Steven Kaplan in France, where he investigated collective bread poisoning for his latest book
Photo: courtesy of Steven Kaplan
Good bread can be hard to find. At least it is if you've got the lofty standards of leading bread historian Steven Laurence Kaplan, who reveals that he tends to BYOB (bring your own bread) even at fancy restaurants. Kaplan, a Cornell professor, has written Good Bread Is Back and, more recently, Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread), about a collective bread poisoning that occurred in a small town near Avignon. He recently spoke at Breadbar in LA, and the Buzz caught up with him to glean further crumbs of knowledge. The man sure knows his baguettes, but the wonder is he knows his Wonder Bread as well.
ZB: The press release for your appearance at the Breadbar describes you as "the world's leading expert on French bread" and "the world's preeminent bread scholar." Not to be too irreverent – but are there others contending for those titles?
SK: Irreverence is an excellent posture for an interviewer. Let's call it skepticism, to be more elegant or neutral. I have worked with and on bread for 40 years. It is unlikely that there is anyone else on the planet – unless he or she lives in a cave or operates clandestinely – who has combined the practical experience in the bake-room with the infinite investment in archival research, who has articulated the practices of the artisan and the intellectual. Were you to query experts in France, I think they would concur with the Breadbar's ostensibly hyperbolic appreciation.
ZB: Did you grow up eating Wonder Bread?
SK: Yes, alas. Yuck. Powerful memories of the crystallization of a robust aversion.
ZB: Is Wonder Bread properly bread?
SK: To the extent that it incorporates flour, water, some salt and a fermenting agent, yes. To the extent that it combines all sorts of supplementary additives, technological auxiliaries, improvers, and myriad other chemicals, fortifiers, preservers, etc., and that it is manufactured in hyper-industrial conditions, to call it bread requires a magnanimous generosity of spirit.
ZB: What drew you to bread?
SK: On the sensual plane, the accident of an encounter in a Paris bakery the first day I set foot in Paris 45 years ago drew me to it. Intellectually, it was the search of a doctoral thesis "problem" or framing theme that touched on all aspects of the human experience from politics and social relations to economic growth and state construction; from religion and collective psychology to culture and agriculture, etc. The one nourished the other. The hedonic spurred the scholarly appetite. The two have operated in fruitful complement for many decades. I am convinced that truly exalting pleasure cannot be mindless. Even if one is not preoccupied with origins, influences and evolutions, bread must be good to think before it is good to eat, to paraphrase the great French anthropologist [Claude] Lévi-Strauss.
ZB: Do you nibble on bread the way others might smoke a cigarette?
SK: No. I respect bread too much to nibble on it mechanically or casually. Yet I cannot avoid tasting it and assessing it whenever I encounter it. When I buy a baguette, for example, if it is truly enthralling, I risk devouring half before I reach home.
ZB: Is there a hidden aesthetic to bread?
SK: Good bread is predicated on an aesthetic of rigor and truth that yields beauty and pleasure. It is anything but hidden. It is the mark or test of artisanal creation and realization.
ZB: If a meal without wine is like a day without sunshine, what is a meal without bread?
SK: A meal without bread is very much in the same idiomatic relation of necessity that your aphorism describes. It is more than a mere complement. It opens a whole organoleptic front. It enriches and delights.
ZB: Which restaurants have the best breads?
SK: You know, I have been spending much more time in France than in the U.S. over the past few years. Even in France, I often bring my own bread to fine restaurants. Restaurants there propose sumptuous dishes and engaging wine lists, but are often indifferent to or disdainful of bread. I take this as a personal affront. I try to shame them into obtaining better bread. Making bread is a separate craft from cooking, and is rarely done well by chefs – who are busy doing other things.
Beyond Breadbar, in the USA, I have never tasted acceptable restaurant bread.
ZB: Well, then, what are your favorite breads at LA's Breadbar?
SK: My favorite Breadbar breads are the baguette (Tour de France), the canonic measure of excellence in classical baking, and the sumptuous Millstone (or Tourte).
– Merrill Shindler