Here is a translation by Leslie Wilson from’ La Hotte du Chiffonnier,’ written by Louis Paulian in 1885. He records how bread was ‘recycled ‘in C19 Paris.
‘Louis Paulian, talking to Parisian chiffonniers (rag-pickers) in the early 1880s, recorded the ways they dealt with bread scraps: "If they’re clean," the chiffonniers told him, "we eat them, and if they’re too dirty, we make the bourgeois eat them... We never waste anything."
In Parisian households of the time, the cooks usually gave clean bread straight to the chiffonniers, but they threw the dirty bread in the bin. Clean bread went home and was dipped in soup to soften it and make it fit to eat – this is hard stale baguette we’re talking about. If there was a surplus of good quality waste bread, it was sold on, via a middleman, mainly to feed the children of poor Parisian trades people who were being reared by women in the suburbs.
Soiled bread had plenty of uses; the best was fed to pigs, rabbits and poultry, and the chiffonniers’ horses, if they had them. Bread that was so disgustingly filthy that the animals would refuse to eat it would be roasted in an oven and then sieved. The coarse crumbs that wouldn’t go through the sieve were sold to restauranteurs in the Quartier Latin for breadcrumbs. These restaurants were used by students, who bought their dinner for 90 centimes, and neither knew nor (Paulian suggests) cared that their hams and cutlets were coated with bread that had been rejected by animals.
The burnt powder that was the residue of this process was made into tooth-cleaning powder and ‘chicory’ which was sold in grocers’ shops. Thus the lower echelons of the bourgeoisie had their leavings returned to them, and were made to pay for it.’
