Although the publishers of this book, when they asked me to write
it, generously allowed me as much elbow room as I might desire, I
must resist the temptation to dwell much longer on the details of
French gastronomic leadership. To exhaust the subject would require
a whole volume much bigger than this. Before closing this long
chapter, however, I must dwell briefly on three more important kinds
of food--bread, butter, and cheese--in the making of which the French
excel.
Unlike ourselves and our English cousins, they partake of nothing but
bread and butter for breakfast, wherefore it is not surprising that
they take particular pains to have these good. Bread is also eaten at
other meals much more freely than in other countries, including Germany
and Austria, which alone rival France in the making of it.
The best French bread is made in such a way that to have it in prime
condition it must always be fresh. At all hours, therefore, one
sees boys hurrying along the streets with baskets loaded with tall
loaves. Without exaggeration, these loaves are often a yard long,
but no thicker than a man's forearm. This is the Parisian bread _par
excellence_, and what is most characteristic about it is that it is
practically _all crust_.
Bread is regarded as the staff of life--an English writer, Winslow,
called it so as long ago as 1624--and it has become so more and more
in recent centuries. It is therefore of the utmost interest to know
how the French, who admittedly know more about good food and the best
cooking than any other people in the world, bake their bread. They bake
it, as I have just said, in such a way that it is _nearly all crust_.
Nearly all crust! And the French, it is needless to say, dote on
this crust. For the crumb they have no liking; often you may see a
Frenchman poke out with his thumb what little crumb there is and leave
it on his plate.
How different this from the practices prevalent among the least
gastronomic of civilized nations--the English and the Americans!
The English way was graphically described in the "Observations on
Mastication" which Dr. Campbell contributed to the London "Lancet"
(July and August, 1903):
"Witness the fashion of eating bread-and-butter at any place of
refreshment, and the last thing you will be served with is a plateful
of crusts of bread. Many establishments, indeed, make a regular
practice of giving away their crusts as unsaleable. Thus, the
rectangular loaves used for bread-and-butter in the aërated bread-shops
are cut transversely into slices, each loaf thus yielding two end
crusts which are put into baskets for the poor, only the soft crumby
pieces being reserved for the customers."
Similar practices prevail in the United States and Canada.
The lowest biological specimen--mere gastronomic protoplasm--is the
pale, ten-dollar-a-week clerk whose deadly substitute for bread is the
half-baked dough ("butter cake") he eats at lunch time--a dyspeptic
mess without the suspicion of a crust on it. His taste, unfortunately,
is shared by some of the well-to-do, whose education has been
neglected. Two youths walked into the breakfast room of an Italian
hotel one morning and sat down at the table next to ours. The first
thing they did was to push away the nicely browned crusty rolls and
ask the waiter if he had any "soft bread." He had none, of course. He
should have told them--I came near doing it myself--that those Italian
rolls, though not equal to the best Parisian, had much more flavor and
were much more digestible than the home-made crumb they were crying
for--like babes for pap, though their teeth looked sound.
In many New York hotels and restaurants, imitations of Parisian loaves
or rolls are now placed on the tables. Some of them are quite good--a
great improvement on the ordinary American bread--yet most of the
diners look at them askance. In down-town lunch places, if you fee the
waiter regularly, he will not insult you by putting a crusty end piece
on your plate. I always fee well, and therefore have the greatest
difficulty in making the waiters believe that I sincerely, honestly and
truly prefer an end piece--a particularly brown one at that. Some of
them look at me with the incredulous expression of the farmer who, on
seeing a giraffe, exclaimed, "There ain't no such animal!"
It is needless to say that I prefer the golden-hued end-piece because
I find it infinitely richer in flavor than the crumb. It is for the
same reason, principally, that the French insist on having crusty
bread. There are other reasons--they may not be aware of them but
instinctively they act on them. Let me give them in the words of a
distinguished medical man--the same Dr. Campbell, Physician to the
London Northwest Hospital, whose words I have just quoted. "Loaves,"
he writes, "should be shaped so as to give a maximum of crust and a
minimum of crumb, and should be baked hard. Such loaves are quite as
nutritious as the ordinary ones, and much more digestible, containing
as they do an abundance of dextrine and not a little maltose, and
compelling efficient mastication, especially if eaten, as they should
be, without any fluid. A lady who has been catering for a large number
of girls gives the bread in this way, and she tells me that there is
_keen competition for the most crusty portions_."
The words I have italicized are of the utmost significance. They show
that if English--or American--girls, or boys, or women and men--prefer
crumb to crust, it is not owing to innate depravity but to lack of
opportunity to learn better. Give them a chance to ascertain the
superiority of crust to crumb and they promptly take to it as if they
were in Paris born.
They cannot be blamed for neglecting American crust, for the crust of
the ordinary American bread actually is inferior to the crumb, being
tough, leathery, and flavorless. But the American crumb is nearly
always indigestible. The moral of the story is that we should discard
it in favor of Parisian crusty bread, boycotting every baker who does
not honestly try to surround his loaves with crisp, toothsome crust.
Ordinary American bread is greatly improved in flavor and digestibility
when it is toasted. _Toasting is the conversion of crumb into crust._
It is resorted to daily by hundreds of thousands of Americans who,
either knowingly or instinctively, adopt this way of avoiding the
soggy bread which ruins the stomach and undermines the health. On this
point let me cite the words of another medical expert, Dr. Alexander
Bryce, author of "Dietetics," "Modern Theories of Diet," "The Laws of
Life and Health," etc., endorsing the views of Russia's most eminent
physiologist:
"Pavlov demonstrated that the chewing of fresh, moist bread [such
as most Americans insist on having] produced no secretion of
saliva worth mentioning, but dry bread caused the saliva to flow
in large quantities. Stale bread, crust of bread, toast, zwieback
(double-toasted bread), and plenty of biscuit compel fairly prolonged
mastication with plenty of saliva, while soft bread is usually bolted
with no production of digestive juice of any consequence."
Besides the yard-long loaves referred to, the French have an endless
variety of breads, one of the best of them being the crescent-shaped
"croissants" usually served with the morning coffee. Different
provinces and towns have their own special kinds, but Paris is the
paradise for bread-eaters; elsewhere, the bread is not so uniformly
excellent, though nearly always better than that served in most other
countries.
While the preponderance of crust over crumb is the most important
aspect of Parisian bread, there are a number of other things to which
it owes its excellence. For a high-class product it is important to
select flour made of wheat which has a particularly fine flavor. The
Flavor is also largely affected by the milling, the way the dough is
made and kneaded, the quick or slow fermentation, the kind of oven used
and its temperature, the length of leaving the bread exposed to the
heat, and many other things.
A French baker's apprentice has to go through a four-years' course of
studies before he is considered an expert. Is it a wonder that such
favorable results are achieved? But besides his knowledge he must have
an infinite capacity for taking pains. _Plus on se donnera de peine
pour pétrir la pâte, plus on obtiendra de pain, et meilleur il sera. On
n'a rien de bon sans travail._ "The more trouble you take in kneading
the dough, the more bread you will get, and the better it will be. You
cannot get anything good without work."
So say the authors--there are three of them--of the "Nouveau Manuel
Complet du Boulanger," published in Paris by L. Mulo. It is a book of
626 pages with 93 illustrations. Besides an introduction which gives
a bird's-eye view of the history of baking, there are ten chapters
treating exhaustively of wheats and flours and their adulteration; on
the making of dough and the different kinds of leaven; on troughs and
ovens; on diseases of bread; on the peculiarities of the breads of
various countries, including, of course, those of France, Austria and
Germany as the most important.
Summing up their conclusions, the authors of this encyclopedic work
say, under the subhead, "Signes Caractéristiques d'un Pain Bien
Fabriqué," "Well-made bread must be light, well-raised and well-puffed
up. Its color must be a particular yellow, shading into brown; it must
be resonant when it is struck; its surface must be smooth, the inside
full of cavities and _grandes crevasses_; its crumb white, very spongy
and very elastic."