The French baguette — “250 grams of magic and perfection,” in the words of President Emmanuel Macron, and one of France’s enduring symbols — was granted UNESCO heritage status on Wednesday. Cuban rum also received this award at a meeting in Rabat, Morocco. Inclusion on this list is a call to the respective governments to care for this heritage and keep it alive.
Breadsticks, with their crunchy outsides and soft insides, have remained an essential part of French life long after other stereotypes like berets and garlic cloves have fallen by the wayside.
The UN agency has granted “Intangible Cultural Heritage” status to the baguette tradition and lifestyle surrounding it.
More than six billion baguettes are made in France each year, according to the National Federation of French Bakeries, but its UNESCO status comes at a challenging time for the industry.
France has been losing about 400 artisan bakeries a year since the 1970s, from 55,000 (one in every 790 inhabitants) to 35,000 today (one in every 2,000).
The decline is due to the expansion of industrial bakeries and supermarkets outside the city into the countryside, while city dwellers are increasingly opting for other types of bread and swapping their ham baguettes for hamburgers.
Yet it is still common to see people with some of these loaves under their arms, ritually munching on the hot end as they leave the bakery or “boulangerie”.
There are national competitions, where candidate baguettes are cut in half to allow the jury to judge the evenness of the honeycomb structure and the color of the interior, which must be cream.
But despite being a seemingly immortal element of French life, the baguette didn’t officially get its name until 1920, when a new law set the minimum weight (80 grams) and maximum length (40 centimeters).
“Initially, the baguette was considered a luxury product. The working class ate rustic bread that had a better shelf life,” says Loic Bienassis of the European Institute of Food History and Cultures, who helped prepare the UNESCO dossier.
“There, consumption became widespread and the countryside was conquered by baguettes in the 1960s and 1970s,” he said.
Its earlier history is quite uncertain. Some say long loaves were common as early as the 18th century; others that the introduction of steam ovens by Austrian baker August Zang in the 1830s was necessary to shape its modern incarnation.
A popular story is that Napoleon ordered bread to be made into thin sticks that could be more easily carried by soldiers. Another links baguettes to the construction of the Paris Metro in the late 19th century and the idea that baguettes were easier to tear and split, avoiding quarrels between workers and the need for knives.
France submitted its application to UNESCO in early 2021, with baguettes picked under the tin roofs of Paris and a wine festival in Arbois.
“It is recognition for the community of artisan bakers and pastry chefs,” Dominique Anract, president of the bakery federation, said in a statement. “The baguette is flour, water, salt and yeast – and the craftsman’s know-how.”
This inscription also “celebrates an entire culture: a daily ritual, an element that structures meals, a synonym of exchange and living together,” said Unesco Director General Audrey Azoulay.
For more than 155 years, eight generations of masters have built up knowledge about the preparation of Cuban rum, to pass it on orally and in daily practice to their students.
This light rum, with an alcohol content of 40%, is obtained from sugar cane molasses and is aged in wooden barrels before consumption.
The generation that currently possesses this knowledge consists of the first three masters, seven masters and four aspirants. This select group is the repository, guardian, and transmitter of the knowledge that originated with the sugar agro-industrial boom of the 19th century.
“For us it is more than pride, it is the true recognition of the tradition of Cuban rum,” master Asbel Morales, 54, told AFP by telephone when he heard the news.
The male dominance that had prevailed in this world for decades changed with the presence of two masters and three other aspirants.
Cuba has developed a school for rum masters, centered on the “Cuban Rum Masters Movement”, which participated in the elaboration of the dossier submitted to UNESCO.
This week, UNESCO registered two other Latin American ancestral traditions.
One is the ancestral knowledge of the indigenous Colombians who inhabit the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain system, a vast area that goes from sea level to 5,770 meters in northern Colombia.
This region is inhabited by the Kogui, Arhuaco, Wiwa and Kankuamo indigenous peoples, possessors of a range of knowledge and traditions that is a legacy “handed down to our descendants,” explains UNESCO.
Black pottery manufactured in the Chilean cities of Quinchamalí and Santa Cruz de Cuca, whose raw material is in danger of disappearing due to forest exploitation, was also recognized by the UN agency.
Source: DN
