Trusty, crusty baguette holding its own after years of decline

PARIS LETTER:France's daily bread returned to its seductive best only after a typically statist intervention

RUE DES Abbesses is dark and deserted at 2am, when Djibril Bodian lifts the shutters at his boulangerieand cranks the ovens into life. In a slow, five-hour sequence he has honed carefully over the years, he leaves the mix of flour and water to sit for a while, then adds the salt and yeast before laying out the dough, weighing and kneading it, then cutting slender baguettes, 20 at a time, and sliding them into the oven.

“The secret of a good baguette is the time you put into it,” says Bodian, a 34-year-old baker’s son from Senegal, pointing to a vat of swirling dough.

“The aim is to let it sit as long as possible. The longer it remains in there, the more supple – and better – it will be.”

The early mornings and the perfectionist streak have paid off. Le Grenier à Pain, the bakery he manages in the 18th arrondissement, is the holder of the “Best Baguette in Paris” award, presented annually by an august panel of bread connoisseurs. Winners of the prize are guaranteed publicity and a sales bounce, and become the exclusive supplier of baguettes to the Élysée Palace.

Having being in decline for decades, the trusty, crusty baguette is holding its own again. For much of the past century, French baking struggled against the double-crisis of plummeting consumption rates and a dramatic deterioration of quality.

At the turn of the 20th century, the average French person ate about 650g of bread a day – about three baguettes – but with industrialisation bringing with it central heating and mechanised factories, people needed fewer calories in their daily lives, so consumption began to fall.

The diversification of diets and campaigns against chemically modified white bread by the medical community didn’t help either. Then there was the simple fact that bread wasn’t as good as it had been. The adoption of faster, industrialised bread-making techniques led to an insipid, prebaked frozen product, short on aroma and taste.

Consumption went into free fall, and by 1970, the average French person ate just 180g a day – three times less than in 1900.

In a country where the boulangeriehas such a central role in community life, the baking crisis was seen as a much wider malaise.

“The bakery had cultural and social functions that went beyond its pure commercial functions, so the state was worried about this,” says Steven Kaplan of Cornell University, who now lives in Paris and is the world’s foremost expert on French bread.

In 1993, the government responded in the typical style of the French Jacobin state, with a decree that created the baguette de tradition. Similar to the appellation d'origine contrôléefor wine, the new law set down standards for the baguette: freezing, additives and chemicals were all banned and bakers were obliged to return to a long first fermentation of two to three hours.

The result was a dramatic improvement in quality and despite the continuing predominance of the industrial variety in supermarkets, bread’s decline has been arrested and daily consumption stabilised at about 135g per person.

Kaplan is fanatical about bread and talks eloquently to me on the subject for almost two hours. He has written scholarly books on its place in French society, as well as a guide to the best bakeries of Paris – a project that required him to eat and rate 700 baguettes.

He has become the conscience of French baking and has cut a niche for himself in studying the relationship between bread and politics (one of Kaplan's recent opinion pieces in Le Monde had the headline "Bad bread, bad government").

He takes heart from the success of the baguette de traditionbut laments the "banalisation" of such a rich topic.

“Bread is much more complex in its flavour structure than wine. It has more volatile substances in it, it’s in many ways more challenging to consume than wine,” he says.

Kaplan uses six criteria to judge a baguette’s quality: appearance, crust, crumb, mouth-feel, aroma and taste. The perfect one will look seductive, its crust an attractive dark orange, its crumb off-white, creamy, almost moist to the touch, with cavities “inscribed in a wild way” along its interior.

“We have direct, physical, sensual contact with bread. If we squeeze bread, it should sing to us,” he says.

Mouth-feel is all about one’s first contact with the loaf.

“How does it feel. Is it aggressive? Is it hard? Is it laborious to chew?”

But most important are aroma and taste.

“Is there a single, dominant aroma or taste, or are there multiple levels of bouquets or perfumes? Can you identify them? Can you pick out a buttery, nutty taste? Can you pick out a taste that reminds you of verveine or Corinthian raisins or black cherry? That’s where the real pleasure is.”

Not surprisingly, this is a man who chooses his baguette with care. I ask what he does if he is served a poor baguette in a Parisian restaurant, but I should have known: he brings his own, in a briefcase.

“I’m not dramatic about it. If the bread is not any good, I take out my own and I discreetly replace it.”