Foreword

Judith Choate with The Master Bread Bakers and Chefs of The French Culinary Institute Photographs by Matthew Septimus

Bread is mystical. Bread is life. So says Chef Alain Sailhac, the sage dean of The French Culinary Institute. Through these and other culinary metaphors, Chef Alain has taught me many things about life. Perhaps the most poignant is his own story about food deprivation during World War II. It is how he came to view bread as the giver of life, and the breaking of bread as a mystical experience.