"I don't want to be confused with being the author of a cookbook," said Cornell Professor Steven L. Kaplan, who travels to Italy Sept. 6 to accept the Langhe Ceretto Prize, an international award that honors outstanding culinary writing.

Kaplan, the Goldwin Smith Professor of European History, is being honored for "The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question 1700-1775" (Duke University Press, 1996), a 750-page examination of the power and symbolism of bread in 18th-century France. The book earlier received the Gottschalk Prize from the American Society of 18th Century Studies.

"The French social order was founded on bread," Kaplan said. " It had a tremendous symbolic charge for Christian society, in that it was the body of their God, and it also was the major source of their nutrition.

"One of the great rituals of French life in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries was the procession to the bread shop or market in early morning," said Kaplan, a member of the French Ministry of Culture's Order of Arts and Letters who has spent more than two decades researching bread and Paris bakers of the 18th century.

The prize committee, which selected Kaplan's book from dozens of entries, said of his work: "This is a splendid demonstration of how a food can be used to interpret a society in all its economic and administrative aspects, and, vice versa, how these merge into making of bread and its quality."

The Langhe Ceretto Prize, which carries with it a cash award of $8,300, will be presented to Kaplan by the Societa Editrice Internazionale at a ceremony in Alba, Italy.

But Kaplan's take on bread isn't all ancient history.

"My French friends are shocked to learn that I own a bread machine," he said. "It doesn't make bread nearly as well as if one kneaded the dough by hand, but it's a marvelous invention and I'd be happy to endorse one."