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by Lauren Collins ╱ from the New Yorker ╱ 27 November 2012

We will always have Parisians!

This issue of the NYer seems unusually sloppy. Surely someone read “baguette of a woman” out loud? Or: “pain Poilâne, smeared with tapenade or bolstering a croque-madame, has come to stand for ‘sandwich bread’ as ubiquitously as ‘Kleenex’ does for ‘tissue.’” Er?

Thin, pale, and refined, Apollonia Poilâne is more of a baguette of a woman than a miche. “I do not believe in making one bread with hazelnuts, one with almonds, one with cumin, just for the hell of it.” Her other prejudices include breads that contain meats (“doughy and nasty”), breads that contain cheeses (“frivolous”), breads that contain novelty ingredients, such as algae (“not very relevant”), “organic” breads (“I don’t believe in paying money to some guy sitting behind a desk to certify something”), panini (“pointless”), bakeries that sell soda (“drives me nuts”), and the French habit of eating foie gras with gingerbread (“fucking disgusting”)…

The taste of miche is generally sour; connoisseurs claim to have detected hints of caramel, hazelnut, spices, and “ancient windmill.” David Lebovitz, the food writer and pastry chef, has said that one of the reasons he moved to Paris was so that he could have pain Poilâne whenever he wanted it. He wrote, “There’s something about the bread at Poilâne—it has a certain flavor, just the right tang of sourdough, dark and husky but with an agreeable légèreté.”