Breaking bread

THE FOOD CLUB

The great cliche about the French is the one about a man with a beret holding a bottle of wine and a baguette," said Amandio Afonzo of Coup de Pates to me at the recent Europain 2008 exhibition held in Paris every three years and, in a curious way, he was right.

The mammoth exhibition was divided into four parts of which bread was the single largest, most vital one. All the big players were present in full force, from yeast producers to oven fabricators who boasted that the floor of their deck ovens had genuine French stone in them "" crucial for the smoky flavour of the base of the baguette.

To see how Europain fitted into context, you had to walk the streets of Paris "" never an onerous task at the best of times. You really do see ultra-trim women "" with or without berets "" carrying home a baguette. If there's a child trailing along, the baguette will invariably have a chunk broken off.

Every bakery shop, gourmet store and pastry shop sells baguettes; indeed, the one place you'll never find it is the supermarket. To the French way of thinking, it's a baker who makes bread. Someone who sells detergent and scrubbing brushes cannot be entrusted with the fundamental task of stocking bread.

To stretch the analogy, will Indian bread start improving if we take it out of daily need stores and put it into bakery shops? I wonder. For starters, we do not seem to have a taste for crusty bread. To us, softness counts for a lot. To many of us, the creamy colour of a French baguette, the slightly coarse, chewy texture and crunchy crust are hardly anything to go ga-ga about.

Most of us don't notice, or don't care, that the cross-section of a slice of baguette made in India does not have the huge air pockets that is the norm in France. We probably have failed to notice that our product here is far whiter. That it is a function of gently removing the outer husk of the wheat does not greatly concern us.

What we value far more is the croissant, with its millions of leaves. It is tempting to think of it as a product that evolved in France by sheer happenstance, but here too, science and technology have shaped it along the way.

For example, there is a butter manufactured in "" where else? "" France that has the property of not releasing grease when subjected to high temperatures. This means that although millions of tiny flakes will fall all over your clothes as you bite into a croissant, they will all be free from grease.

Privately, some exhibitors were tight-lipped about the future of the baguette in France. Though they'd never admit to it publicly, the baguette has taken a hit in the country of its birth and diet is to blame for it.

Like elsewhere in the world, carbohydrates have become Public Enemy Number One in France too.

(marryam08@gmail.com)