[Sca-cooks] French bread, was Cheese, warm or cold

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

>lilinah at earthlink.net wrote:
>>  half day old French bread (in France) is no longer edible, but
>>  you could probably bash someone over the head with it.
>
>Only for certain values of the term "French bread."  Lionel Poilane (Lord
>High God himself) claimed his breads were best on the third day after
>baking, IIRC, and are quite moist and tasty a week after baking.  Any bread
>made with a slow ferment and without commercial yeast will generally do
>just fine for several days if kept in a dry environment.
>
>-Lorenz

Bear wrote:
>I suspect what is being referred to as "French bread" is the baguette, which
>are baked three times a day.  They are best eaten while warm, but they can
>last a couple of days.  After that, feed them to the food processor for
>breadcrumbs.
>
>Baguettes are yeasted to give them they airy texture and have too large a
>surface area to mass to retain moisture very long.

Yeah, well, where i lived in the South i never saw anyone buy 
anything other than baguettes.

After much looking, I did eventually find a partially whole meal 
bread at a sort-of health food store (this was back in 1972) that 
only came in the form of a boule (that's basically a dome shape). 
Those definitely stayed edible for several days.

But the skinny baguettes dried out in a few hours. Leftover lunch 
baguettes were sliced, spread with butter and dipped in bowls of 
tea-and-milk for early afternoon tea. Fresh morning baguettes were 
sliced, spread with butter, and dipped in bowls of coffee-and-milk 
for breakfast.

I lived on the third floor of a building from the late 16th or early 
17th c. My French "ami" and i were the only tenants, all the other 
apartments were empty. The toilet was in the hall (i don't mean the 
porcelain was sitting in the hall, but as in New York's Lower East 
Side, there was only one toilet per floor and it was in its own 
little "water closet" in the hall. There was no bath or shower. On 
the ground floor was a little mom-and-pop shop with a bakery in the 
basement. The stuff they made was ok, but they weren't the finest. We 
did buy our bread from them as it wouldn't have been proper not to.

Alain insisted i buy our breakfast croissants in the neighborhood, 
but the only patisserie nearby used margarine and there was no way i 
was going to get those more than once or twice. He was very worried 
that my behavior (i.e., not buying from them - i certainly didn't say 
anything to them) would cause talk.

Note that a bakery (boulangerie) bakes bread and items made with 
bread dough. A patisserie (pastry shop) bakes bread-like items made 
with rich buttery and/or eggy dough, like croissants and brioches.

Once i had a great craving for tofu. I had to take a bus to Nice 
(about an hour one way) and find a Vietnamese store to get any.

Another time i had a craving for Mexican food. The only foreign 
restaurant in town was a very expensive Chinese. I eventually found a 
tiny shop (the size of a medium sized bedroom in an older part of 
town, but not too far from La Croisette) that sold only American food 
- seems there was some demand for cold breakfast cereals - and they 
had "cocktail tortilla" in cans (!!!). I used them to make very mixed 
up enchiladas, with some rather French cheese :-)

This was all over 30 years ago. I can only imagine that things have 
changed a great deal in Cannes and Le Cannet (the older cheaper part 
up the hill where i lived) - for example, there were no American fast 
food chains there then and only one super marche' (called Casino) in 
the whole town. How the mighty have fallen...

Anahita