Bread

"Bring bread to the table and your friends will bring their joy to share."
-French proverb

A baguette for breakfast in Nice

When walking through the streets of Paris, it seemed like every third person was carrying a baguette. Bread is eaten at every meal in France. At breakfast, you can spread it with butter and jam or opt for a sweeter variety. At lunch, you can pair it with soup, cheese, or meat. At dinner, bread is essential for sopping up every last drop of sauce of juice. The French passion for bread is even written into their history. When hungry peasants demanded bread from the French royalty in Versailles, an unsympathetic Marie Antoinette famously remarked "Let them eat cake." As recently as the 1950's, bakers striking against the regulation of bread prices caused angry customers to heave bricks through bakery windows. One French mayor even committed suicide when he was unable to cope with the insults hurled at him by angry citizens who blamed him for not adequately supplying their town with bread (France: The battle of bread, 1956). 

Croissants

Bread bakeries, or boulangeries, are on every corner and are the first businesses open every morning. Clearly, the French take their bread very seriously. In fact, "the French government took drastic steps to protect the baguette from mass production and cost-cutting methods, such as using frozen dough." Since 1997, the only stores allowed to call themselves a bakery, or a boulangerie in French, must bake their own bread on the premises (Gustafson, 2007, p. 28). That means you're guaranteed to a fresh, hand-crafted loaf every time you step into a boulangerie. Plus, they offer more varieties than any Wonderbread consumer could imagine! Some of the highlights of my visits to the bakery (besides the ubiquitous baguette) were croissants (with or without chocolate), pain au noix (wheat bread with walnuts), brioche (buttery and rich, and especially delicious topped with crunchy sugar crystals), and pain au lait (bread made with milk that's a perfect bun).

Brioche sprinkled with crystallized sugar

The French always expect their bread to be fresh, and they're willing to make multiple trips to the bakery to ensure that. The author of my favorite guidebook reference, Great Eats: Paris, asserts that statistics show the average Parisian makes a minimum of three trips to the bakery per day. Since there is no fat or preservatives in a baguette, it goes stale very quickly, as witnessed by the fact that all of my bread would turn rock-hard stale in less than 48 hours. Therefore, a Parisian would not dare eat this morning's bread with dinner, since it has already lost most of its tenderness (Gustafson, 2007, p. 28). No wonder they make so many trips to the bakery! Plus, who wouldn't be tempted to go into a store wafting the aromas of freshly-baked breads throughout every neighborhood?