Before the Baguette: The History of French Bread

Introduction

The history of French bread is not only the history of bread in France. Long before the baguette and the croissant spread across the globe, other countries were adopting their own idea of French bread as their own. Fifteenth century English statutes refer to a Panis Franceis called pouf.¹ A sixteenth century Italian writer said that just before his time bakers in Rome had learned to make the best bread from a French baker.² In the late eighteenth century, students at the Academy of Berlin were to be given good French bread.³ In England, a finer sort of bread was still called French bread.⁴ In 1805, one of the better breads in Madrid was called Pan Frances.⁵ In Italy, soon after, the best bread was also still called French bread.⁶ The Vietnamese term bânh mi, used today for an iconic sandwich, began as the French term pain mie, and originally referred to the wheat bread introduced by the French.⁷ Today, the baguette has become so popular in Asia that it is even made in… North Korea: French-trained chefs are cooking up a storm in Pyongyang where North Korea’s privileged classes are devouring their baguettes.⁸

For visitors to France itself, this bread has long stood out. In the seventeenth century, an Italian visitor to Paris noted not only the quality of the bread, but the huge size of some loaves, as well as the peculiar fact that a specific loaf could go in and out of fashion in little time.⁹ The Englishman John Evelyn wrote of France, where, by universal consent, the best bread in the world is eaten.¹⁰ Two centuries later, American tourists were still struck by the bread:

And finally, the pains longs, 'the long loaves of French bread!' Ah! The long loaves! There is not one who does not talk of them! They have only seen, in California, very small loaves, thirty or forty centimeters long at most. Our interminable 'flutes', lined up in the shop windows, or borne in the morning in small wagons by women, astonished them!¹¹

An English writer declared:

French bread is readily distinguished by the pleasant (imperceptible) sweetness of its flavour, its perfect lightness, the exquisite crispness of its crust, and last, but not least, its look of perfect cleanliness, and the regular, blooming appearance of its beautiful, tempting, cinnamon-coloured crust. The superiority claimed for French bread is not imaginary…¹²

As excellent and varied as bread can be elsewhere, for no other country is bread so noted and so part of its overall image. Yet few, even among bread lovers, know the history of its bread, or how varied and extensive that history is. Do a search for the history of French bread on the Internet and you are likely to find accounts which are not only inaccurate, but limited in scope to the croissant and the baguette, and little more.

This book is an attempt to remedy that state of affairs, to offer a comprehensive and carefully documented history of this varied and influential bread, beginning with the earliest finds in France and tracing the complex shifts in methods and products which only in recent centuries have resulted in the rich variety of French breads found today, including, but by no means limited to, the baguette and the croissant.

The First Bread in France

As the Neolithic revolution spread to Europe, people there began to cultivate grain.¹³ They mainly grew emmer and einkorn (both forms of wheat), barley and some bread wheat.¹⁴ They consumed much of these in semi-liquid forms such as porridge. But we know that Neolithic groups also made some bread. How? Because, incredibly, scattered loaves from that time have survived; ironically, it is fire that has preserved them. Archaeologists have found carbonized Neolithic bread, burned by accident or in rituals, in Switzerland, in Eastern Europe, and in France itself.¹⁵

As Max Wahren points out, bread was independently invented in several parts of Europe: Regarding central and western Europe, what is commonly understood as bread was not... invented in a particular place, but is found in several middle Neolithic sites (to put it simply, in a band stretching from the mouth of the Rhone to the Lower Rhine). Typically, at this early date, bread was made simply by heating a wet mass of dough on a rock. But what Wahren describes as the oldest perfectly preserved European bread, found in Switzerland, was slightly more sophisticated, made of finely ground wheat, slightly leavened, and gracefully curved in form.

In France itself, one Neolithic loaf was found in the east, at Charavine; this was roughly circular, about 8-10 cm across and 2-3 cm thick. Another, somewhat thicker and larger than the first, showed marks of having been modeled in a basket. Yet another, from the Copper Age (the late Neolithic), was found in the south at Rocher de Causse. It was oval, roughly 6.7 cm by 4.4 cm, with a thickness varying from 1.4 to 2.3 cm. The texture was fine, with a homogeneous texture and close-holed crumb. These were about as simple as breads could be, what archaeologists call galettes, but breads nonetheless.

Around 2800 BCE, the Bronze Age began in France. This brought slight changes in grains; hulled barley began to replace naked barley; spelt wheat and millet appeared.¹⁶ But the way people ate grains did not greatly change; porridge probably remained the main method of preparing them. Yet specific breads have been also been found from this period. One found in the Var, roughly circular and about 15-20 cm across, was even decorated with acorn shoots pressed into the dough. Remains of a loaf found at Longeuil-Ste-Marie, above Paris, show that it was expertly made, well-leavened and from finely sifted flour, and baked, not on a hot surface, but under an oven or other covering.

And so, when the Gauls arrived (around 800 BCE) from the East, they would have encountered some form of bread – if they did not already make bread much like it. They continued to use the same grains which, for the most part, did not leaven well (being low in gluten). Finds at Acy-Romance mirror others in pre-Roman Gaul:

A wide range of grains including spelt, emmer, einkorn, barley, millet and oats. The only grain used to make bread (an unleavened naan-like flatbread) was spelt. The other grains were ground up in a mortar and eaten in preparations like porridge or soup.¹⁷

Phylarcus, in a rare description of bread in Gaul from pre-Roman times, describes it as being broken (rather than torn or cut) which also suggests that it was flat, unleavened bread.¹⁸ The text accompanying an exhibit for the French City of Sciences says Emmer, spelt or further hulled barley… made up the main vegetal food for the center and north of Gaul.¹⁹ Of these, only spelt would have leavened well. Emmer can (just) be leavened, but only into a very dense loaf.²⁰

Some regions used millet or its close relative panic, neither of which leaven at all. Just after the Roman conquest, Strabo wrote: The part of Aquitaine next to the ocean is for the most part sandy and meagre, producing millet, but barren of all other fruits.²¹ Later, under Roman rule, Pliny would still mention the predominance in Aquitaine and other regions of millet and panic. (The people of Gaul, and of Aquitania more particularly, make use of panic; In the Gallic provinces panic and millet are gathered, ear by ear, with the aid of a comb carried in the hand.²²)

It is very likely then that the Gauls ate more unleavened than leavened bread and even ate their grains as porridge more often than as bread. The flatbread may have been cooked on a hot stone (as it was in the Neolithic period and later by early Scottish hunters) or under the embers of a fire (as it long would be in parts of France). Even under the Romans, Gauls did not universally abandon their culture and a flatbread found at a Gallo-Roman site is probably typical of earlier Gaulish bread: an oval, unleavened loaf 2.3 cm thick, made mainly of barley and either einkorn or emmer.²³

Still, scattered evidence suggests that the Gauls might have made some leavened bread before the Roman conquest. As noted above, the Neolithic bread found in Switzerland appears to have been leavened and it is not impossible that the Gauls made similar bread as well. Also, after a group of Greeks – the Phoceans – founded Massilia (now Marseille) around 600 BCE, they introduced a number of classical practices to the local Gauls: "They learned to prune the Vine, and to plant the Olive… Greece did not seem to come into Gallia, but Gallia to be translated into Greece."²⁴ It is likely that these Greeks introduced the Gauls to leavened wheat bread. But that influence appears to have been limited to the region.

Challemel, La France et les Français à travers les siècles. Courtesy of the British Library.

1. Gaulish millstone

In agriculture, the Gauls were surprisingly advanced, using granaries, marl, and the sickle:

Gauls built their granaries on piles to protect them against rodents and humidity and used them for cereals, dried meats, dried fruits etc. In the first century BCE, these became less common, as grain was stocked in warehouses in oppida [early urban centers]…

The Gauls produced many iron tools and are credited with inventing the sickle, allowing them to harvest and store large quantities of hay. The adoption of the rotating millstone divided by 15 the time to produce a kilo of flour. The period is marked by an unquestionable agricultural revolution.²⁵

The Gauls also (like the Germans) used underground silos, which had the advantage of hiding grain from the enemy during conflicts, as well as effectively preserving it. This method was still being used in coastal areas of Africa, Spain and Italy during the nineteenth century.²⁶

In the first century, Pliny described a complex threshing machine used by the Gauls.²⁷ In the fourth century, Palladius described a similar mechanism, but in far more detail:

A vehicle is therefore made, which is borne on two small wheels: the square surface of this is strengthened with boards, which extending to the outside may render it more roomy at the top. The height of the boards of the cart is less at the fore end: there small teeth, proportioned to the size of the ears, are set in a line, bending backwards towards the upper part. Behind the same vehicle there are formed two very short poles, like those of sedans: there the ox is yoked to the vehicle, with his head towards it, a gentle beast, which may not be apt to exceed the orders of the driver. When he begins to drive the vehicle, all the ears of corn being laid hold of by the small teeth, are taken into the cart, the straw being cut off and left; the ploughman who follows, generally directing the height or lowness of it: and thus, by going and returning a few times, the operation is performed in a few hours.²⁸

Both descriptions date from after the Roman conquest, but the fact that this apparatus remained particular to Gaul for several centuries suggests that it was, at the least, a native Gaulish invention.

The Gauls then were sophisticated farmers, but rarely, if ever, sophisticated bakers. Neither their bread nor the breads which had preceded it in Gaul would leave any trace on what became French bread. Which began with the Romans.

French Bread Begins (the Gallo-Romans)

Leavened, sophisticated wheat bread – the main bread made in France today – took hold there under the Romans, who had already settled in the south before the conquest (52 BCE). This bread in turn can be tentatively traced to the Middle East.

In the fourth millennium BCE, Sumerians made both beer and bread; whether one preceded the other is impossible to know.²⁹ Certainly, they produced a great variety of breads, both flat and leavened. They too used emmer and barley; their use of beer makes it likely that they used yeast (which, until the nineteenth century, was no more than the foam from making beer) to leaven their bread. Linguistic evidence shows that their successors, the Babylonians, influenced bread-making in Egypt, which also used emmer wheat and went hand in hand with brewing. Though the Egyptians in turn influenced the Greeks, in the classical period, naked wheats (such as bread wheat) began to displace hulled wheats (such as barley), and so the Greeks came to use bread wheat.³⁰ Because they did not make (in fact looked down upon) beer, they would not have used yeast, and so would have leavened bread with sourdough (or sometimes tart liquids). Meanwhile, according to Pliny, the early Romans ate grains only in porridge (puls).³¹ But Roman housewives and possibly cooks were making bread by 166 BCE, when Rome defeated the Macedonian king Perseus. Only then says Pliny did professional bakers – presumably Greek slaves – appear in Rome.

By the time of the conquest, Romans ate a variety of breads. First grain and later bread distribution played a major political role. Bread overall held an important place in Roman culture; and so under the Romans, bread in Gaul went from being incidental to being central.

Changes in grain

The most obvious change in grains came with the new dominance of bread wheat, which became the grain most widely grown in Gaul; its close relative spelt too became more common. Barley had a poor reputation among the Romans, as Pliny the Elder notes: Barley bread, which was extensively used by the ancients, has now fallen into universal disrepute, and is mostly used as a food for cattle only.³²  And so in Gaul too it became a low status grain.

Rye, previously barely known, began to be cultivated from the first century on, mainly in the Île-de-France (greater Paris region). It may first have been used as forage for livestock. Emmer, which had been one of the most common grains before the Gauls, began to disappear (though it may have lingered under other names almost into the nineteenth century).

In the north of France, archaeological finds from the period are mainly of bread wheat, but also of husked wheats like spelt and emmer.³³ The latter have somewhat fragile ears and resistant husks, and so require more and longer processing than naked wheats, including repeated beating to obtain clean grain. Spelt can tolerate drought and thin soils; emmer requires more fertile soil, but remains less demanding than bread wheat, which requires deeper, more structured soils. Until the fourth century, husked wheats were found only in the north of Picardy, before spreading to the south.³⁴ Bread wheat was dominant for the whole Gallo-Roman period, especially, after the second century, around Paris and in the south of Picardy.

For centuries, these grains would remain the main ones in French bread production. Bread wheat and spelt would be used for the better breads; barley and rye, often in various mixtures, were used in breads for servants and the poor or those, like monks, who wanted to humble themselves. Per Strabo and Pliny, millet and panic were grown in and near Aquitaine.³⁵

Gaul even, says Pliny, gained some reputation for its grain:

The Gauls have also a kind of spelt peculiar to that country: they give it the name of brace, while to us it is known as sandala; it has a grain of remarkable whiteness. Another difference, again, is the fact that it yields nearly four pounds more of bread to the modius than any other kind of spelt.³⁶

In addition to the grains grown in Gaul itself, the wealthy (as in many things) used foreign imports. Writing at the end of the imperial period, Sidonius Apollinaris apologizes to a rich friend for the simple meal he will serve him, where there will be no breads whose wheat has been gilded in the Syrtes of Libya.³⁷

Making bread

When Gallo-Roman culture still survived under the Franks, Gregory de Tours described two baking methods. These were Gallo-Roman techniques (though probably not unknown to the Franks). One used an oven, the other hot coals:

As she was putting a loaf in the oven, a Saturday after sundown, a moment touching the night of the Lord’s resurrection, her arm was seized by pain. She threw a second and a third loaf into the oven; then her hand began to involuntarily grip the wood she held; the woman, understanding that she was condemned by judgment of the divine power, at once cast away the peel she held.³⁸

Here, the oven would have been heated by burning wood in the oven itself, as would remain the case for over a millennium. No doubt this was a beehive oven, like that shown on the tomb of the Roman baker Eurysaces and in numerous other images.

A woman of the country having, one Sunday, soaked flour, made a loaf of it which she set to bake under the hot ash after having pushed the burning coals away from it.³⁹

In this case, the hot ash used would have been in an open hearth, which at this point was simply a fire banked with stones.

Many would maintain the latter method well after ovens became standard. In Latin, the hearth (or fire) was focus; bread cooked in it was focacius. This word of course has its own history in Italy; in France, it evolved into fogaza, fogata, fuacia and similar variants, becoming fougasse and fouace (both finer breads) in French.⁴⁰  Such hearth bread might also have been made under a clibanus (pottery bell), as was common elsewhere in the Empire, especially in later centuries.⁴¹ Certainly, the method survived centuries later in France. (NOTE: In later Latin texts, this word simply means oven.)

If clibani were used, the process would have been primitive. Here is Cato's description of how to bake such bread: "Wash your hands and the mortar [or mixing bowl] well. Put the flour in the mortar, add water bit by bit, mix all this well. Once the dough is made, shape it, bake it under the earthenware pot (bell)."⁴² In Cato's description here, one familiar step is missing: the addition of a fermenting agent. The result would have been a very heavy loaf. Gregory’s description of hearth bread does not include a rising step either, though that may only be because it is so summary. Still, in simple households without ovens, it is likely that unleavened flat bread was most common, even if such simple productions were also the least likely to be noted in texts.

The rare bread that appears in Roman images typically is swollen in a way that indicates it has been leavened. Most professionally produced bread probably was, as well as bread made in houses affluent enough to have ovens.

2. Images from Eurysaces’ tomb, showing a beehive oven and spherical loaves

Grain quality

A modern reader, in visualizing flour and bread, will probably imagine relatively pure and homogeneous products. But even under the Romans – for a long time, France's most sophisticated rulers –, flour was not necessarily appetizing. Excavations at Amiens of a large granary reveal what was probably a common state of affairs in the larger cities: part of the grain had spoiled from humidity, some had begun to sprout and at least eight varieties of insects had infested it, sometimes over several generations.⁴³ Scholars who studied it write the case of Amiens is... not unique. In general, one notes, in the Roman era, obvious difficulties in keeping stocks in good condition. Some of these problems may have been related to Roman culture itself: the tendency to centralization, for instance, which increased the need for storage. The same long-distance transportation which helped increase the availability of grain may also have introduced some parasites and resulted in spoilage en route.

Overall, some, if not necessarily all, of the grain available under the Romans would have been in poor condition, resulting in a correspondingly poor bread, even with more sophisticated baking techniques. Gourevitch, having studied similar finds around the Roman empire, points out that such grain could not be properly milled.⁴⁴ She adds:

Not only was the bread of the Romans not good in general, but further it was often toxic, even for the military population which power had so much interest in treating well since, more and more often, the army made the emperors. If the stored cereals were bad in military granaries, if they were in the civil granaries of distant provincial cities, it is likely that they were everywhere, except perhaps in the very large cities where the circulation of goods was faster and above all in Rome where it was necessary to avoid displeasing the plebes.

Ironically, those living poorer, simpler lives in the country may have had better bread, simply because they had less grain to store and were probably obliged to renew their stock more often.

Ovens

A third century mosaic from Saint-Romain-en-Gal shows a man making bread, using a spherical oven about three feet across with a mouth about a foot wide opening out onto a rectangular work surface.⁴⁵ The man is using a long peel to put dough into the oven. This smaller form of oven (resembling many still found in the Middle East) is the kind likely to have been used in many households.

Numerous ovens have been found at Gallo-Roman sites in France. Manière describes one found in the Haute-Garonne as:

rather well preserved… a circular mass of compact earth more or less hard and baked about 1.30 m wide outside. Inside, a hemispheric cavity… At the base, the sole or floor in highly baked earth 80 cm in diameter opening on a mouth 30 cm long, 30 cm wide and 40 cm high... The walls... very baked, smooth and [showing] long use...⁴⁶

Shards of Gaulish pottery underlay the floor, suggesting that Gaulish culture still persisted in this region.

Many ovens recycled a large spherical Roman pot called a dolium, using the slightly pointed bottom half. Such an oven was found at the site of a bathing station in the Bouches-du-Rhone, 1.7 m. in diameter, with a cover made using the reversed base of a dolium, open at the top. Bouet lists several other finds of ovens across France, some again using dolia for the upper part, others circular constructions of stone and tiles, sometimes with brick as well, and often using pieces of stone for the floor. Several were mainly buried, perhaps to protect them from the weather.⁴⁷  In these cases. the baker would have worked in a lower room or depression providing access to the mouth of the oven.⁴⁸

Varieties of bread

By Pliny’s account, the Roman array of breads rivaled that found in today’s French bakeries:

Some kinds, we find, receive their names from the dishes with which they are eaten, the oyster-bread, for instance: others, again, from their peculiar delicacy, the artolaganus, or cake-bread, for example; and others from the expedition with which they are prepared, such as the spoliations, or hurry-bread. Other varieties receive their names from the peculiar method of baking them, such as oven-bread, tin-bread, and mould-bread. It is not so very long since that we had a bread introduced from Parthia, known as water-bread, from a method in kneading it, of drawing out the dough by the aid of water, a process which renders it remarkably light, and full of holes, like a sponge: some call this Parthian bread.⁴⁹

In Rome itself, bakers (pistors) were specialized in different breads: pistores candidarii, siliquiarii, clibanarii, dulciarii, libarii, crustularii, fictores, etc. (that is, bakers of very white bread, of fine wheat bread or pastry, of bread cooked under bells, of sweets, of ritual breads, of cakes, of sacred breads).⁵⁰ Various shapes have also been documented: the round, segmented breads (quadrati) found at Pompeii; braided loaves found in Roman graves; the playwright Plautus’ mention of a bread three feet long.⁵¹ As the major oppida in Gaul were fashioned into Roman cities, with forums, baths and temples, it is likely that a similar variety existed in some of them; a tombstone for a baker from Narbonne describes him as a Roman baker (Roman pistor), which may imply that he made bread in the style of the capital.⁵² Still, at least two tombs from Rome itself show bakers making small spherical loaves very like those later seen in medieval images and this appears to have been the most common form throughout the Empire.⁵³

3. Images of segmented loaves (quadrati) from Pompeii

A loaf found at Reims resembled one of these, but was slightly flatter (like a hamburger bun).⁵⁴ Two loaves found at Amiens, about 10 cm wide and 5 cm thick, again were similar, but flatter; they are made of spelt, with a crust distinct from the fine-holed and regular crumb.⁵⁵ A bread found in the Drôme was also similar, being approximately oval (9.1 by 8.3 cm), 4.5 cm thick at its thickest point, with a slightly curved top; exceptionally, it appears to have been cooked in a mold, with a smooth, regular crust and regular crumb.⁵⁶ This slim evidence suggests that the standard Gallo-Roman bread was small, round and slightly flattened.

A Christian sarcophagus in the Museum of Antiquities at Arles shows a man holding a basket of circular breads, about the width of a man's palm, with a raised section extending almost to the edge divided by a cross (that is, into quarters).⁵⁷ Variants on this form are seen across the centuries in French imagery. This may have been the bread used for Communion before unleavened bread.

Other breads found (typically from funeral pyres) take exceptional forms. A nearly circular galette found at L'Hospitalet-du-Larzac, in the Aveyron, measured about 9 cm across and was made of fine flour with a regular, small-holed crumb; it had been folded over, as if to enclose something. A really striking loaf found virtually whole in the Var resembled a quiche in shape, being about 13 by 11 cm wide, with two slashes across the top.

The latter were very rare not only in early bread, but in French bread at all until the nineteenth century. Later French bakers would not slash bread until almost the end of the eighteenth century, when more yeast (as opposed to sourdough) leavened bread was made; one theory is that the slashes first served to release the extra gas produced by the stronger leavening. This suggests that this bread may have been a rare example of the practice in this period. Certainly, according to Pliny, some Gauls did use yeast to leaven their bread:

In Gaul and Spain, where they make a drink by steeping [grain]... - they employ the foam which thickens upon the surface as a leaven: hence it is that the bread in those countries is lighter than that made elsewhere.⁵⁸

If it was lighter than, say, that of the