<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Helping an Old French Art to Rise

November 29, 2003
By DEBORAH BALDWIN

PARIS - Steven L. Kaplan stared through the window of a
Paris bakery one Sunday morning, looking like an osprey
ready to swoop.

"I've watched him work," Mr. Kaplan said hungrily, speaking
of the baker, Dominique Saibron, and his tenderly
cultivated sourdough starter, known in the business as
levain.

If Mr. Kaplan admires your levain, it is no small thing. He
knows more about French bread than practically anyone else,
some of France's top bakers say.

A relentless researcher, Mr. Kaplan was one of the people
who helped salvage the crusty mainstay in the 1980's, when
many baguettes tasted like sliced white bread.

Mr. Kaplan has, in fact, done so much to ennoble the
baguette and its cousins, the boule and the bâtard, that he
has twice been dubbed a chevalier by the French government
for his contributions to the "sustenance and nourishment"
of French culture.
The bread baron Francis Holder, who runs Paul, the
innovative international chain of bakeries, calls Dr.
Kaplan's expertise extraordinary. Jean Lapoujade, a
director of the renowned bakery Poilâne, said, "We look
forward to his next work with impatience."

Not bad when you consider that Mr. Kaplan, 60, is not a
baker and not even French. He is an American professor at
Cornell University who grew up in Brooklyn and Queens. "We
ate kornbrot," he said, speaking of the dense European rye.</font>