Did the 1919 ban on night baking really create the baguette, or is that a later story?
I've been look up the origins of the baguette and the timeline seems to fall apart under the popular story as part of my project of creating an interactive food world.
What I can find:
- The word "baguette" for a bread seems to appear only around 1920. Jim Chevallier points to Le Figaro of 4 August 1920 putting "baguettes" in quotation marks, and a Seine regulation that same month that first names it as a bread (with a price ceiling of 35 centimes).
- Long loaves were clearly older: American visitors in the 1850s–1880s wrote about Paris loaves five to eight feet long.
- August Zang's Viennese bakery (1838/39) brought steam ovens to Paris, but I can't find any period source for the claim that he invented the baguette.
- The law of 28 March 1919 banned employing bakers between 10 pm and 4 am. The usual story is that this pushed bakers toward a thinner loaf that bakes faster. Chevallier calls it plausible but unproven, since the press of the time barely mentioned it.
So what actually drove the shift to the thin loaf in the 1920s? Is there any evidence from bakers' trade papers, union records or the bakeries themselves that the night-work law changed the shape, or did the thin loaf take over for other reasons (fashion, price rules, ovens, wheat)? Sources welcome, including French ones.
I'm making a free interactive food book with a Paris bakery around 1900 in it, and I want its story to be right: interactive food world
Thank you!!