Bread

PARIS -- This is a city for lovers, yes? Well, I came prepared with a checklist for my romantic dates in love-soaked Paris. Butter? Check. Small silver knife? Check. Napkins. Check. Plan de Paris (that indispensable book of street maps)? Check. Next, I purchased a carnet, that nifty bundle of 10 train tickets for the Paris Metro, and off I went. Off to consummate my love affair with that most quintessential of all French things -- the baguette. Some people go to Paris to traipse through gardens; to take in magnificent paintings, ancient textiles and other gleaming bits of antiquity; to marvel at cathedrals boasting magnificent windows of colored light.

Six-thousand years after its appearance, bread not only sustains, it delights, fascinates, mystifies and even inspires revolution. Peter Reinhart, master baker, can tell you all about it. A full-time baking instructor at Johnson & Wales University and writer of three previous bread books, Reinhart has written not a bread history but a guide to its deepest mysteries. These abundantly illustrated pages unfold in formulas (bakers don't say recipe) and techniques for making 44 different breads - alphabetically arranged from New England's anadama to whole wheat.

As Marylanders streamed into area supermarkets, corner groceries and convenience marts for provisions, cash registers were ringing up record sales as some store shelves began running bare.The Giant supermarket chain, which has stores through the mid-Atlantic, reported that Saturday was its biggest sales day in the chain's 60 years."The stores have just been mobbed," said Barry F. Scher, Giant's vice president for public affairs. Some stores have reported they are either running low or out of some staple items, such as milk, bread, eggs and bananas, Mr. Scher said.

People are still eating Hostess Twinkies and Wonder bread, but the problem for Interstate Bakeries is that they are eating less of them. Interstate Bakeries Corp., the nation's largest wholesale baker, said yesterday that it had filed for bankruptcy protection. Many consumers seem to have lost their taste for the company's bread and pastries, many of which have been a staple for more than 70 years. But high expenses were also a factor. Interstate said it had hired a corporate turnaround specialist, Tony Alvarez II, of Alvarez & Marsal - a New York-based consulting firm that has also assisted HealthSouth Corp.

Robert O. Hirsch PROVIDENCE, R.I. - The carbohydrate-laden breakfast spread of croissants, cinnamon rolls, muffins, pineapple coffee cake, bagels - and not a slice of bacon in sight - was a fitting start to the day for a hundred or so bakers who gathered at a college campus here to vindicate their products in the face of a recent and potent threat: low-carb diets. As millions of dieters turn to bunless hamburgers, pasta-free lasagna and other low-carb fare to trim their bellies, the economic ripples are widespread.

It was a misty morning, and Dale Dugan, baker for the four restaurants and one wine shop in Baltimore's Charleston group, said his bread was giving him a weather report. On days like this one, he said, when there is a lot of moisture in the air, the dough likes to spend a short time in the proofer. Moreover, the bread's "oven spring" its first rise in the oven, will be more ample. Additionally on humid days, you have to watch the crust. "If there is too much water in the air, you can get a hyper-exaggerated crust," he said.

PARIS -- There was a time when a baguette was a baguette. It was a long, thin, crusty loaf and it symbolized France. That time, comforting in its certainties, has passed. The country has entered the era of the concept-baguette.At the Robineau bakery, the leeks protruding from shopping baskets, the oyster salesman across the street and the occasional surly aside sustain the reassuring illusion that Paris will always be Paris. But when the customers reach the counter, the illusion is shattered.

The loaves of crusty European-style bread were flying off the table as fast as Joe Port could bag them at the Riva Road Farmer's Market when a familiar voice called, "Hi, Joe."Looking up, Port saw his old Naval Academy classmate, newly retired Adm. Charles R. Larson. "I called back, 'Hi Chuck, I see the governor appointed you to head his university task force.' He said, 'I had to have something to do.' "While Larson had just left the academy superintendency in June to take his first nonmilitary step in 40 years, Port, 61, is well into his third career -- bread baker and restaurateur with his &r Brazilian-born, American-educated wife, Vera, 62.The Ports married in the academy chapel the day he graduated '' in 1958 and spent the next 25 years traveling around the United States and abroad during Joe's postings as a Navy pilot.

All week, Fran Sonnenschein and her family have been obsessed with crumbs. They have emptied their coat pockets, vacuumed between their couch cushions, swept behind the stove. After almost a week of cleaning, they have banished every piece of bread from their home - in theory, anyway - and are ready for the most widely observed Jewish holiday of the year: Passover, which begins at sundown tonight. During the eight days of the holiday, observant Jews are not allowed to eat or even see bread or other leavened products, called khametz.

Dale Dugan, a baker who thought of his handmade breads as works of culinary art, died of cancer Thursday at Chesapeake Hospice House in Linthicum. The Elkridge resident was 48. "He was an inspiration to everyone who worked with him," said Alfred Himmelrich, owner of the Stone Mill Bakery. "He had an arts-and-crafts ideal that he lived by. He liked making his breads the way the monks did." Born in Turtle Creek, Pa., Mr. Dugan credited a Mennonite grandmother with getting him interested in baking.