Un Coup de Baguette

When I was a child, growing up in England, it’s safe to say that we didn’t enjoy the diversity of food options available to consumers today. Indeed, when supermarkets started selling baguettes in the early 80s, it caused much mirth in my household when we saw them labelled in supermarkets as “French sticks.”

Although it may strike us as absurd nowadays to translate the names of well-known food products like croissant (literally, “crescent”), linguine (“little tongues”) or — god forbid — vermicelli (“little worms”), in hindsight, “French stick” wasn’t such a bad translation after all. Larousse lists fifteen different meanings for the word “baguette,” including, of course, the emblematic French bread, but the primary meaning of baguette in French is a thin, generic stick. More specific meanings include chopsticks, the conductor’s baton, or the magician’s wand — hence the “coup de baguette” pun in the title (literally, "wave of the wand"; figuratively, “the baguette’s masterstroke”).

I know it is generally considered pretty poor form to explain one’s own puns, but the masterstroke I’m referring to in the title is, of course, the French Ministry for Culture managing to nab “Intangible Cultural Heritage” status for the baguette. And for the avoidance of doubt, I should specify that this accolade was not acquired at the stroke of a wand; the French Bakers’ Confederation had been lobbying for its inclusion for years; the application was finally submitted in March of 2021, and a long, drawn-out process culminated with the 17th session of the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Rabat, Morocco, on 30 November 2022. Quite the consecration for the humble baguette.

Indeed, the baguette may be a historic product, but it is also a relatively recent creation in the grand sweep of baking history. There are lots of theories about how the baguette came about — my personal favourite (probably apocryphal) is that it was invented to enable Napoleon’s troops to march into battle with their dinner strapped to their backpack — but the fact is that there is no mention of the baguette in the professional literature before the 20th century.

Steven Kaplan’s fantastic 2002 book, “Le retour du bon pain” (“Good Bread Is Back”), traces the rise, fall and renaissance of the baguette in post-war France; Parisian consumers, were so sick of pain bis (wholemeal bread) or pain noir (black bread), the only types of bread available during rationing, that white bread quickly became the norm. Moreover, with French consumers eating less bread than before due to the diversification of their diet, and maybe inspired by the success of the Chorleywood process on the other side of the channel, French bakers started to take shortcuts, with more and more of them reducing fermentation times and resorting to industrial yeast. Kaplan describes his dismay at how insipid bread often was in the 1970s.

Fortunately, in the 80s and 90s a new generation of bakers sought to give bread its mojo back. Stone-baked bread made with sourdough and long fermentation times became all the rage. Achieving Intangible Cultural Heritage status seems like the culmination of the baguette’s return to its former glory, but it is also a reminder that nothing is ever a foregone conclusion; artisan bakers face other headwinds, from changing consumer habits to the 35-hour work-week, and the number of artisan bakeries in France has fallen from 55,000 in the 1970s to “just” 33,000 today.

Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that France will see the same decline of the artisan bakery industry as the UK; the famously protective French state has set up multiple legislative ramparts, bread is a central part of French cultural identity, and there are state-certified bakery diplomas and excellent training institutes such as the Ecole de Boulangerie et de Pâtisserie de Paris that seek to perpetuate that tradition. Every French child can identify with Willy Ronis’ famous photo of a boy rushing home with a parisien under his arm; every French man or woman is familiar with the Proustian thrill of spreading butter onto a warm baguette. France is not the only country where bread is more than just a means of sustenance, indeed it has religious significance in many cultures, but the baguette is truly a blessing — a fact acknowledged by its World Heritage status — and, for that, may we be truly grateful.

Willy Ronis, le petit parisien (1952)