Good Bread Is Back Quotes

“Kneading too long and too quickly, adding more and more yeast (which had become a relatively inexpensive product) in order to skip the first fermentation (pointage), bakers began to produce bread in which they could not ultimately take pride, bread that did nothing to restore the image of the artisanate, which had been destabilized by devastating competition.”
― Steven Laurence Kaplan, Good Bread Is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It

“Kayser had the distance and the pedagogical cast of mind that allowed him to undertake a critical analysis of French breadmaking, its historical itinerary, its current state, and its prospects for the future. His conclusions were harsh: He observed ‘‘a degradation,’’ ‘‘a decadence’’ in the profession. In the race toward productivity, the breadmaking business had lost not only its mastery of certain techniques and rigorous execution, but also the pride of the independent, skilled artisan. Poorly trained and badly counseled, bakers languished in a sort of anomie, turning in desperation to millers, equipment salesmen, and purveyors of ‘‘improving’’ additives in the hope of finding a way out.”
― Steven Laurence Kaplan, Good Bread Is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It

“A number of compagnonnages still exist today; each cultivates its own identity, but they are mainly devoted to the formation of an artisanal and moral elite.”
― Steven Laurence Kaplan, Good Bread Is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It

“Until the middle third of the nineteenth century, compagnonnages were illegal secret associations, countercorporations, as it were, that provided workers with weapons to resist their masters’ tyranny and paternalism and that schooled them in a highly ritualized ethic and mystique of solidarity, virtue, and good conduct (as the fraternities defined it), the independence and dignity of the worker, and pride in the trade.”
― Steven Laurence Kaplan, Good Bread Is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It

“Without regulations — as the corporations warned on the eve of their abolition by Turgot in 1776 — false workers were going to replace true ones, false gold would drive out the real thing, the suburbs ("false towns") would eclipse cities.”
― Steven Laurence Kaplan, Good Bread Is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It

“When he spoke out ten years later against an ‘‘over-statized’’ France, Jean Cabut nevertheless asked for a heavy dose of activism on the part of the state: ‘‘Responsibilities have to be met, and laws have to play the role of safety barriers; otherwise, as General de Gaulle reminded us, all hell will break loose.”
― Steven Laurence Kaplan, Good Bread Is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It

“compatriots needed to weave into the social fabric bakeries close to home or bread trucks that deliver; like a sort of societal gluten, sources of bread constitute networks of sociability that structure daily life.”
― Steven Laurence Kaplan, Good Bread Is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It