It's interesting how much of modern cuisine is, well, modern, and a product of modern technology. The article doesn't talk much about the baguette's history, and suggests the origins are lost in the mists of time. I guess they are. Not that lost, though! Sure, the shape is probably much older. But modern baguettes, the kind we know with the glazed crunchy crust, are made in a steam oven. That effectively limits their introduction to the date of the introduction of steam-injection baking (probably invented in Austria in the 1830s) to Paris, which was in the late 1830s. It was not possible to make a baguette -- not the baguette we know anyway -- before that. Similarly, many of Escoffier's recipes basically assume access to a gas cooker and refrigeration, and you would have been very hard-pressed to pull them off a century before without those. Haute cuisine was very haute tech at the time.
Similarly, even without direct technological considerations it stands out how much of modern food isn't really that old in the grand scheme of things.
For example, one thing I always think about when cooking is how popular tomatoes and potatoes are in Indian cuisine (the former being essentially mandatory in most dishes), but since they were both brought over from the New World, the food from just 400 years ago would've been extremely different from what it is today.
> For example, one thing I always think about when cooking is how popular tomatoes and potatoes are in Indian cuisine (the former being essentially mandatory in most dishes), but since they were both brought over from the New World, the food from just 400 years ago would've been extremely different from what it is today.
Tomatoes in Italian cuisine are even more recent. While they were theoretically available from the 16th century, Europeans believed they were poisonous and refused to eat them. It was only around the mid-end of the 19th century that they became a popular and accepted part of the cuisine.
Yes, tomatoes and potatoes were considered toxic for a long time, because they belong to the same family as a bunch of very toxic plants (such as the belladona), and even with tomatoes and potatoes, most parts of the plants are toxic anyway (anything except the parts we eat, actually).
Yes, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, and corn to some extant, are an important part of French food in many regions of the country, and yet all of these went from America. And yet I'm pretty sure most people imagine this is what peasants used to eat back in the middle ages. Indeed, all our "traditional" meals are actually a pretty recent invention.
Could you not just put a pan of water at the bottom of the oven to get a steamed oven? Plenty of barbecue techniques use steam as an element, and those are not using steam-injected ovens
That is a nudge in the right direction, but to get the thick, caramelized, crunchy glazes with really light fluffy bread, you want to inject 200 °C steam under pressure into the baking chamber.
You can get a (perhaps poor, but tastes nice) simulation by having the ability to shoot warm or hot water as a spray directly onto hot metal in the oven.
Interesting article (in French) on the history of "baguette tradition", created in 1987 and codified by the "Bread Decree" on 1993. This decree made it possible to codify with precision the requirements for the milling of its flour and its method of manufacture.
