What do you think?
Rate this book
Bread of Three Rivers: The Story of a French Loaf
What is it about bread? Why am I, here in the middle of my life, so enamored of French loaves? Two images kept cropping two French people sitting in a café for a long afternoon of eating thick hunks of bread and drinking cups of coffee, and a Frenchman on a bicycle with a loaf slung across his handlebars. These visions seemed to depict lives soaked in leisure, where there was time for the good things. . . . Then this thought ambled It's the dailiness of bread, like a reliable friend. . . . My plan starts to billow forth. My project, as I imagine it, will be a natural history, an ecology of bread. The story of a loaf.
Overcome by a passion for French bread, Sara Mansfield Taber travels to Brittany in search of a loaf, which like the lifestyle that must surely accompany it, is perfect in its simplicity. After many months of seeking, she tears off a hunk of pain trois rivières, made by Gold Medal baker Monsieur Jean-Claude Choquet of Blain, Loire-Atlantique. It "smelled like heaven and tasted a mile deep." It tasted honest. Here was her loaf.
In Bread of Three Rivers Taber takes us deep into the grainy crumb, uncovering the four basic ingredients-the salt, water, wheat, and yeast-that when combined by M. Choquet make for a spectacular loaf. We learn of the marshy fields of Guérande where for hundreds of years salt, blessed with a unique mixture of microbes and minerals (that lend their flavor to the bread), has been harvested with the help of the sun. Then we're off to Moulin de Pont-James to meet the miller, who whispers to Taber that he actually uses strong American wheat from North Dakota to fortify the local harvest. Then to Nantes to engage the organic wheat farmer. In Nort-sur-Erdre we discover an ancient natural aquifer, composed of sand and limestone somewhere between 8 million and 50 million years ago. We end our journey in Lille at the Lesaffre Yeast Company, where the alchemy responsible for everything from American white loaves to Turkish flatbread is revealed.
A deliciously satisfying mixture of history, science, travel narrative, and romance (could anything be more powerful than bread love?), Bread of Three Rivers reminds us that nothing, no matter how basic, is as simple as it would seem.
Overcome by a passion for French bread, Sara Mansfield Taber travels to Brittany in search of a loaf, which like the lifestyle that must surely accompany it, is perfect in its simplicity. After many months of seeking, she tears off a hunk of pain trois rivières, made by Gold Medal baker Monsieur Jean-Claude Choquet of Blain, Loire-Atlantique. It "smelled like heaven and tasted a mile deep." It tasted honest. Here was her loaf.
In Bread of Three Rivers Taber takes us deep into the grainy crumb, uncovering the four basic ingredients-the salt, water, wheat, and yeast-that when combined by M. Choquet make for a spectacular loaf. We learn of the marshy fields of Guérande where for hundreds of years salt, blessed with a unique mixture of microbes and minerals (that lend their flavor to the bread), has been harvested with the help of the sun. Then we're off to Moulin de Pont-James to meet the miller, who whispers to Taber that he actually uses strong American wheat from North Dakota to fortify the local harvest. Then to Nantes to engage the organic wheat farmer. In Nort-sur-Erdre we discover an ancient natural aquifer, composed of sand and limestone somewhere between 8 million and 50 million years ago. We end our journey in Lille at the Lesaffre Yeast Company, where the alchemy responsible for everything from American white loaves to Turkish flatbread is revealed.
A deliciously satisfying mixture of history, science, travel narrative, and romance (could anything be more powerful than bread love?), Bread of Three Rivers reminds us that nothing, no matter how basic, is as simple as it would seem.
256 pages, Paperback
First published November 21, 2000
2 people are currently reading
42 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
July 11, 2019
Interesting carving of the components of what is bread - good bread, sandwich bread, French bread, and pain trots rivieres. Lots of details which I didn't follow that closely, so probably helpful that they were repeated. Pictures would have been wonderful for some of the locations visited but that might have defeated the word pictures Sara worked so hard to create. Liked her characterization of the people she worked with while tracing the journee.
February 10, 2020
Salt, wheat, and yeast all seem so simple and obvious. After reading this book, you'll never take what goes into making a baguette for granted.
January 4, 2022
Interesting, especially the chapter on salt.
January 15, 2010
Comparing this to "A Year In Provence" is a joke, isn't it? This isn't a "gee, aren't the French cute and grumpy" sort of book. While this book does have charm in its portrayals of the people she interviews,a good deal of it is taken up by technical descriptions of how yeast is made, how drinking water is processed, etc. The sort of person who loves a Mayle book's eyes will glaze over.
Truthfully, I found Taber's detailed descriptions a bit hard to focus on myself--I think she could have found ways to simplify what she learned. And sometimes when she's musing in what she feels is a deep and meaningful way, she sounds pretentious.
Most important of all, where is SOME kind of recipe for french bread? Where is Taber with her hands deep in dough, trying to recreate the experience?
The creative spark that takes those ingredients she describes and turns them into something beyond the ordinary is missing in this book.
Truthfully, I found Taber's detailed descriptions a bit hard to focus on myself--I think she could have found ways to simplify what she learned. And sometimes when she's musing in what she feels is a deep and meaningful way, she sounds pretentious.
Most important of all, where is SOME kind of recipe for french bread? Where is Taber with her hands deep in dough, trying to recreate the experience?
The creative spark that takes those ingredients she describes and turns them into something beyond the ordinary is missing in this book.
November 11, 2009
I love the idea of this book, but the reality just didn't do it for me. I expected the book to be more about the search for the perfect loaf of bread, but the author had basically discovered the bread she wanted to profile from the beginning, so the book was more about the technical aspects of the bread and its ingredients. I think that this could have been very interesting, but it just wasn't. I never wanted to read the book even though the writing was good, and when I realized that it felt more like a burden I needed to push through, I decided to abandon it (take that, OCD!). Maybe I'll return to this next year when my sister and I begin our year of bread.
December 22, 2009
A little chemistry - some geopolitical issues - a bit of cuisine - and some agriculture. It all adds up to a delightful read from an author who wanted to get the bottom of what exactly makes a wonderful loaf of French bread. Is is the yeast? The salt? The water? The wheat (much of which, it turns out, comes from Nebraska)? Or is it just French traditional savoir-faire? A bit of all that, as the author discovers in conversations with salt farmers, hydro-engineers, bakers, and others involved in the making of French bread.
February 17, 2016
Actually a 3.5 star rating; I enjoyed the author's journey of discovery that her idealized loaf of French bread consisting of four simple ingredients, flour, water, salt and yeast was much more a discovery of culture, science, modern society and life, especially of what makes each of us different but ultimately the same. Any reader of John McPhee and perhaps William Least Heat-Moon should find this book enjoyable.
Currently reading
December 22, 2008Salt, water, wheat & yeast...
August 25, 2010
makes you want to go out and find a good bread bakery or better yet, take a trip to France and find a good bread bakery.
Want to read
November 22, 2009I took a workshop on the Personal Essay with Sara this weekend. Am looking forward to reading her book!
January 4, 2015
Good gathering of information; the writing varies and is sometimes clumsy.
January 17, 2015
In a search for good bread, Ms. Taber travels to France not only visiting a baker but also following the sources of the ingredients: salt, wheat, water and yeast.
July 12, 2009
90% boring, 10% charming, but I will hear what the book club has to say.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews