To be a baker's boy...

from review by Bee Wilson of
Good Bread is Back by Steven Laurence Kaplan

To be a baker's boy in eighteenth- century Paris must have been pretty close to hell. You were effectively a slave, both to your master and to the intricate demands of sourdough fermentation. The working "day" began close to midnight.
Wearing rough, uncomfortable underwear made from old flour sacks, you were forced to knead as much as 200 lb of dough at a time, using nothing but your hands and -in desperation -your feet. This kneading took place not once but many times over the night, usually in a clammy cellar too dark for you to see what you were doing, and so hot that the dough sometimes melted before it had risen. The baker's boy in charge of kneading was known as le geindre, the groaner, on account of the blood-curdling noises he made as he worked. When you were finally granted rest, sometime in the morning, you were obliged to sleep in the blinding heat of the bakery. After three hours, you were forced to wake up again, to minister to the sourdough starter, which, like a newborn child, required round-the-clock feeding. In 1788, the journalist Louis-Sebastien Mercier described how unhealthy bakers' apprentices looked. Unlike butchers' boys, who were robust and ruddy, bakers' boys were flour-coated wretches, huddling in doorways, haggard and white.
All this misery was required to serve the panimania of the French. Bread signified more to the French than it did to other nations. It was not just subsistence; it was a sacred matter, as well as an affair of state. The Communion wafer was holy, but so was the ordinary white sourdough loaf of everyday life. To turn a loaf upside down was considered bad luck, akin to sacrilege. Before eating, it was customary to trace the sign of the cross over the bread using a knife. In 1789, the Encyclopedie methodique noted that "most people" in France "believe(d) they would die of hunger if there (were) no bread" -even if other food was available.
The "tyranny of bread", as Steven Laurence Kaplan has it, tied the French together. Kaplan, who probably knows more about French bread than anyone alive, does not make enough, perhaps, of how the French approach to carbohydrates differed from that of their neighbours. By 1789, the Italians were swapping the crustiness of bread for the slipperiness of pasta. Across the channel, the British were abandoning bread in favour of sugar. During the eighteenth century, British sugar consumption increased eightfold, to 16 lb per person per year. With all these sweet calories, bread was no longer so vital, especially since much British bread now came adulterated with alum, an astringent chemical which could make white porous loaves out of poor quality flour. In France, though, bread remained relatively pure -and essential. Life without bread was unthinkable. To have "lost the taste for bread" was synonymous with losing the will to live. By the end of the nineteenth century, the average Frenchman was still consuming close to a kilo of bread per day. And "bread" for the French had extremely stringent and precise connotations, well crusted with an alveolated crumb, kneaded from white flour and made by a slow and arduous process of fermentation and baking. All consumption has its costs. While the cost of Britain's sweet tooth was the slave-driven sugar colonies, the cost of France's passion for bread was the terrible life of the baker....