Society

He is probably the only historian of French bread in the world. Arriving in Paris as a student in 1962, he literally fell in love with the bread, shopped at every bakery in the capital to try all the varieties and decided to devote his doctoral thesis to the subject at the university of Yale (United States). Nowadays he divides his life between America, where he teaches French History at Cornell (New York) and France where he teaches courses at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (near Paris). He is the author of a dozen or so academic works on French bread from the 18th century to the present day.
Making a veritable religion of baguettes baked by traditional methods, he has also written two books for a general audience in order to encourage the French to eat more of it: these are Le Retour du bon pain [1] [Back to Good Bread] and Cherchez le pain [2] [Finding Bread], a guide to the best bakeries in Paris. To compile them, Kaplan tested some 700 of the capital’s 1,260 bakeries, buying 60 baguettes a day. "I learned to spit a lot!", he says, laughing. He dreams of settling permanently in our country one day. "What attracts me to France is that sense of taking pleasure in things which is expressed as much in discussing ideas as in the art of living."

Barbara Oudiz, journalist