14-05-2025
Macron is wrong — the best baguette is a binned baguette
To France, where campaigners are calling for half-size baguettes to become the norm, on the grounds that too much goes to waste. With the slogan 'Une demie, ça suffit' (half is enough), a food waste app, Too Good to Go, has suggested that les Français ask their boulanger to bake them half a baguette, a sensible change to working practices greeted by French bakers with all the calm acquiescence we associate with French farmers and French air traffic controllers in August.
However, amid the howls of Gallic outrage, we are in danger of missing the point: the best baguette is a binned baguette and six out of ten French people admit to doing just that with at least part of it. But my top tip after you've been to the boulangerie and carried your baguette home is to feed it to the birds and have a croissant instead. Or not, because croissants are overrated too, and don't get me started on brioche, or pain complet, which tastes like doormats, or pain de mie, the runt of the litter and the ideal choice for what, exactly? You're never at a loss with a poppy seed bloomer, but pain de mie?
Naturally, a country that takes itself so seriously that it polices its own language, tries also to police its own bread. La vraie baguette has to be 55 to 65cm long and weigh 250 to 300g, because otherwise the sky will fall in or it might be a ficelle, not a baguette, so watch out for the language police. President Macron once said that baguettes are '250 grams of magic and perfection in our daily lives', which shows how much he knows. Unesco has added baguettes to a list of the world's 'intangible cultural heritage', alongside Syrian soap and Estonian mash, a clear disservice to Syrian soap and Estonian mash.
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Yet the popularity of this sorry attempt at baking is fuelled by a romantic myth that you'll break off a chunk and eat it with camembert, in the perfect picnic spot. There will be a river meandering close by and no wasps. How many of us can say that we have ever, even once, achieved that? Is it worth persevering with what should, by any reasonable measure, be a doomed form of carbs on the off-chance that we might? Baguettes are stale by the time you've left the shop. You're more likely to eat them sitting in a traffic jam on the autoroute du Soleil than a water meadow in the Dordogne, and the kids will be bored witless in both.
They are an inefficient shape. They taste of cotton wool and crust, compared to, say, a poppy seed bloomer, which tastes of poppy seeds and loveliness. And lest the French feel singled out, the same applies to Italian bread. Has anyone ever truly enjoyed a grissini? Foccacia's all very well, but no one would care if they never ate it again. Anything served on ciabatta would be better off not, and that crispy poppadom thing, pane carasau? No.
Nor is it just a European thing, because anything baked with yeast in America is instantly suspect. I love America. Some of my best friends are American. But you just can't trust a country that invented waffles and serves biscuits with gravy. And the darkest and most important truth about this most important of subjects isn't the length of baguettes in France, it's the ubiquity of sourdough in England. You can't buy anything that isn't sourdough any more. A baguette isn't any less pointless for making it sourdough and a muffin is not improved by it. Where have all the good, plain bloomers gone? To the barricades, citizens, and let us abolish all this fancy foreign sourdough. Unless it's too hot. Or raining. Or August.
An email arrives from someone senior and apologetic at M&S, admitting that in its recent hack, 'some personal customer data has been taken … this could include contact details, date of birth and online order history'. There is, she adds, 'no evidence that it has been shared', perhaps showing a slight naivety about what hacking is for.
Now, hacking and its co-defendant, scamming, are obviously very bad things, a modern curse with terrible consequences and hapless victims. But the M&S hackers will now be armed with knowledge of my bra size and that I recently bought a hair clip and returned a light fitting. Was it worth it, I asked a friend. 'Yes,' she replied. 'That's invaluable information, if you're a plastic surgeon performing breast reductions in a well-lit hair salon.'
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Lucy Worsley, promoting her new Lady Swindlers podcast, has said, 'We still recognise those situations where women feel they have to marry for money.' I think her point is that she feels sorry for such women, but honestly, Lucy? Would that I had.
I'm halfway through doing up a house. I spend my days adding up columns of figures wrong and my nights worrying about it. I count plug sockets, not sheep, and wonder if, perhaps, electricity is overrated, because do you have any idea how much nice light switches cost? Off the top of my head, I'm fairly sure that my relationship history isn't replete with chances to marry money, but is it too late? And could he be persuaded to invest in some plugs?
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