If I am sounding like something of a baguette nerd, it’s because I am—officially. In March 2010, after more than a decade and a half of living in Paris, I was granted the honour of being a judge in the Grand Prix de la Baguette de Paris. (No, this is not a bread race—it means, literally, the grand prize for the Parisian baguette.) I had been selected to choose the city’s best bread.
When I first received the letter from the Hôtel de Ville, I thought it must be a cruel joke. I assumed that only bakers and chefs were worthy of such an honour, or at the very least native-born Parisians. Aren’t Oscars voted for by movie people, and isn’t the manager of the French football team always a Frenchman?
I was convinced that a friend of mine had got hold of some headed notepaper and was having a laugh, especially because I knew that the result of the competition could have a profound impact on the nation’s politics. As well as a cash prize and sackloads of publicity, the winner gets a year’s contract to supply bread to the Élysée, the presidential palace. It seemed incredible that Paris would entrust the task of deciding what the head of state ate for breakfast to a British writer whose website was at that very minute trumpeting the arrival of his new book called 1,000 Years of Annoying the French.
But then an email came through from the office of Madame Cohen-Solal, the Deputy Mayor in charge of Commerce, Craftmanship, Self-Employed Professions and Art Trades, confirming the invitation. Apparently, someone in the department had read my books and had decided that I might know something about baguettes.
And, in fact, baguettes do loom large in at least two of my books that have been translated into French. In A Year in the Merde, there’s a passage, often quoted to me by French journalists, about a visit to the boulangerie, which the hero Paul West describes as the only place in the world where the French will form an orderly queue (he’s not quite right, but then he’s only just arrived in the city). And in Talk to the Snail, I trace the pilgrimage of the baguette from boulangerie to restaurant table, noting every stage along the route where it is squeezed, sniffed and exposed to bacteria before entering the unsuspecting oesophagus of the Parisian diner.
In any case, I accepted the challenge avec plaisir, and I’m very glad I did, because it turned out to be one of the most Parisian experiences I have ever had.
Judging was to take place at the Chambre Professionnelle des Artisans Boulangers-Pâtissiers (an artisan being a ‘craftsman’) on the Île de la Cité, the part of Paris that has been inhabited since before Roman times, and presumably where the city’s first loaves were ever cooked. The building houses grand but rather rundown offices, including, on the first floor, a banqueting hall the shape of a slice of tarte aux pommes—a long triangle, panelled in wood the colour of a well-cooked baguette crust. From the wall hangs a breadmaker’s version of the tricolour, featuring an olive branch (make bread not war?), a pretzel and two baker’s oars—the wooden paddles used to remove loaves from the oven.
The fifteen judges, most of them bakers or City Hall officials, sat at three long tables, one along each side of the triangle. I was between two bakers, both of them floury-fingered thirty-somethings, and one of them a previous winner of the prize.
‘So have you delivered bread to the Élysée every morning for a year?’ I asked him.
‘Oui, twenty baguettes a day.’
His shop was in the 15th, the south of Paris—quite a hike across town to the 8th during rush hour, I sympathized.
‘Oh, they wanted me to deliver it at eight every morning,’ he said, ‘but I said I couldn’t get there before ten.’ Even the President had no authority over a Parisian baker, it seemed.
‘And did you ever see Sarko or Carla Bruni eating one of your baguettes?’
‘Never even got invited in,’ he grumped.
‘Still, a great competition to win,’ I said.
‘Yes, my turnover went up 15 per cent because of it.’
Definitely a prize worth having, then, which might explain the incredibly strict entry requirements. Entrants had to be owners or employees of a Paris baker’s shop listed in the city’s business register, and their baguettes had to conform to the criteria laid out in decree number 93-1074 of 13 September 1993, which (in case you don’t know it) specifies that a baguette must be between 55 and 65 centimetres long and weigh 250–350 grams.
Consequently, twenty-two of the entrants were immediately eliminated from the judging, thirteen of them for being oversized. I pleaded for the big ones to be retained—after all, who’s going to complain about receiving too much bread for their money? This, though, was shouted down as a typically Anglo-Saxon obsession with quantity over quality. And rules were rules.
So far, so methodical, but anarchy quickly kicked in. Like most Parisian meetings I have attended, the theoretical agenda didn’t turn out to be the actual one. First, a baker who had come along to be a judge wasn’t on the list, and began complaining that he would have entered the competition if he’d known he wasn’t going to be on the jury panel. He was given some judging forms and allowed to start tasting (rules are rules, unless someone French complains).
The main source of typically Parisian chaos, however, was the hygiene, or total lack of it. The waiting baguettes, all laid out as naked as a Saint-Tropez sunbather except for the ring of paper bearing their number, were heaped up on a table at one end of the room, in a tasty-looking logpile. When the judging began, the loaves were gathered up in batches of five (by bare-handed helpers) and taken to the tasting tables, where they were sliced, fondled, sniffed and chewed by the judges, all of whom had shaken hands before
