The French baguette is now a cultural landmark. Here’s everything Americans get wrong about it

In the 2021 film Pig, Rob Feld, a truffle hunter and former chef portrayed by Nicolas Cage, embarks on an obsessive quest to recover his stolen pig. In doing so, he tackles an almost equally poignant side quest to find a specific type of baguette from a specific bakery. When he does find the coveted baked good, the moment is transformative in ways that only make sense if you consider them within the movie’s broader architecture. Rob is broken in all kinds of ways, and some of his emotional wounds can only be healed by this specific baguette in these specific circumstances.

I’m not Rob Feld, thankfully. But I understand the hunt for the perfect baguette. And I understand why, once one has found the baguette to end all baguettes, the one that perfectly matches their preference in terms of taste, texture, and whatever else, it’s hard to deviate from that chosen path. I’m a French person living in New York, and there is precisely one place I get my baguettes from. Everywhere else can go take a hike.

So, when the United Nations added the baguette to its record of intangible cultural heritage, I was listening. I listened when Audrey Azoulay, the head of the UN’s cultural branch (UNESCO), said the distinction was meant to highlight the “savoir-faire of artisanal bakers” and “a daily ritual”, as well as the baguette per se. I listened when French President Emmanuel Macron somewhat hilariously – but not inaccurately – described the baguette as “a few centimeters of savoir-faire passed from hand to hand”. I listened when Asma Farhat, a baker at Julien’s Bakery in Paris, reacted to news of the baguette’s triumph in the traditional French manner – satisfied, but not exactly surprised.

“Of course, it should be on the list because the baguette symbolizes the world. It’s universal,” Farhat told The Associated Press. “If there’s no baguette, you can’t have a proper meal. In the morning you can toast it, for lunch it’s a sandwich, and then it accompanies dinner.”

Sounds simple enough – in theory. But in practice, the baguette offers no shortage of pitfalls, as my various encounters with American baguettes have shown me. First of all: the shelf life of a baguette is devastatingly short. As Farhat said, you’re meant to buy it in the morning and eat it throughout the day. The next morning? You start over. In a pinch, day-old baguette can be salvaged by way of a quick trip to the toaster, but that’s it. Wasteful? Doesn’t have to be! French toast in French is called “pain perdu”, aka “lost bread”, because it was originally meant to be made using stale bread that would otherwise be – you guessed it – lost.

As a teenager, I (very) briefly interned at a French bakery. My adolescence was a fair few years ago, but as best as I can remember, we opened around five in the morning. The bakers got to work downstairs, where their work stations and ovens were located. Baguettes were delivered upstairs, to the actual shop, still warm and – as I discovered while sleepily trying to organize them in the display – extremely breakable. We sold them over the next few hours. The bakers kept making batches throughout the day, so that every baguette was sold as fresh as possible. Too often, when trying to buy baguettes in America, I’ve encountered baguettes that had very clearly languished on their displays for hours on end – sometimes a whole day. Those baguettes were dead on arrival.

Secondly, a baguette should contain four ingredients: flour, water, salt, and yeast. That’s it. I don’t want to see anything else. No egg wash. No sugar or anything else. Flour, water, salt, yeast. I’m sure it’s extraordinarily difficult to make something delicious using such a pared-down recipe. That’s where the miracle lies. Don’t mess with it.

And thirdly, there’s the texture. I’ve seen baguettes that resembled hoagie rolls, too wide and not risen enough. Let me tell you something: when a baguette is as it should be, you can see it, and you can hear it. It sounds like something a character from the movie Amélie would say, but it’s true. When you press lightly on the outside of a baguette, it should give you the most satisfying, delicate little crunch.

There is nowhere to hide when making a baguette. The ingredients need to be just right. The baker’s skills will be tested. It should be baked just so. But when the stars align – as the UN itself just acknowledged – it’s perfection. Don’t settle for anything else.