Sara Mansfield Taber

"This is one of the most compelling, knowledgeable, and graceful books about the French soul that has ever been written by an American. Bread of Three Rivers is more than the story of “the heart of French bread”—though that would be enough to grant it high praise. Taber’s book is about the verities of tradition, skill, and respect still so strong in French culture."

-Richard Goodman
author of French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France


"The printed page alone will evoke the crackling noises and the toasty aroma of cooling loaves in Jean-Claude Choquet’s boulangerie."

- William Castle
The Boston Globe


"The greatest treat in the world for me is a chunk of superlative, crusty French country bread covered lavishly with the best possible butter. Bread of Three Rivers is an in-depth, poetic study of the most basic of all foods...bread."

-Jacques Pepin, author and cohost of PBS-TV's Cooking at Home

What is it about bread? Why am I, here in the middle of my life, so enamoured of French loaves? Two images kept cropping up: two French people sitting in a cafe for a long afternoon of eating thick hunks of bread and drinking cups of coffee, and a Frenchman on a bicycle with a loaf slung across his handlebars. These visions seemed to depict lives soaked in leisure, where there was time for the good things...Then this thought ambled forth: It's the dailiness of bread, like a reliable friend...My plan starts to billow forth. My project, as I imagine it, will be a natural history, an ecology of bread. The story of a loaf.

Overcome by a passion for French bread, Sara Mansfield Taber travels to Brittany in search of a loaf that, like the lifestyle that must surely accompany it, is perfect in its simplicity. After months of seeking, she tears off a hunk of pain trois rivieres, made by Gold Medal Baker Monsieur Jean-Claude Choquet of Blain, Loire-Atlantique. It "smelled like heaven and tasted a mile deep." It tasted honest. Here was her loaf.

"In prose as voluptuously delicious as pain trois rivieres itself, Sara Mansfield Taber delves into the heart of France and finds the world, shimmering in its complexity. Once again, Taber has written a book that is both wise and very beautiful."
-C.M. Mayo, author of Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles Through Baja California, the Other Mexico