French rediscover the art of baguettes

By Caroline Wyatt BBC correspondent in Paris

Gaultier made baguettes the star of his latest catwalk show

In France, that national symbol, the crusty baguette has in recent years been threatened by a decline in bread consumption and the rise of industrial-style baking.

But French boulangeries are now winning back customers by returning to more traditional methods.

Another French icon, Jean-Paul Gaultier, has joined forces with the bakers for an exhibition at the Cartier Foundation which may also whet the nation's appetite for bread.

Visitors in Paris are flocking to an exhibition which combines the country's two great passions - food and fashion.

Gaultier has created a mouth-watering display of dresses which look good enough to eat.

Every garment is made of bread, even the conical corset he once designed for Madonna.

Leanne Sacramone, the curator of this display at the Cartier Foundation (Fondation Cartier), says it was Gaultier himself who chose the bread theme.

"For him, the idea was to do something completely new, and so he decided to transform the Foundation into a boulangerie," she says.

"It's based on a dream he had as a child to become a baker," she adds.

Revived interest

Elegant dresses made out of baguettes and bread rolls dominate the room, while the scent of newly baked bread from the bakery installed downstairs wafts enticingly through the air.

A corset good enough to eat

It persuades many visitors to buy the distinctive Jean-Paul Gaultier baguette - a blue-and-white-striped loaf, reminiscent of his trademark stripy T-shirt.

The exhibition and its popularity are all part of a renewed interest in France in the art of traditional baking, sparked partly by the country's leading bread expert.

He has been fiercely critical of the tasteless baguettes made here since World War II, by bakers rushing the fermentation process.

Worst of all for the French, that criticism is coming from Professor Steven Kaplan - who just happens to be American.

He is a fluent French speaker who - when not teaching at Cornell University in the US - spends a lot of his time in France, lurking in bakeries to enhance and expand his already encyclopaedic knowledge of bread.

And speaking on the subject of bread, his eyes light up with an infectious enthusiasm.

"What I try to say to the French is there's a passion in bread. It's part of your heritage; be demanding!" he says.

"And when I talk to the French about bread, they forget I'm American for a little while," he laughs.

'Enjoy me!'

In writing his gourmet guide to the top 100 baguettes in Paris, Professor Kaplan had to eat his way through more than a thousand boulangeries, enabling him to taste the worst and the very best of baguettes.

I ask him to describe what makes the perfect baguette and he unleashes a torrent of verbal appreciation of just how good a good loaf can be.

"My favourite baguette of all time is going to be exploding with aroma - all sorts of smells and flavours, from a hint of chocolate to winter vegetable," he says animatedly.

"It has a golden outside, and you can see the mark of the baker on it when it's good. The other, the worst sort of baguette, is completely dead on arrival, whereas the traditional baguette is just alive, and calls out to you with the solicitation: please come and enjoy me!"

Old fashioned

And perhaps he has helped French customers to become more demanding when it comes to their baguette heritage.

After a steep decline in quality during the 1970s and 1980s, French bakers have begun rejecting industrial methods.

Around a fifth of the 30 million baguettes sold daily in France are once again being made the old-fashioned, time-consuming way.

Few do it more successfully than 23-year-old Pierre Thilloux, of the Parisian bakery La Fournee d'Augustine.

Bread is so typically French that we have to do all we can to keep up the image we have of producing the best bread in the world Pierre Thilloux

The smell of fresh hot bread wafts temptingly from his tiny bakery on the Left Bank, where he won France's baguette of the year award.

He leaves the dough to ferment for several hours so that each loaf becomes a golden, crusty work of art.

Pierre Thilloux is proud of his heritage.

"Bread is so typically French that we have to do all we can to keep up the image we have of producing the best bread in the world, which I think - without boasting - is true," he tells me.

"So it's vital to nourish that French savoir-faire."

He believes that there is a backlash against low-quality, cheaper bread and a return to old-fashioned quality baguettes - comforting food for thought for the discerning bread-lover.