It is a staple of the French dining table, enjoyed by millions with butter and jam at breakfast, as a sandwich for lunch or with cheese for an evening meal. Now the baguette has been recognised as among the global treasures of humanity, to the delight of gourmands who wish to preserve France’s proud baking traditions.
It has joined Neapolitan pizza, Belgian beer and the Mediterranean diet on the list of nearly 700 traditions now listed by Unesco as the world’s intangible cultural heritage.
The push for Unesco recognition was led by President Macron, who has described the baguette as “250 grams of magic and perfection”.
But its popularity is hardly in dispute. Each person in the country eats on average half a baguette a day, with 10 billion sold each year, and it is also a staple in former colonies such as Algeria and as the bánh mi in Vietnam.
The Unesco listing of “the artisanal know-how and culture of baguette bread” is, however, a boost for the quality produced by independent French boulangeries whose numbers have declined from 55,000 in 1970 to 35,000 today in the face of competition from the cheaper products sold in supermarkets and convenience stores.
Audrey Azoulay, the French head of Unesco, said that the listing “honours the know-how of artisan bakers” after the agency announced its latest new additions in Rabat, Morocco. “It celebrates the French way of life,” the former culture minister added. “The baguette is a daily ritual, a structuring element of the meal, synonymous with our culture of sharing and conviviality,”
The baguette, which originated in Paris in the late 19th century and moved from bourgeois tables to become popular with the masses in the 1930s, follows other French food on to the growing and eclectic Unesco cultural list that also includes the Argentine tango and Irish hurling. In 2010 France won Unesco heritage status for “the gastronomic meal of the French”, with particular reference to multi-course menus.
Among Unesco’s newcomers this year, four are deemed so in danger that they have been decreed to be “in need of urgent safeguarding”. These are Chile’s Quinchamali and Santa Cruz de Cuca pottery, Ahlat stonework from Turkey, the pottery of the Vietnamese Cham people and a bell-shaped skirt from Albania known as the xhubleta.
The French nomination said that baguettes, which were under state price controls until 1987, differed from other breads because they were composed of only four ingredients — flour, water, salt and yeast — and must be left to ferment for at least 15 hours at between 4 and 6C.
Traditional bakers, who start work before dawn and then prepare a second batch for afternoon sale, apply their own touch. One of the mysteries of the trade is the inability of French boulangeries outside France, in cities such as New York and London, to produce authentic tasting baguettes even using imported French ingredients.
Frédéric Comyn, a baker who won this year’s contest for the best baguette in Paris, said the Unesco status “gives us immense pride and puts the spotlight on artisanal craft and not industrial baking”. It was “a big step towards the good and the very good”, he said. Comyn supplies the Élysée palace with its bread until next year’s winner is chosen.
Baguettes, which come in various types, from plain to “tradition” and seed-covered, sell for just over a euro. While remaining popular with the working and lower middle classes, it is falling out of favour with the educated urban classes, who see the fluffy white bread as less nutritious than the wholemeal and sourdough varieties.
The short life of the fresh baguette leads to huge waste. Every person throws out the equivalent of nine baguettes a year and bakers throw away up to 15 per cent of their production, wasting 50,000 tonnes a year, according to their national federation. Bakers are coming up with remedies to give stale baguettes a second life as pastry, beer and even green electricity.
Their bread batons may have got Unesco heritage status but that does not mean the French do baguettes best (Hannah Evans writes).
Some of the best I’ve tasted have been in London at the Dusty Knuckle Bakery; at Poilâne, a French family-run boulangerie in Mayfair; or from the Orange Bakery in Oxfordshire, which sell out almost immediately.
“You do not need to go to France to get good bread,” says Richard Bertinet, Frenchman, renowned baker and the founder of the Bertinet Kitchen Cookery School in Bath. “Baguette is just the name of the shape. I make very good bread using British flour here in Britain. The secret is to respect the dough. You cannot rush it. Time is everything.”
A top-quality baguette can’t be made in less than 12 hours. Most of that time is leaving the dough to rest or ferment. “What you buy in the supermarket have a very tight crumb which is a sign that they have been made too quickly.”
Bertinet uses British flour from Wessex Mill in Wantage, and follows a classic French method using a sourdough ferment and fresh yeast. The result is a light crumb, a thin crust and a crunch that makes your stomach rumble. “A good baguette will make you salivate when you squeeze it and hear the crust,” he says. “The stomach will be switched on just by the sound.”
Hannah Evans is deputy food editor