WHEN I INCLUDED this piece in my first Paris edition, Barry told me the only baguette in all of France that she liked was la flûte Gana from Ganachaud, a legendary boulangerie in the twentieth arrondissement. After she first tried it, she immediately thought of a French advertising slogan of the time, Voilà un préjugé qui m’a coûté cher, which translates as “And that’s a prejudice that cost me dearly.” If she once thought all baguettes were alike—dull and tasteless—she didn’t anymore. I happen to be fond of the crispy, airy baguette in general, but I grant that the flûte Gana is one of the most perfect baguettes on earth. The original Ganachaud (rue de Ménilmontant) was presided over by master baker Bernard Ganachaud, who has since retired. That original shop is now closed, but Ganachaud’s daughters, Valérie, Isabelle, and Marianne, have opened their own boulangerie nearby (226 rue des Pyrénées), which appears to be thriving. The family also now oversees a network of boulangeries with the Gana brand throughout France.
My husband and I once had the supreme great fortune to meet Bernard before he retired, although it happened quite by accident. I mentioned to the cashier at Ganachaud that I was visiting from the States and had learned of the bakery in Patricia Wells’s b—But before I could say the word book, she excitedly summoned Bernard, who led us upstairs to his office, where we were served coffee and bostock, slices of slightly stale and toasted brioche flavored with kirsch and almonds (which is very yummy). All the while I was explaining that we didn’t really know Patricia Wells—we had only read her book—but he didn’t seem to mind as he shared some publicity clippings with us and chattered on about his recent venture in Japan.
There are a number of other outstanding boulangeries in Paris, and you will discover your own, some famous and others perhaps known only within your quartier, but a trip out to the twentieth (the neighborhood is Gambetta) is very much vaut le détour—it’s worth the trip, to quote the Guide Michelin. I recommend making the journey a full-fledged excursion, also visiting the Père-Lachaise cemetery and Le Saint-Amour café (on the edge of the cemetery, at the corner of avenue Gambetta and boulevard de Ménilmontant). Le Saint-Amour was recommended by Patricia Wells years ago, and I’ve since visited several times, downing glasses of good Burgundy and enjoying the abundant bonhomie.
NAOMI BARRY wrote for many years for Gourmet. She is also the author of Paris Personal (Dutton, 1963), Adorable Zucchini (Brick Tower, 2005), and Food alla Florentine (Doubleday, 1972).
CHRISTINE, A BANK of information about her city, gave me the address of “the best bread place in Paris.” Of course I made the trip since you don’t find great bread on every corner anymore, even in France where the national image used to be a pair of crossed baguettes under a Basque beret.
The bakery was at 150 rue de Ménilmontant in the working-class district of the far-out twentieth arrondissement. Maurice Chevalier, who had been a child of the neighborhood, used to sing about Ménilmontant and he infused it with a titillating glamour, which has lingered.
The farther we progressed up the steep hill on our first foray into the territory, the more unpromising it seemed as the site of “the best bread in Paris.” I was mentally accusing Christine of a bum steer when up loomed Bernard Ganachaud’s bakery with the sudden brightness of a big ferry station in an otherwise darkened landscape.
It was huge with six times the frontage of any shop in the vicinity. Breads of assorted shapes and sizes were artfully displayed behind the gleaming windows. Thirty varieties are available in a Tour de France of regional breads. Some are better than others because in the down-home original versions, some simply are better than others. A pain d’Auvergne had a real style but it turned out to be disappointing, for instance.
On one window a girl employee was writing in large white letters the hit parade of specialties due to come forth from the visible ovens. The odors tantalizingly evoked a glorious farmhouse kitchen even if your childhood had not been that lucky. Although the French are notorious for the way they jump queues, in Ganachaud’s bread line they were a model of decorum, proving that good behavior is determined by what is worth waiting for.
Ganachaud refuses to deliver and he doesn’t care who you are. The chef of the Crillon was crazy about the deluxe baguette baptized flûte Gana and wanted it for the hotel. He was told to come and get it. Ganachaud insists on quality control of his product until the moment it is handed over to the customer. That means on the premises. Were it to spend a couple of hours in the back of a delivery van … He shudders. So the Crillon accepted to do its own fetch and carry. At the end of a year, the chef moaned, “Mon cher, do you realize that my taxi bill to get to you has been even greater than my bread bill?”
The complaint pleased Ganachaud no end. To go from the Crillon on the Place de la Concorde to the rue de Ménilmontant is like going from Eighty-first Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to New Lots Avenue in Brooklyn. Individual customers from the chic arrondissements miles away have worked out a pool system. Whoever makes the trek is honor bound to bring back a supply for the others.
I immediately recognized the maître-boulanger, who was wearing the white work jacket with the tricolor ribbon collar and his name embroidered on the breast pocket that Bragard has made for most of the top chefs of France, giving them the uniformed look of an Olympic team. Despite a fluff of white hair and mustaches, Ganachaud’s movements were quick and youthful and he was light on the balls of his feet like a bantamweight boxer. He interrupted a staccato monologue he was delivering to a young man in a corner, invited me to his organized little office, and—toc-toc—ordered me a coffee and a flûte Gana.
I have never been much of a fan of the baguette, the long skinny loaf usually known abroad as French bread, but I became a fanatic of Ganachaud’s upmarket version. It is not only the best I have ever eaten but I am scared of it because once started I can’t stop. It is twice the price of a regulation baguette, which has been no deterrent to the sales.
There was a delicious chewiness to the crust and a pleasing consistency to the crumb and, much as I love butter, it didn’t need any. The flûte was no mere support for cheese but could stand very nicely on its own.
“No serious artisan need ever worry about competition from the factory,” said Ganachaud, “although if technology can make a bread with the same savor, I am not against it. However, the industrial bakery cannot furnish a bread that is really fresh.”
He was referring mainly to the baguette whose short but happy life is responsible for those bread lines throughout France three times a day. The round loaf that was the peasant’s staff of life could be counted upon to remain edibly fresh for several days. Big as a pillow, it took a while for all the moisture to evaporate from the crumb. The svelte baguette has comparatively little crumb and it goes dry in no time flat. Ganachaud’s flûte has a crust porous enough for the moisture to come in as well as go out and consequently it remains fresh for a few hours more than the average. As long as you don’t ask the perishable to be forever, a quality baguette at its peak can be memorable.
The Japanese, anxious to acquire the best of the West, wanted to franchise his flûte. Ganachaud gave them his usual “On my conditions or No Go.” Not only would the bread have to be made according to his rigorous specifications, but the ovens had to be adjacent to every point of sale. They agreed and now there are sixteen outlets in Japan where you can buy an authentic flûte Gana thousands of miles from the rue de Ménilmontant.
Meanwhile Ganachaud has created an artisanal network throughout France. Twenty independent young bakers have three-year contracts with him that allow baking and advertising the flûte Gana in their establishments. The contracts are renewable for another three-year period after which the bakers can go on producing the flûte with no more commitment to him. It is an odd financial arrangement and rather like six years in holy orders, but profitable.
At breakneck speed, Ganachaud related a little of his past. He was born in southwest France in 1930. His father was a small farmer who plumped up the family income by baking and delivering big loaves of bread to other farm families around the countryside. Bernard supplied a helping hand from the age of eight, both at the kneading trough and on the delivery wagon.
While studying at a stern Jesuit academy in Bordeaux he continued to aid his father prepare the dough and make the dawn deliveries. He was an excellent student, wanted to become a lawyer, and somehow found time to be active in the Scouts. But a daily schedule of five a.m. until midnight was too much for his health to sustain. He dropped his studies and concentrated on being a baker, applying all his intelligence and intensity to one of the oldest métiers in the world.
The real killer was lack of sleep. For the customer to have fresh bread in the morning, the baker must observe the fermentation at a fixed period in the night pretty much like a sailor on the watch who can sleep for a few hours only before the next stretch of duty.
Ganachaud decided to break the servitude by harnessing cold to slow down the fermentation and thus allow himself an eight-hour night without interruption. It was a freedom he had never known. At present he has young bakers working under his rule but thanks to the scientific application of cold the deadly night shift is no longer necessary.
The harshness of his early youth had left a permanent toll and he felt he would have to sell his now flourishing business. His attractive young daughters, Valérie and Isabelle, were aghast. “Papa, you simply can’t do it. We will carry on for you.”
They enrolled in a professional school and finished the three-year course with top honors. As far as I know, Ganachaud’s girls are the first professional women bakers in France and the first to earn the tough CAP (Certificat d’Aptitude Professionnelle) in what is regarded as one of the most macho of the artisan trades.
Slender and full of grace, they admit to consuming at least a half pound of bread a day regularly, proof that it is not bread that makes you fat but what you put on it. Except for the respite offered by the slowing down of the night fermentation through cold, they watch the clock like hawks, for good bread making demands chronometer precision.
In most other ways the Ganachauds work by the old-fashioned precepts. “A true baker,” says Papa, “mixes his own flours.” (Any loaf that disobeys his commands is rushed to a laboratory to find out the reason why.) The true baker chooses his combination of flours the way a great tea blender selects leaves of different strains. He uses natural leavenings instead of factory-produced yeasts and baking powders and shuns the preservatives that give added shelf life.
In Paris an alarming number of bakers are buying prepared mixes or frozen dough from industrial plants. With the latter they need but shape it into the desired form and slide it into the oven for baking. Bread from these terminal stations is rarely better than average. Bake shops are springing up with charming décors that suggest a world as it used to be, but the décors are deceptive stage sets masking chain operations.
Lucien Pergeline, a director of the Grands Moulins de Paris, revealed that certain bakers have cut down on the traditional fermentation period with the astute use of commercial baking powders, thus saving themselves an hour or more of time. In addition, with the powders they can achieve a short-weight loaf of 200 grams that has the size of a 250-gram baguette and sell it for the price of the latter.
“Hmm,” I said. “Sounds like watered stock—when the drovers of upper New York State used to walk their cattle to market forcing them to drink a maximum on the long march, thus upping the price on the hoof.”
The purists of the profession are up in arms and there are debates, symposiums, and articles on saving the Good Bread of France. An alerted segment of the public passes around the names of honest bakers the way they pass on the name of a good bistro discovery. Jean-Michel Bédier, chef of Le Chiberta in Paris, tells me there is a worthy baker in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, the Burgundy town where Colette was born. We may drive down. It is only seventy-five miles away.
The more I learned, the more choosy I found myself becoming. Strolling in Paris, I noticed Gérard Mulot’s sign at 2 rue Lobineau, a step from the rue de Seine in the sixth arrondissement. Fabrication Maison depuis 1976. I liked this proud proclamation of the date as if it went back two centuries. What caught me, however, was the mention of pain au levain, which meant that Mulot was using a starter dough as his leavening. His pain de campagne was excellent with a faint and pleasant note of acidity, more to my liking than any I have found in my neighborhood of the seventh arrondissement.
On a recent Sunday afternoon I went to the big book fair at the Porte de Versailles because Paul Guth, whose Moi, Joséphine, impératrice (I, Joséphine, the Empress) is one of my favorite biographies, was to autograph his latest work. The delightful Mr. Guth has written more than fifty books and is one of the few contemporary French authors who has been able to live by his pen.
He turned out to be a fervent partisan of honest bread. I went to see him a few days later in his sixteenth arrondissement apartment where he writes with a pen at a small table looking out on what could be a small walled garden in the provinces.
At the request of other partisans, he had written a pamphlet entitled Le Pain en majesté, or Bread Enthroned, in which he called bread “God’s representative of his flesh and soul, born in the secret of the night during the night of time.” Like a troubadour of old, Guth proclaimed the virtues of bread battling against our delirium for speed, which was ruining our sensations and sentiments and leading to the downfall of the Occident. “With its eternal values, bread attaches us to the earth from which we are being torn by an industrial civilization.”
In his childhood in a peasant house in the Bigorre, a pretending-to-be-asleep little boy watched his aunt Amandine knead the dough. “Writhing, she lifted it in strips, stretched it, threw it, punched it down. All the while, she groaned softly with the wails of love, of birth, of death.”
After my next trip to Ganachaud, I dropped off a loaf at Guth’s door.
My friend Maxine, who eats out at a different Paris restaurant every night, told me excitedly, “I found two great new ones. And they are baking their own bread.”
Alain Passard is the chef-owner of l’Arpège at rue de Varenne in the locale that used to be l’Archestrate. The youthful Passard has two stars from Michelin. At Arpège, the bread is baked in the morning for the lunch service and in the afternoon for the evening service.
“Bread is very important in a restaurant and I love to make it. The customers are very surprised. Almost the first thing they say is, ‘Where do you buy this bread? It is fabulous. We don’t find it in Paris.’ Some of the women ask me, ‘Oh, if only I could have some with my coffee in the morning.’ If any is left over, I give it to them for toast.” His hundred clients a day manage to put away four kilos of Arpège’s individual rolls and six kilos of country bread, which is a lot of bread for a fashionable crowd.
Alain grew up with the taste of good bread. It was made by a farmer friend of his father. When he was twenty and already trained as a pastry chef, he said to his father’s friend, “May I spend two weeks and learn to make bread the way you do?” One of its secrets is sea salt from Guérande in Brittany, sel de Guérande, considered the Flower of Salt.
The fine bread accompanies a cuisine that is refined and restrained, genuine and unpretentious and never banal. An example is a simple and charming entrée consisting of cabbage leaves stuffed with crab meat in a light mustard sauce. The combination of rusticity and sophistication is characteristic of Alain Passard.
Like Passard, Gilles Epié of Le Miraville is a young Breton. His approach to food is much the same—imaginative and inventive without excess or affectation. His little restaurant was barely six months old when it received the accolade of a star from the Michelin.
He started baking bread while working in Brussels, and could find none that seemed suitable to partner his style of cuisine. The public’s reception convinced him to do the same when he came to Paris. Not an insipid bread but a forthright loaf with the fermentation set off by beer and grapes. Into his dough goes a touch of honey and the honorable sel de Guérande. There is never any bread left over to give the customers to take home.
At Charenton-le-Pont on the edge of Paris, an address as unprepossessing as the rue de Ménilmontant, is the small Musée Français du Pain. Occupying a floor in the head office of a flour-milling company that supplies most of the leading pastry chefs in France, it is an endearing place.
The museum is the dada of the company’s owner, Jacques Lorch. For twenty-five years M. Lorch has been ferreting out artifacts pertaining to the subject that is his passion. The collection now numbers more than a thousand pieces, and to obtain some of them he had to beat out offers from big museums around Europe.
“The story of bread is the story of the life of man,” said M. Lorch.
The oldest exhibit in the museum is a model of a granary in Egypt, dating back to approximately 2000 BC. We know that the ancient Egyptians already had leavened bread because when the Hebrews fled the country they went in such a hurry they left their starter dough behind. As a result the Exodus had to be effected on matzos.
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 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 way eating habits have changed the role of bread in French life, and that, as one baker told her, “the French bread the Japanese make is much better than the average French!” But she concludes that “romance based on ignorance and fantasy and unconscious prejudice is not as satisfying or rich as romance grounded in the truth. Maybe one can include fairy tales in the range of possibilities, and consciously choose to be romantic sometimes and just stick to the opinion that you are eating the world’s most glorious loaf of bread.” It’s a wonderfully written book that’s also an eye-opener. Boulangerie! is a paperback guide, a little bigger than an index card so you can easily carry it around with you, featuring 223 establishments in every arrondissement. A primary consideration for inclusion was the response to the question “Faites-vous le pain vous-même?” (Is your bread baked here in your shop?) The authors listed only boulangeries whose answer was yes; in 1997, the French government’s small business ministry stipulated that only bakeries that selected their own flour, kneaded their own dough, and baked the loaves on their premises may be called boulangeries. The boulangeries are not rated, but the author team assures readers that the selected listings will not disappoint.
Since 1993, there has been an annual Grand Prix de la Baguette de Tradition Française de la Ville de Paris contest, which is a long way of saying a Best Baguette in Paris contest. In March of 2010, 141 baguettes were sampled by fifteen judges, who included Franck Tombarel of Le Grenier de Félix (64 avenue Félix Faure, 15ème, and the 2009 winner) and Benjamin Turquier of Boulangerie 134 RDT (134 rue de Turenne, 3ème, and the 2009 runner-up). The 2010 winner was Djibril Bodian of Le Grenier à Pain Abbesses (38 rue des Abbesses, 18ème). (To learn the names of other honorees, try Googling “best baguette in Paris” and a year.) The editors at a great site called Paris by Mouth (parisbymouth.com) had a different list in 2010 (with some overlap); in their Five Great Baguettes, Eric Kayser (8 rue Monge, 5ème) took the number one spot, followed by Gosselin (258 boulevard Saint-Germain, 7ème), Du Pain et des Idées (34 rue Yves-Toudic, 10ème), Coquelicot (24 rue des Abbesses, 18ème), and Julien (75 rue Saint-Honoré, 1er). The contributing editors at Paris by Mouth, by the way, are a discerning bunch—they include head editor Meg Zimbeck as well as Alexander Lobrano, Clotilde Dusoulier, Dorie Greenspan, Patricia Wells, and Wendy Lyn. In their profiles on the site, they each share their Top 3 Paris Tastes, a valuable little guide by itself.
Culinary Paintings
Years ago, when I was looking through a large box of postcards I’d accumulated from various museums and galleries, I noticed that I had a great number of still life images, and these all depicted food and drink: walnuts, silver goblets, brioches, cherries, melons, apricots, beautiful bowls, coffeepots, wine, bread, apples, onions, picnics, fancy feasts … I had them all and I loved them and I didn’t want them hidden in a box anymore. But I had entirely too many to do something meaningful with them all, so I selected those I loved the best and had them framed. Some of these were actually high-quality cards suitable for framing, and they really do look fine under glass. These are now in my dining room and kitchen, and I’m so glad I can look at them often.
So, naturally, I love the Poilâne boulangerie, not only for the bread, which is outstanding, but for the little room in the back that is essentially a museum of paintings, all depicting loaves of bread. It seems not everyone knows about this room, but anyone is welcome to walk in—it’s just behind the cash register. I think it’s wonderful. The paintings were collected by Pierre Poilâne, who founded the original bakery in 1932. Lionel, Pierre’s son, later ran the business until he died tragically in a plane crash in 2002; Pierre’s daughter Apollonia is now carrying on the family tradition. The elder Poilâne exchanged his bread for paintings, and though I don’t believe they are particularly rare or valuable, they’re quite beautiful. As Pierre Rival explains in Gourmet Shops of Paris, the presence of the paintings “is testament to the strength of the link between Poilâne bread and art. Against the odds, the artists in Saint-Germain-des-Prés succeeded in making pain Poilâne fashionable.” Other favorites of mine at Poilâne are the punitions, unbelievably simple but delicious cookies, and the special decorated loaves—don’t miss these! At the Poilâne store online (poilane.fr), there are also wonderful French breakfast bowls and a bread knife that is to die for.
When I saw a book called Food in the Louvre (Flammarion, 2009), I knew I had to have it. What a combination: color reproductions of artworks in the Louvre with a preface by Paul Bocuse and recipes by Yves Pinard, head chef at the Grand Louvre restaurant. The artworks featured are by Jean-Siméon Chardin, Francken the Younger, Louise Moillon, Jan Steen, Murillo, Eugène Delacroix, François Boucher, and others; images also include a Roman floor mosaic, Egyptian crockery, and a Greek red figure cup. Bocuse writes that “for a chef, turning the pages of this book is a singularly rewarding experience.” He observes that many of the works have a festive aspect that illustrates his idea of what cooking should be: “Seated around a table with friends, time no longer means anything. For eating is above all sharing in the pleasure of other people’s company and many is the time in my restaurant I have noticed how a great meal depends first and foremost on the diners and on the interaction between them. An alchemical process seems to take place whenever people sit round a dining table.”
