Joe Bennett: Let's talk about brioche

'Qu'ils mangent de la brioche,' Marie Antoinette is said to have said when told the peasants had no bread. 'Let them eat cake,' is the splendidly curt translation. But brioche is not quite cake.

Come with me to the supermarket. We're heading not for the instore bakery, so cleverly placed in the first aisle to seduce us with the smell of baking bread, but to the far aisle where the bread is plastic wrapped and on display in sloping trays, alongside packaged cakes and rolls.

And if you choose to come along I will a tale unfold that will harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine. Coming? Oh good. It should be fun.

We'll go via meat for no reason other than that it is instructive.

The word meat used to mean merely food, as in the phrase meat and drink. Flesh was the word for animal parts, as in 'bring me flesh and bring me wine,' but since then we have become squeamish of our carnivorousness and try to pretend it isn't so.

Look at the bright-lit ranks of plastic trays with never a drop of blood to show that earlier this week these raw components walked and saw and heard and clucked and bleated. Like Shakespeare, the supermarket holds a mirror to our nature.

Once we had settled down as a species to farm and grow cereal crops, bread became fundamental. It still is. Look at the trays of it, the myriad choices. When I was a little boy, white bread was posh and wholemeal was for cranks.

Today the wholemeal stuff is a badge of cultural virtue, while sliced white bread is for plebs. Oh the whirligig of fashion.

Beyond the soy and linseed and the strange quinoa loaves lie the specialist and foreign breads, the flat breads of the middle east, the various rolls of Europe. And thus we come to today's subject: brioche.

'Qu'ils mangent de la brioche,' Marie Antoinette is said to have said when told the peasants had no bread. 'Let them eat cake,' is the splendidly curt translation. But brioche is not quite cake.

Rather it is an intermediate beast, made with too much butter and too many eggs to be bread but with too little sugar to be cake. It is, well, brioche.

The French bake it in assorted shapes, from rolls to complicated pretty loaves and are partial to it for breakfast. And unlike the classic French baguette which is stale by early evening on the day it's baked, the brioche keeps quite well.

(Some 40 years ago I lived above a criminal picture-framer's shop in Nancy in eastern France. Next door was a boulangerie. They baked baguettes each day, of course, and it was a fine smell to wake to, but they baked brioche not more than twice a week.)

The packet I've just taken down is of tube-shaped individual brioches, laced with chocolate chips, a common style of breakfast treat with coffee.

There are eight rolls in the packet, each individually wrapped in cellophane for freshness, and then the whole encircled in a second crinkly cellophane bag.

A lot of cellophane, one must admit, for not an awful lot of food by weight or value (the packet costs $6) but then again, just look along the shelves and in the freezers of the supermarket.

The quantity of plastic packaging, all petro-chemical in origin, is quite astonishing. No wonder there's a South Pacific gyre where a million tons of trash just sits and swirls and breaks down into microchips of plastic for the fish to eat. The bill for our pollution is about to come and find us, I suspect.

But anyway, we have our eight brioches. Look closer now. Upturn the packet, read the smaller print. There, you see it now? Those three small words. These tiny inexpensive breakfast loaves, these sweetened rolls, these ordinary trifles of the baker's art, fashioned from eggs and flour and butter, yeast and cream and salt, all ancient staples, were Made In France.

I kid you not. Though we have eggs and flour and butter, salt and yeast and cream, in bounteous quantities here in the southern seas, someone saw fit to bake these things in France, as far away as it is possible to be, and cram them with preservatives, and double wrap them in a fossil fuel derivative and then transport them thirteen thousand ludicrous kilometres for you and me to buy.

I know, I know, there are no words. Nor do we need them. Your hair, that stands on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine, says all there is to say.