Refer to Wenyuan | Why the French love the "Baguette"

Reference News Network reported on March 15 (Text/Anthony Perry Green)

God, how much the French love to talk about bread. Living among them, sometimes I swear that if I hear a word on this topic again, I will go crazy at once. The French are more obsessed with bread than wine and cheese. A Frenchman might admit in the face of persecution that other countries can also produce wine and cheese that are barely imported. But bread? They will say that no country is close to the level of France.

Of course, the French are always eating bread. Depending on who you believe in the numbers, the country eats between 30 million and 32 million loaves of bread every day. This is equivalent to every Frenchman eating half a baguette every day. This figure is lower than one baguette per day in 1970 and three batons per day in 1900. But it's still a huge number. And, I'm sure, no country talks so much about bread or thinks it's an important part of its image. If you want to sketch the image of the French, just add a bicycle, a beret and an onion.

Right now, the French's enthusiasm for bread is even stronger. The campaign to place the baguette on UNESCO's List of intangible cultural heritage of Humanity will peak next month.

However, baguettes are not as traditional as people sometimes think. The exact origin of this strip of bread is controversial. But no one would say it's been around for more than 200 years, certainly longer than that. In terms of the history of bread, it was like yesterday. We've been eating this food ever since Mrs. Natu (and I've only recently heard about them; they live in present-day Palestine) made bread around 12,000 B.C. Thousands of years later, the Sumerians were very good at making flat bread.

The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans added yeast to allow the bread to ferment. By the Middle Ages, bread was used in France as both food and tableware. Diners use a piece of stale bread as a plate, and when they are finished, they give it to poor people or dogs.

Bread naturally became the center of family, social and political life. Shortages of goods and soaring prices caused by the grain harvest failures of 1774-1775 were key factors that led to the French Revolution four years later. In fact, one of the first tasks of the French First Republic in 1792 was to control the price of bread. Control continued until 1986.

From the 19th century onwards, there are many theories about the specific origins of baguettes. Previously, French bread was round, mostly made from flour mixed with couscous and rye. There is a story that the long baguette was designed by Napoleon's army and was easier to carry. Another story claims that baguettes were designed for the workers who built the Paris Metro and could be broken open directly by hand.

The third theory highlights the need for daily freshly baked bread in the emerging urban class — previously, bread was usually baked only once a week, and in rural areas, the interval was even longer. With the arrival of steam furnaces from Austria, the adoption of compressed yeast, and the production of more refined flour, the demand for fresh bread from the emerging urban classes was met. Molding flour into long strips instead of round ones means that both kneading and baking are faster, saving time and money. The whiter bread thus made is naturally something that only the rich can enjoy.

This continued until around 1945. As Kristoff Cressan, the baker in Rouen, said to me: "After the war, the French people had enough of brown bread. They all wanted white fluffy bread baked from refined flour. For them, it means the end of suffering. This, as Ikresan said, also brought about the end of taste.

A baguette should be 1.5 to 2.4 inches wide, 1.2 to 2 inches tall, about 26 inches long (1 inch about 2.5 cm - this net note), and weigh about 9 ounces (1 ounce about 28 grams - this net note). The shell should be brittle and soft on the inside, honeycomb-shaped. A "traditional" baguette must be limited to wheat flour, water, yeast and a pinch of salt. There is no other than him. Although the price is only a few tens of euros, it is definitely worth a try. (Zhang Lin translated from the Website of the British Daily Telegraph on March 1, originally titled "The Wonderful Origin of Baguette and Why the French Are So Obsessed with It")

Source: Reference News Network