The French do love their baked goods, as proven by their new postage stamp.
Every year on May 16, France celebrates Saint Honoré, the patron saint of bakers and pastry chefs. This year, the French postal service La Poste marked the occasion with a delightful tribute—a special postage stamp in his honor. TThe "Baguette de pain française" stamp not only features a baguette wrapped in a ribbon of France's colors—red, white, and blue—but also features something unusual: it smells like a freshly baked baguette! Yes, you read that right—a scratch-and-sniff baguette-scented baguette stamp. Illustrated by Stéphane Humbert-Basset, this novelty is priced at 1.96 Euros each.
La Poste's (Google-translated from French) description of the stamp really gets comically deep into the meaning of the baguette in French culture:
The baguette, bread of our daily life, symbol of our gastronomy, jewel of our culture.
It consists of basic ingredients such as flour, water, salt, yeast and/or sourdough. This apparent simplicity reveals a complexity of manufacturing: dosing and weighing of ingredients, kneading, fermentation, division, relaxation, shaping, finishing, cooking scarification. So many meticulous steps mastered by the artisan baker whose unique know-how is passed down from generation to generation.
It is the promise of a delectable sensory experience . On view, it seduces with its golden crust and its grignes, signatures of the baker. Fresh from the oven, its toasted scent whets the appetite. To the touch, it is a transition from the resistance of its crust to the lightness of its honeycomb crumb. The act of breaking it offers a delicious symphony due to its characteristic crunch. With each bite, its authentic taste is revealed. As a food for sharing, the baguette accompanies us from breakfast to dinner, taking pride of place at the heart of meals and remaining a constant invitation to conviviality.
Bearer of culture and customs, the baguette is deeply rooted in the daily practices of the French . She embodies a ritual, that of going to her bakery, a local business anchored in the regions, attracting twelve million consumers every day. The making of six billion baguettes each year confirms its iconic status in French food heritage.
The baguette transcends borders to become an international icon. The inclusion of these artisanal skills and its culture in UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage testifies to its influence and establishes it as an ambassador of the bakery craft.
—Dominique Anract, President of the National Confederation of French Bakery and Pastry
La Poste
[via Neatorama]
