Good Bread Is Back
A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It
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In Good Bread Is Back, historian and leading French bread expert 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 describes 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. 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. By the mid-1990s bakers rallied, and bread officially designated as "bread of the French tradition" was in demand throughout Paris. Kaplan meticulously describes good bread's 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 the sound bread should make when it comes out of the oven. 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.
About this Author
Steven Laurence Kaplan is the Goldwin Smith Professor of European History at Cornell University. He is the author of The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1770-1775, also published by Duke University Press.
Reviews
"Good Bread Is Back will become the canonical book on 20th century French baking, not only in English but in French too."
"[F]or anyone with a broad interest in bread, the book is an excellent and comprehensive look at the product and how it has shaped, and been shaped by, French society."
"[Kaplan is] not just the leading authority on French bread but the conscience of French baking--a conscience that does not hesitate to tug. . . . Good Bread is Back [is] a punchy, compendious account of how French baking returned to its artisanal roots and sparked a revival in quality crusts."
"This is very much a bread nerd's book. . . . It is a fascinating story, and Kaplan is the person to tell it."
"A good baguette is as integral a part of French cultural heritage as Paris and Lacan, and this beautiful book forms a fitting tribute, researched, written and illustrated with finesse."
"Professor Kaplan's new book is a tasty meditation on the many pleasures of good bread, wrapped in an object lesson on the evolution of artisanal production. Many readers who do not share the author's passion for the technical aspects of breadmaking will nonetheless be impressed by it. And anyone who has ever stood in a French bakery savoring the scent and admiring the array of delectable brown loaves will be heartened by his optimistic conclusion that good bread will always drive out bad. It is, as Kaplan might say, a delicious book with a beautifully gilded crust and a pearly, chewy crumb."
"Students of French history and food will find [Good Bread is Back] completely absorbing and it should be required reading for any professional."
"Throughout this work, Kaplan powerfully demonstrates the symbolic charge of bread as it is ''deeply bound up with the basic values of sociability and well-being, with sacred and secular in communion' (304). . . . Kaplan reminds us through bread, that bread sums up the human experience."
"[A] book every serious American bread enthusiast ought to read. . . . A good storyteller, Kaplan describes his large cast of characters in sharp detail, with numerous protagonists and antagonists, and does a fine job of capturing the center of good in each of them."
"A magnificent combination of polemic and scholarship, it asks how the superlative French bread of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries gave way to the disappointing industrial loaves of the 1960s onwards; and how these in turn, have been happily supplanted by a new generation of artisananal baguettes, batards and boules."
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