Good Bread Is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It

Good Bread Is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It

Historian 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. This book chronicles the turnaround of French bread from the quality, globally renowned loaves that dominated the world, into the bland generic loaves that they became and then back again. This story takes into account every step of the process, from the providers of the grain to even the government stepping in, in order to show the great return of the French loaf. Kaplan also describes what a perfect French loaf is and how many have tried to replicate it and why it is imperative to know exactly what you are doing when trying.

This book is both a historical account and a love letter of the French bread making process. It is important to the history of bread because the French have been world renowned for their breads for centuries and the decline of their bread is a milestone in bread history. It is important to understand what caused them to decline, and how they were able to reemerge while also gaining an understanding of what it takes to make a truly good loaf of artisanal bread. There are so many factors that go into crafting a French loaf that it is easy to miss one, or intentionally cut corners and these are chronicled in Kaplan's narrative.

Steven Kaplan

https://books.google.com/books?id=f7Tk55rW32YC

Duke University Press

Dec 20, 2006