boule

The tradition & historical record

Boule, from French, meaning "ball", is a traditional shape of French bread resembling half a ball. A boule can be made using any type of flour and can be leavened with commercial yeast, chemical leavening, or even wild yeast (such as sourdough). The name of this rustic loaf shape gives the French term for bakers "boulangers" and bread bakeries "boulangeries". ¹

Boule bread appears in certain Renaissance paintings by the Dutch painter Dieric Bouts. A representation of Boule bread can be appreciated in the still life works of the 18th-century Spanish painter Luis Eugenio Meléndez (1716–1780), and in the works of the contemporary French painter Jean-Baptiste Chardin (1699-1779). ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Boule (bread)”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

boule is traditional round bread shape, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 2 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²