It is a sunny morning in May and boulangerie Fournil Didot in the 14th arrondissement of Paris is buzzing with patrons. The industrial oven in the kitchen is spitting out warm baguettes and loaves of airy French bread — Boule de pain — their crusts golden and dusted with flour, dispersing the heady primal scent of fresh bread being baked. Neat little rows of croissants, pain au chocolat, and pastries including macaroons and flans, and sandwiches like jambon-beurre, line the glass counter.But the bestseller at Didot is their baguette and there is a reason for it. Didot’s Baguette — officially Baguette de tradition française — has recently been ranked number one, picked from around 150 (143, to be precise) bakeries around Paris and crowned earlier this year. A jury comprising experts from trade federations, journalists and citizens evaluated each competing baguette based on various factors in an annual competition called Concours de la meilleure baguette de Paris in late February.
Baguette baking at Fournil Didot
| Photo Credit:
Guillaume Bontemps/Ville de Pari
Located in a predominantly French speaking neighbourhood, Fournil Didot is a typical boulangerie as far as French bakeries go in Paris, except for one detail. Its owner, the baguette competition winner, is the Sri Lankan Tamil baker Sithamparappillai Jegatheepan. He is missing this morning because he is accepting his award from Paris’s recently elected mayor, Emmanuel Grégoire, at this year’s Fête du Pain festival that celebrates the French craft of breadmaking.“I did not expect to win, so it came as a surprise,” Jegatheepan tells me later. Civil war forced Jegatheepan, whose family were farmers in Jaffna, to flee Sri Lanka in 2003. He landed in Italy and travelled to France where he sought asylum.His lack of French language skills restricted his employment opportunities, and he says he took whatever jobs he could find. “One of my first jobs was at a French restaurant that served cuisine from Normandy,” he recalls. He started out washing dishes in the kitchen and slowly rose through the ranks to become a cook, a cuisinier, expert at handling prized ingredients like scallops and entrecôte – a premium cut of beef.
