What is it about bread? Why am I, here in the middle of my life, so enamored of French loaves? Two images kept cropping up: two French people sitting in a caf 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...