Garlic and Bread Soup with Sage and Bay Leaf, from Provence

Guy Gedda, the celebrated French chef and cooking instructor, apologizes to his readers for including such a primitive soup in La Table d’un Provençal. “I had promised to exclude all dishes that are ‘too rustic,’” he writes, but “this evening having a bad migraine […] a mysterious voice shouted in my ears that I was suffering because I had decided to drop and forget Aigo Boulido.” Then he goes on describing the virtues of this “soup of the old folks,” which was not just soothi