From the iht:

“As a kid in Brooklyn Steven L. Kaplan ate pale sliced Wonder Bread like everyone else but had an epiphany in Paris as a Princeton student in 1962 when he happened on a small bakery on the Rue du Cherche-Midi called Poilâne and bought a bâtard which he filled with cheese and ate in the Luxembourg gardens. “I can still taste that first bite,” he says.

Kaplan went on to become a professor of history at Cornell University, always fascinated by bread as one of the principal actors in French life: it is bread, he says, that seals the social contract in France, the link between the government and the governed.

When in the United States Kaplan, from what he views as necessity, bakes his own bread. In France he is recognized as the bread authority, compared recently in Le Monde with Robert O. Paxton, the American historian who forced French eyes to open on the subject of Vichy. The occasion of the comparison was Kaplan’s new book, “Le Pain Maudit” (Cursed Bread), a study of an unsolved mystery dating back more than half a century but which lingers even in the memories of those not then born: the affair of the poisoned bread.

What became a national disaster began on Aug. 16, 1951, when the inhabitants of the small town of Pont-Saint-Esprit in the Gard region of southern France were suddenly stricken by frightful hallucinations of being consumed by fire or giant plants or horrid beasts.

A worker tried to drown himself because his belly was being eaten by snakes. A 60-year-old grandmother threw herself against the wall and broke three ribs. A man saw his heart escaping through his feet and beseeched a doctor to put it back in place. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets. There was no treatment, no cure and only one possible explanation: something in the bread baked the night of Aug. 15-16 had caused the calamity….” Read the rest

tags: france Steven L. Kaplan Pont Saint Esprit Le Pain Maudit poisoned bread