Bash: build command string with quotes and invoke it directly

Question

In bash, this sequence doesn't work the way I thought it would:

> command="echo \"foo bar\""
> $command
"foo bar"

Using eval instead:

> eval $command
foo bar

This does what I want, but I would prefer not to use eval. Is there any way to formulate the expression "foo bar" such that the direct invocation $command sends the single intended argument to echo, instead of 2 half-quoted arguments?

For context, the script is a simple driver for compiler benchmarking, making it easy to experiment with various compiler options and organize the results for later analysis. There is no presentation factor to be accounted for, only the correct passing of arguments to the compiler, and correct naming of output file paths. Missed quotes lead to errors, whereas superficial factors like spaces are discarded by the compiler frontend and have no effect on the results.

Answer 1

This does it, but still uses eval:

command='echo "foo bar"'
eval $command

Now, here it is without eval:

command=("echo" "foo bar")
"${command[@]}"

Answer 2

While the array approach is the best way to do what you want (build a shell command equivalent to a parsed and cleaned input line), to answer the question asked you can use a function:

my_function(){ echo "foo bar"; }

command=my_function

$command # executes echo with one argument containing foo bar 

However in 48 years of Unix usage/programming I've never encountered a case where this was appropriate.