Customer Reviews

Good Bread Is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It

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I've just downloaded this to the free pc kindle reader provided by amazon, and I'm reading the first chapter.

This is THE BOOK I've been waiting for. This is the history of French bread, it's for people like my husband and I who have been trying to perfect the perfect baguette for years. Literally YEARS. I have looked at Raymond Calvel's The Taste of Bread on google books, but you can't read the entire thing on it, so this may possibly be my next purchase after the Kaplan book.

If you are into the history of the baguette and want to know how baguettes caused, yes CAUSED the French Revolution then this is your book. I am also interested in how the French reacted during WW2 when they were forced to use inferior German flour instead of French flour and were making, once again, terrible baguettes. I have heard that the French were very depressed about the state of the baguette during that period and that the art of making baguettes was lost....

Some people to THIS DAY state that the taste of baguettes went downhill after the war, that the bakers no longer made the great bread that they had made before the war. Mr. Calvel and subsequently Mr. Kaplan set out to try and reverse this. Raymond Calvel worked diligently to bring back the recipes and the ways that the French had used before the entire horrible episode of WW2.

Raymond Calvel was also Julia Child's teacher at the Cordon Bleu, and he was one of the inspirations for Mr. Kaplan and this book. Mr. Kaplan is an incredible treasure, a bread historian...who is very respected in France (!) though he is American.

This book is so wordy that I gave up on it long before getting to any good stuff - if I would have found any good stuff. The book needs good editing.

I WAS SOMEWHAT MISLED BY THE INFOR PROVIDED ABOUT THE BOOK BEFORE I BOUGHT. AS IT TURNS OUT YOU GET A COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE SOCIAL THROWS OF FRANCE ABOUT THE BREAD MAKERS OF FRANCE, I DIDN'T REALIZE BAKERIES WERE SOCIALIZED WITH PRICE CONTROLS. GO FIGURE, HOWEVER, THE BOOK IS BORING AS HELL. LOTS OF GENERALITIES . IF YOU WANT TO MAKE BREAD THE FRENCH WAY, BETTER BUY A COOK BOOK ON BREAD.