corresponding interest and has in fact been postulated by a variety of writers. Some – authoritative as they appear – are frankly and demonstrably wrong, others less so, but offering no sources for their assertions. The question, then, of where, how and why the baguette appeared continues to require clarification.

      But this question contains, like a Russian doll, another: just what, in its different roles as foodstuff, symbol, word, etc., does baguette mean?

      Definitions, official and other

      What, in the most limited literal sense, is a baguette?

      Given France's history of bureaucracy and scrupulous categorization, one might expect to find a crisp official definition of the baguette, specifying, at the least, its length, width and composition. Apparently, such a definition has been tried, but unsuccessfully:

      Although the French have tried to standardize the baguette, they have not succeeded. There are too many shapes, forms, flours and customs throughout France to get everyone to comply. For example, the Parisian baguette weighs 250 grams but the baguette sold in Marseilles weighs just 200 grams.²

      The very official French National Center of Textual and Lexical Resources (CNRTL) offers its own definition: A long thin bread of about 300 grams³ but also access to that of the Academie Française: Long thin bread weighing two hundred fifty grams⁴,

      Nous voilà bien avancés, as the French say (or as some Americans might put it, Yeah, that helped. Not.).

      A writer on the French National Confederation of Bakers' site has written:

      In terms of breads' weights, no regulation exists setting the weight of breads relative to this or that term. Absent a text, one must refer to the loyal and constant usage of commerce. Often, the question concerns the weight of the baguette and that of the flûte. For these terms, it must be admitted that usage varies from one region to another.

      Thus in the Paris region, the term baguette is applied to a bread of 250 g and the term flute to a bread of 200 g. On the other hand in Seine-Maritime for instance, the commercial usage is reversed, that is the term baguette corresponds to a bread of 200 g and the flute to a bread of 250 g.⁵

      In 2009, their information site, Espace Pain, stated that there were no fixed measurements, but that the baguette was about 70 cm long and 6 cm in diameter, and in general scored with about 5 grignes (the scores or slashes made in certain forms of bread)⁶. (The grignes, which are rarely mentioned in definitions, may nonetheless fairly be considered a key characteristic of a baguette.) In 2012, the updated site said:

      The current or classic baguette is made from a mix of wheat flour (type 55 or type 65), of drinking water, of kitchen salt, of yeast or leaven. It measures between 55 and 65 cm and weighs between 200 and 300 g.

      (For the site's earlier version of the composition, see Its Composition below.)

      In Quebec, the Quebec Office of French Language is somewhat more precise, at least in regard to size: A glazed bread, 60 cm long and from 5 to 6 cm thick. (The question of exactly how thin a baguette has to be might be ponderously academic were all long narrow breads baguettes. But of course the matter is not that simple.)

      A precise definition does exist for one kind of baguette – the (dubiously named) baguette tradition (which purports to be a baguette as it was made traditionally, a curious claim for a relatively recent bread; the most traditional French bread is the round boule). The noted bread historian Steven L. Kaplan has some sharp observations on attempts to revive traditions in French baking:

      The bakers' relationship to the past was not devoid of ambiguity. Most of them knew very little about what I would call the historical past, whose claims required critical scrutiny and documentary corroboration... The allure of the unvarnished, uncorrupted professional tradition betrayed a deeper longing, hardly confined to bakers, or to the French, for the more solid values that were believed to have held sway at one time...The bakers groped to forge a usable past, one that would not cripple them [and so he says used modern methods where it suited them, even in making traditional bread].... Meg Bortin, an American journalist based in Paris, was doubtless right to warn almost twenty years ago that the evocation of l'ancienne was more often a coup de décor –  a decorative ploy – than the harbinger of better bread. And Alain Shifres was equally on the mark a decade later in debunking the enchantment with autrefois. The original bread does not exist...... Yet our confidence in the past as a guide to primal virtues seems boundless.⁷

      A cynical observer might be tempted to consider the baguette de tradition as an ersatz construction created for purely marketing purposes. Whatever the case, the reader will find much here about traditional breads and much about the baguette, but very little about the traditional baguette.

      While addressing this issue in 1983, Patricia Wells gave a good general definition of the baguette, combining an impressionistic portrait with a precise definition:

      Does it still exist, the great, slender French baguette, with its crackling crisp, golden exterior, its elastic and creamy interior, its flavor of fresh-milled wheat, the bread that's carried naked through the narrow streets of France from daylight until dusk?

      Yes, and no. The traditional baguette, the 2 1/2-foot loaf weighing just under eight ounces, is in trouble and it's undergoing both a period of reevaluation and revival.⁸

      Well's definition, impressionistic as it is, has the advantage of capturing some aspects of the baguette which do not make it into official definitions, yet are very much part of what many people mean when they say baguette.

      Note that a number of Web sites refer to a French law from 1993 saying that it defines the baguette. It does not, except to the degree that the baguette is one of many breads which can be made with what the statute does define, which is a specific dough which can be legally referred to as traditional⁹. But the statute says nothing about weight, size, shape, etc. The term baguette refers above all to a shape. French bread in general underwent some change in composition, as well as the methods used to make it, through the nineteenth century and then again when additives, freezing and par-baking began to be used later in the twentieth. But neither the methods nor the basic dough used to make a baguette were in themselves innovations.

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