Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [99]
On a fourth century AD Roman mold of the Goddess of Victory are the letters DULC, which, according to Lorch, was the abbreviation of the Roman confectioner Dulciarius. There are seals from many countries. During the ages when bread was brought to communal ovens for baking, it was the custom to mark the loaves. Thanks to these brands, an individual could claim his bread once it was baked.
Of the many documents on display, the one that captivated me most was a proclamation of November 15, 1793, announcing that only one type of bread could be sold, the Pain d’Égalité. Henceforth, there was to be no more white bread for the rich and black bread for the poor. The future did not promise Pie in the Sky but a compromise loaf for all alike.
“Can you find out more for me about the Pain d’Égalité?” I asked Lucien Pergeline of the Grands Moulins de Paris.
White flour is the ultimate refinement of the whole grain of wheat. According to the articles of the revolutionary decree, no more than fifteen pounds of bran could be extracted from one hundred kilos of any kind of grain. The order specified that all bread would be composed of three-fourths wheat flour and one-fourth rye flour. In localities lacking sufficient rye, barley flour was to be substituted.
In Article 9 the bakers were warned that they faced imprisonment if they made anything other than a single type of bread to be known as the “Bread of Equality.”
The law didn’t last for long. Under the empire of Napoléon I, the new aristocrats went right back to white bread. Society shifts. Now it is the well-to-do who cherish the virtues of the bread once spurned by the less well-off. If it came to a choice today, the former would rather give up cake.
Whether it is white or black, leavened or unleavened, bread is the food common to all mankind.
In Turkey, a land of long-respected traditions, any piece of bread seen lying upon the ground is to be raised, pressed against the heart, the lips, and the forehead, and then placed on a high ledge. One does not walk upon bread. It would be a sacrilege to the Creator.
As the poet sang, “A jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and Thou.”
Bread Box
“Bread is located at the crossroads between the material and the symbolic, between economics and culture,” notes Steven Kaplan in his excellent book Good Bread Is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It (Duke University Press, 2006). Kaplan also points out various phrases and proverbs that feature bread in France: a person who is very ill has lost “the taste for bread”; a marvelous individual is “better than good bread”; and a tiresome experience is “as long as a day without bread.”
In short, bread matters in France. Kaplan, himself French, notes that “even if consumers eat much less bread than in the past, they see themselves in bread, which continues to contribute to their identity as French people. In public opinion, bread remains deeply bound up with the basic values of sociability and well-being, with sacred and secular communion.” In addition to Kaplan’s book, two other noteworthy bread reads are Bread of Three Rivers: The Story of a French Loaf by Sara Mansfield Taber (Beacon Press, 2001) and Boulangerie! Pocket Guide to Paris’s Famous Bakeries by Jack Armstrong and Delores Wilson (Ten Speed, 1999). In the first, Taber travels initially to Brittany to “understand bread in a deep way, beyond even the capacity of my tongue.” We follow her to master bakers elsewhere—while delving into salt, wheat, water, and yeast—and find that though Taber set out in search of something as simple as a loaf of bread, she instead found herself “sitting down to a rich, five-course French meal.” She acknowledges that it was sometimes difficult to learn about the