It's interesting how much of modern cuisine is, well, modern, and a product of modern technology. The article doesn't talk much about the baguette's history, and suggests the origins are lost in the mists of time. I guess they are. Not that lost, though! Sure, the shape is probably much older. But modern baguettes, the kind we know with the glazed crunchy crust, are made in a steam oven. That effectively limits their introduction to the date of the introduction of steam-injection baking (probably invented in Austria in the 1830s) to Paris, which was in the late 1830s. It was not possible to make a baguette -- not the baguette we know anyway -- before that. Similarly, many of Escoffier's recipes basically assume access to a gas cooker and refrigeration, and you would have been very hard-pressed to pull them off a century before without those. Haute cuisine was very haute tech at the time.