I would be remiss not to mention this:
In the second volume of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” which came out in 1970, Child felt driven to give a recipe for baguette, something that Richard Olney—who comes across as the best cook and the worst snob of the group—thought absurd. Didn’t she know, Olney wondered, that in France everyone bought baguette from the boulangerie? No French cook would dream of making bread from scratch at home. But this wasn’t the point. Child felt that the baguette recipe was necessary because, in 1970, good bread was so difficult to come by in America, even in New York.
Now there’s no shortage of French artisanal bread for those with the cash to buy it. And yet we still feel a powerful nostalgia when we think of Julia Child buying her French bread inher France.
Indeed, the NYer is famously not for the little old lady in Dubuque. However, there are, even in 2013, large swaths of the USA where French artisanal bread cannot be had unless you make it. If you've ever wanted to make fondue (who eats like that anymore?) but decided to late too make a baguette, (me, Saturday), you might take issue.
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