THE INVENTION OF SLICED BREAD - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 21

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THE INVENTION OF SLICED BREAD
Dreams of Control and Abundance
The housewife can well experience a thrill of pleasure when she first sees a loaf of this bread with
each slice the exact counterpart of its fellows. So neat and precise are the slices, and so definitely
better than anyone could possibly slice by hand with a bread knife that one realizes instantly that here
is a refinement that will receive a hearty and permanent welcome .
—Reporter's account of the first automatically sliced bread sold in the United States, Chillicothe,
Missouri, July 6, 1928
THE BEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD?
Brasserie Four in Walla Walla, Washington, serves up regional cheeses, pâte de foie de poulet handmade
from local organic chickens, and roasted bone marrow from a nearby ranch. Tourists, drawn to this
out-of-the-way town by its hundred-plus wineries, stop in for French country cooking, but the vibe is
hipster-hominess. “Townies”—affluent early retirees and young urbanites who fled to the country with
kids in tow—fill the place most nights. The art on the wall is by their kids and grandchildren. This is a
place for sopping up herbed broth enveloping Northwest mussels and scraping every last bit of seasonal
root vegetable puree out of a bowl. It is a place where you need lots of good bread. And for several
years, until Walla Walla hatched a good European-style bakery of its own, Brasserie Four—this shrine
to the local and artisanal—served baguettes made by Japanese robots twelve hundred miles away.
For such well-traveled bread, it had many of the marks of artisanal quality: a creamy yellow crumb,
alveolate with large irregular holes, each bubble's thin, shiny membrane testifying to skillful work with
a finicky wet dough and the absence of commercial yeast. The taste was nutty, with tang but no artifi-
cially sour sourdough notes. Brasserie Four's baguettes, produced by La Brea Bakeries in Los Angeles
and shipped frozen to groceries and restaurants around the world, were clearly the product of care, slow
fermentation, and simple ingredients, not a chemically pumped speed dough like most ersatz “French
bread” in town.
As someone interested in good bread and food politics, I had long wondered whether it was possible
to produce high-quality European-style breads in the United States at affordable prices. The dream of
good bread for the masses is the most ancient of bread dreams. And living in Walla Walla, far from the
artisan bakeries of Portland, San Francisco, or New York, this relatively inexpensive and widely avail-
able bread almost seemed to fit the bill. Not all my foodie friends shared my optimism: when I told
one die-hard champion of handmade bread that I planned to visit La Brea's factory, he exploded, “Why
would you want to go to La Brea Bakery? It's the evil empire!”