In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (12 page)

The Incredibly Sad Tale of Philippe the Shoemaker

(OR, THE POLITICS OF THE BAGUETTE)

It was a pleasant Parisian spring afternoon circa 1775 when Philippe Cordelois was awakened from his siesta by a knocking on the door. Kicking, actually. His visitors first reduced the building’s main entrance to splinters. Then they charged up to his third-floor garret, shouting, “In the name of the King!” Philippe, a twenty-eight-year-old apprentice shoemaker, was puzzled; was his master in trouble with the police? The cops burst into his room and threw him against the wall. They knocked over the table, ripped open his mattress. Finally, the officer rummaging through his cupboard gave a shout and grabbed the shoemaker by the collar. He had found a piece of stale bread wedged into the back of one of the shelves. “Nothing to hide, eh?” shouted the officer. He shook the week-old crust in Philippe’s face. “Then what, may I ask monsieur, is this?”

“The history of bread,” wrote historian Piero Camporesi in
The Bread of Dreams
, “is the dietary expression of a long battle between the classes.” The earlier Parisian scandal over
mollet
had centered on the questions of yeast, nationalism, and ancestry. But the classic battle was all about color and class. Italians, for instance, have historically had only two real classes, according to Camporesi. There were the “fodder mouths,” peasants who lived on dark brown bread, and “bread mouths,” who dined only on white. The Roman elite would attack anyone who dared offer them a slice of brown bread, and Caesar made the inappropriate serving of dark bread a crime punishable with prison time.

By the time Philippe the shoemaker was arrested in 1775, the issue of who got to eat white, and who brown—and at what price—had become one of the touchiest political issues in France. Like the Italian peasants, most French citizens choked down coarse rye and barley breads. The authorities thought this fine and natural. Peasants, after all, were believed to be only marginally more evolved than pigs. The aristocrats suffered a supernaturally refined digestive system which, alas! could process nothing but the most meltingly delicious of baked goods, well buttered. There were a few concessions to the real world. The army had been on a white-only ration since an attempt to foist rye on the boys had led to an open revolt. Parisians also received special treatment, and even the lowliest gamin dined on the snowiest of breads. This discrepancy was one of the first things Napoleon Bonaparte noticed with horror when he arrived in the capital.

Like Napoleon, the French peasantry was passionately discontented with the situation. It finally blew up when a baker in the village of Beaumont-sur-Oise tried charging white prices for rye. Housewives hog-tied the villain and threw him into the pond, which would have been the end of it if the village’s police chief (a notoriously shy man) had kept the situation under control. He didn’t, and before you knew it, the ladies had embarked upon a daring but popular program of economic reform. After they’d given away all the baguettes in Beaumont, they headed over to the neighboring village of Meru, where their fiscal policies were again warmly received. Within ten days, over three hundred bread riots broke out. Markets were raided, bakers were forced to sell their loaves at one-tenth the market price, and whole barges were relieved of their flour. The uprising kept creeping closer and closer to Paris, but the police did nothing. They claimed so many people were participating that they’d have to arrest most of France.

The rioters finally reached Paris and gathered outside the office of the minister of finance, Anne-Robert Turgot, chanting, “Give us bread!” At least that’s the popular version of the event. A more accurate translation of their plaint would probably be, “Give us a light yet savory bread with a crisp, caramel-colored crust and a pleasantly chewy, but not tough, interior at a reasonable price.” They emphasized their point by threatening to clobber the riot police with stale baguettes. Stale
green
baguettes, to be precise. They claimed the bizarrely colored monstrosities, which ranged from very dark brown to gray to green to black, were now being sold by Parisian bakers as a result of Turgot’s free-trade policies. This was too much for Turgot. He called the green baguettes “Turkish bread” and claimed they had been made from ashes and rye to serve as propaganda tools in a campaign to topple his government. Turgot’s supporters then implied that the bread riots had been started not by peasant housewives but by sexual transvestites, “perverted men who were strangers to the villages which they had come to destroy.” It was
they
who had made the green bread weeks earlier, Turgot claimed, so it would be nice and moldy in time for the riots, at which point they’d handed it out to real peasants whom they paid to say it had been purchased at the marketplace. It was obviously all a lie, the story went, because no one had seen a slice of dark brown bread in Paris—much less green—in centuries.

Enter Philippe the Shoemaker. Turgot had assigned the entire Parisian police force to find anyone possessing bread that was
bien brune
(quite brown) and bring the conspirators to justice. Hundreds were arrested and interrogated. The transcripts of their “confessions” can still be found today on a dusty shelf in the French National Archives, a foot-high stack of handwritten, crumbling papers liberally decorated with doodles. A number of them finger the shoemaker. One informant told the police he’d seen Philippe with a group of suspicious-looking country “ladies.” Another put him drinking with bakers believed to be part of the conspiracy. The most damning report claims he was seen with a subversive baguette in his hands the day of the riots. Inspector Jean Baptiste Charles LeMaire was in charge of the investigation, and when he finally located Philippe’s digs— only a block from Paris’s central marketplace, Les Halles!— LeMaire struck. Philippe was charged with “possession of a
crouton
of bread that was absolutely brown” and taken to the sadistic interrogation chambers below place du Chatelet (now an equally annoying Metro station of the same name).

POLICE INSPECTOR LEMAIRE: Is it not true that you told the shop-keeper that this bread, this dark bread, was being sold in the central market of Paris?

PHILIPPE THE SHOEMAKER:
Mais, oui!
Yes, it is true I said that. But monsieur, I was only repeating what a man from the country had told me. He said that they were selling this bread in the market. It is he who gave me the dark bread!

[LeMaire must have been pleased since his job had been to find proof that the peasant rabble-rousers from Beaumont were also behind the disturbance in Paris.]

LEMAIRE: This is the one you met with the country “ladies”?

PHILIPPE: I saw three or four women who were showing everyone some round loaves, yes.

LEMAIRE: Did they speak to you?

PHILIPPE: I think they were selling bread. But in truth, monsieur, it was the man with them who approached me with the aforementioned bread that you found in my chamber.

LEMAIRE: And it is true, is it not, that those three or four women also gave you some bread that was quite dark?

PHILIPPE: No.

LEMAIRE: I think you are not telling the truth, monsieur. It is not a reasonable story. For instance, why were you in the market when there was all the tumult going on if you were not involved?

PHILIPPE: Oh, I was only curious.

LEMAIRE: Just curious! A likely story. Do you know where you are? Do you know what happens to people in these places? People who are “just curious” about rebellions against the King of France?

PHILIPPE: God save the King! Oh, mercy, monsieur . . .

LEMAIRE: Are you sure these so-called women did not give the bread to you?

PHILIPPE: Yes, no, no. I tell you it is the truth! It was the man who gave me the aforementioned bread. It was completely black! I remember he said to me, “This bread, eh? It is not so good, non? Not even a dog should eat such stuff!”

LEMAIRE: The rogue! Describe this man.

PHILIPPE: He was maybe five feet three inches, about thirty-six to forty years. Brown hair. I swear that I have no idea of his name. I had never seen him before.

LEMAIRE: And his clothes? What was he wearing?

PHILIPPE: I couldn’t say. I remember thinking he had very poor fashion sense.
Très paysan.

Philippe’s story seems to have checked out, because LeMaire released him after a half dozen interrogations. There are, however, no records of his ever having married. Perhaps he died in the upcoming revolution, or returned to his village of Cambray, where people ate brown bread and were glad of it. The treasonous
crouton
found in his room was sent to the royal crime lab, where forensic experts determined that, contrary to Minister Turgot’s theory, it had been baked the day of the riots and “turned green and black because of its ingredients.” Turgot’s theory that a deviant Svengali had masterminded the riots, however, was probably correct; Louis XVI was so horrified by the information in the final police report that he burned it himself (apparently it indicated that Louis’s relative the Prince of Conti had been behind the whole thing). Turgot was forced from power soon after banning the powerful bakery guild. The question of who got what bread continued to smolder until Marie Antoinette finally introduced an element of sanity into the debate by suggesting that if the peasants were unhappy with their bread, why didn’t they just eat cake? This simple observation was somehow taken the wrong way, and, soon thereafter, on the day the price of bread reached an all-time high, the people of Paris went shopping for her head.

Bread is the perfect bellwether of French neurosis. Once the revolution got into full swing, people began choosing their toast based on its political flavor. White was out. Proletariat brown became the toast of the town, and nary a marquis could be seen dunking his
mollet
in his
au lait
. Scholars quoted Pliny’s praise of rye. Generals reminisced about how Roman gladiators scarfed down barley biscuits before battle. Even London’s elite took note of the volatile situation and swore to eat “no wheaten bread of any finer quality than that produced from meal.” But the bureaucrats of the French Revolution took the cake (not that they wanted any). Political committees railed against the class separation caused by
la mollesse
(luxury white breads) and urged that it be banned to “create a just uniformity.” Court records from the era are full of bakers arrested for subversion or cheating or simply politically incorrect baking. The mayor of Paris urged the people to hunt down royalist pâtissiers, and some bakers were even lynched. The bread debate became so fierce that one of France’s leading journalists furiously questioned the National Assembly as to whether the revolution had been simply over who was to have “more or less white bread.”

The answer to his query, of course, was yes. In November 1793, only a month after Marie “let ’em eat cake” Antoinette had lost her head, the National Assembly voted to create a National Bread of Equality. It was to be made of three parts wheat, one part rye. “Wealth and poverty have no place in a regime of equality,” opined the committee, “[so] there shall no longer be produced a bread of the finest flour for the rich . . . but this single and good type of bread, the Bread of Equality.” It was the old
scandale mollet
reborn, a law that enshrined the belief that the people’s daily bread defined their political and moral character, only now Paris’s social engineers were using it to create a truly democratic nation. This utopian loaf law was passed on November 15 and sent on for final ratification. But it never came. Apparently even the French couldn’t swallow this one. Instead, six weeks later the Parlement came up with what they thought was a better solution to the endless bickering over white and brown and luxe and
mollet
and your-bread-is-better-than-mine. They ordered every able-bodied Frenchman to start growing potatoes.

The Virgin’s Nipples

The French may be the most vocal about sex and baking, but the Italians have the most colorful renditions. The bread called
copiette
is made to resemble a couple having sex, a reference to the ancient tradition of schtupping in a wheat field to help ensure its fertility. Roman wives have a vagina-shaped pastry called
prucitanu
that they traditionally give their husbands at Christmas. If dissatisfied, they give him the
viscotta di San Martinu
, a phallic-looking biscuit named after the patron saint of cuckolded husbands. Well-hung grooms wear seven donut-shaped pastries called
xuccarati
on their member during the honeymoon to calm their fearful brides. One cookie is removed and eaten each day until she’s ready for the full monty.

Traditional image
of St. Agatha
offering her breasts
on a serving
platter; sketch by
the author of a
fresco in an
unnamed Sicilian
church.

The most common of these erotic mouthfuls is the
minni di virgini
, or Nipples of the Virgin, a custardfilled pastry shaped like a woman’s breast and topped with an aroused candied cherry nipple. Also sold—sans nipple—as
genovesi
. The story behind this delicious pastry, however, is enough to take away your appetite. It seems the pastry commemorates the martyrdom of St. Agatha, who had her breasts cut off by Roman pagans for refusing to renounce Christ. She’s now the patron saint of breast cancer victims and is traditionally portrayed offering her breasts on a serving plate.

3 cups basic pastry dough
¹
⁄2 cup basic pastry cream
Candied
succatta
or chocolate pieces
Candied cherries cut in half
Confectioners’ sugar

Preheat oven to 425°F (220°C). Divide the dough into seven pieces and roll into rectangles about 6‘ × 4‘ ×
¹
⁄4‘. Place 2 tablespoons of pastry cream on one half of the rectangle and sprinkle with chopped candied pumpkin or chocolate (about
¹
⁄4 tablespoon, or as you like). Fold the other half of the dough over it to make a square. Seal it well and then, with a glass or a pastry cutter, cut out a circle-shaped mound from the center about three inches in diameter. Put the halved candied cherry in the middle, and bake for six to eight minutes, or until lightly browned. Sprinkle with confectioners’ sugar and serve.

Makes 8. Best enjoyed warm.