Good Bread Is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It

by Steven Laurence Kaplan

Good Bread Is Back is a beautifully illustrated book for foodies and Francophiles alike. Widely recognized as a leading expert on French bread, the historian Steven Laurence Kaplan takes readers into aromatic Parisian bakeries as he explains how good bread began to reappear in France in the 1990s, following almost a century of decline in quality.Kaplan sets the stage for the comeback of good bread by describing how, while bread comprised the bulk of the French diet during the eighteenth century, by the twentieth, per capita consumption had dropped off precipitously. This was largely due to social and economic modernization and the availability of a wider choice of foods. But part of the problem was that the bread did not taste good. Centuries-old artisanal breadmaking techniques were giving way to conveyor belts that churned out flavorless fluff. In a culture in which bread is sacrosanct, bad bread was more than a gastronomical disappointment; it was a threat to France’s sense of itself. With a nudge from the millers (who make the flour) and assistance from the government, bakers rallied, reclaiming their reputations as artisans by marketing their traditionally made loaves as the authentic French bread.By the mid-1990s, bread officially designated as “bread of the French tradition”—bread made without additives or freezing—was in demand throughout Paris. What makes this artisanal bread good? Kaplan explains, meticulously describing the ideal crust and crumb (interior), mouth feel, aroma, and taste. He discusses the breadmaking process in extraordinary detail, from the ingredients to the kneading, shaping, and baking, and even to the sound bread should make when it comes out of the oven. He offers a system for assessing bread’s quality and a language for discussing its attributes. A historian and a connoisseur, Kaplan does more than tell the story of the revival of good bread in France. He makes the reader see, smell, taste, feel, and even hear why it is so very wonderful that good bread is back.

Genres: Food, History, Food Writing

384 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Steven Laurence Kaplan is the Goldwin Smith Professor of European History at Cornell University and Visiting Professor of Modern History at the University of Versailles, Saint-Quentin. His many books include a guide to the best bread in Paris, Cherchez le pain: Guide des meilleures boulangeries de Paris, and The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1770–1775, also published by Duke University Press. The French government has twice knighted Kaplan for his contributions to the “sustenance and nourishment” of French culture.

Reviews

[David C Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Find someone who looks at you like Steve Kaplan looks at a baguette! The preeminent historian of the political culture of French bread and baking (his 18th century histories are magisterial) delivers a lover’s lament for the decline of French baking and lauds its possible renaissance. Very well written and offers a wealth of insights not just on French history/culture but general topics like scientism, positivism, cultural nostalgia and modernization. 5 stars for enthusiasm but 4 for the book because Kaplan gets so carried away by bread making and its issues, small and large, that the lay reader gets lost in the details of baking and the polemics about it.
Also: Sylvester Graham, minister and social reformer through diet (inspirer of the Graham cracker) was a 19th century American, not active in the 1930s as Kaplan has him. He died in 1851.

[Lo]

I'm excited to finally read this, because Kaplan's appearance promoting it in 2006 is the greatest interview Conan O'Brien has ever done. He is absolutely a role model for me, not just as a baker, but as a liver of life.

If you haven't seen the interview I mentioned, and especially if you're a Conan fan, you really should check it out. It's the one time where Conan himself was completely blindsided by what goes down, despite all the prep:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hFb0...

[Laurie · Rating 3 out of 5]

As the title says, this is a history of french bread. Far from concise, and at times overly academic to the point of being pedantic, this provides a fascinating insight into the role of bread in a place where the respect for food is near-religious. Historical conflicts slowly beaten down by bureaucratic and regulatory movements, the rise of the corporate bakers, and so on. Interesting to an insider, probably not so much to a casual reader.

[Meg]

I'd love to read this and have ordered it. My lifetime ambition is to make the perfect baguette. If you've ever seen the difference it makes, to bake your own white bread with T55 french bread flour, you'll never take bread for granted again.

[Melinda · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was interesting but kind of a slog; that is, it dragged a bit. I got halfway through and realized that there are reasons why I have never liked bread very much. The only options I saw as a child were white bread (forbidden in my mother's whole wheat home) and my mother's whole wheat bread, which she labored for years to make more palatable, and finally succeeded well enough for herself, after I had long been out of the house. My husband was all in favor of white bread, Wonder bread if possible. I agree with my mother that whole wheat bread is better nutritionally and is fiber-rich, but it's a chore to make under the conditions and ingredients I have available. There are reasons why presliced, store-bought bread is so ubiquitous!

This book digs into the history of industrialized bread and reveals many of the changes necessary to make shelf-stable, uniform loaves, from what is actually a very organic and therefore unpredictable process. It's like, you can plant a tree where you would like the tree to grow, but you don't control its growth, because you don't control all the variables. Bread is a growing thing, and our industrial society, in order to produce as much as possible with as little financial cost as possible, has tried to eliminate as many variables as they can. The result reminds me of Mark Twain's quote about trying to find out how a frog jumps. If you dissect a frog to find out, you get a dead frog. And you still don't know how it jumps.

Maybe that's why God referred to bread for the Last Supper, because how it works is a mystery, just as the atonement for our sins.