Hocker Grove
French One & Two

                           French Culture: Baguettes!

                                                                                                                                                      Its crust is appetizingly golden and crunchy, and the bread inside is light                                                                                                                                                       and fluffy...the baguette is a mainstay at French tables. It accompanies                                                                                                                                                         every meal and represents around 80% of all bread bought in France.

 

                                                                                                                                                      The traditional baguette is internationally renowned but its ingredients                                                                                                                                                        are simple: wheat flour, water, yeast or and salt. Legend has it that it                                                                                                                                                              owes its elongated shape to practical considerations: bread shaped like                                                                                                                                                        this takes less long to rise and to cook.

 

                                                                                                                                                     The baguette is a symbol of French national pride, and its recipe is                                                                                                                                                                  appreciated and celebrated throughout France, even by the President of                                                                                                                                                      the Republic! Every year, the “Grand Prix de la Baguette de Paris” is                                                                                                                                                                awarded to one baker, who becomes the official supplier to the Élysée                                                                                                                                                          Palace, residence of the French Head of State, for that year.

 

There are various local types of bread specific to different parts of France, and no two bakers are the same. The French bread you are used to, however, has not been eaten in France since time immemorial as you might think. Up until about 1800 French peasants ate bread made from wheat, rye or buckwheat. Bakers often added all sorts of materials as fillers to make the flour go further: sawdust, hay, dirt and even dung were all used. The vast majority of a peasant’s diet came from bread, and an adult male could eat as much as two or three pounds of it a day.

 

Grain and bread riots were extremely common up until the French revolution. In fact, the riots that resulted in the fall of the Bastille on 14th July 1789 and helped start the French Revolution began as a search for arms and grains. Parisian peasants – rightly – suspected that there had been grain hoarding to increase prices, and took to the streets in protest.

 

The development of steam ovens around mid-1700s made it possible to bake loaves with a crisp crust and a white, airy center, like today’s baguettes. In 1920 a law was passed preventing workers from starting work before 4am, which made it impossible to get the bread cooked in time for breakfast – this was a major problem, since the baguette is the star of a French breakfast: you open it and spread it with butter or jam before digging in with a cup of orange juice, coffee, tea or hot chocolate. They solved this by making the bread into long, thin baguettes that cooked faster. Some of them were much longer than we see today: “…loaves of bread six feet long that look like crowbars!” (1862).

 

Even with all of these changes, the baguette is still a central part of French life, with many French people stopping by the bakery for one every day. But who knows what new traditions will arise? Breaking news at the end of 2014 included a Parisian baker who installed the first vending machine for baguettes, available 24/7!