A Thousand Years of Sugar Sculpture

One question that food historians just can’t resolve is just how much Arabic influence there is on medieval European food.  Some have argued that medieval cuisine is little better than a distant echo of the glories of Baghdad and Cordova while others insist that the smattering of Middle-Eastern recipes in European cookbooks represents nothing more a few exotic dishes added to an otherwise indigenous repertoire.  The more I read about Arabic cooking in 10th and 11th centuries, the more I am inclined to go with the first view.  Of course Arabic cooking itself didn’t appear out of a vacuum.  You could probably argue that it was a synthesis of Persian and Byzantine styles with a dash of Indian, Turkic and Bedouin influence.

I thought a lot about this when I was doing research for may last book, Sweet Invention:  A History of Dessert, since it was unquestionably the Arabs who introduced sugar cultivation to the Europeans.  Along the way, they gave us such things as custard, cannoli and marzipan (and possibly puff pastry and sponge cake).  What I didn’t think they gave us was sugar sculpture, which became all the rage in the Renaissance, a fad that continued well into 18th century not only in Christendom but the Ottoman Empire too.  I didn’t even believe it when I read about it in Sidney Mintz’s brilliant Sweetness and Power, figuring his information was second hand.  Who ever heard of Islamic sculpture?  Well a lot I knew.

Photo:  Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sculpture: Ivan Day

Admittedly, the evidence for medieval Arab sugar sculpture is pretty skimpy.  The cookbooks don’t give any instructions for making the kind of sugar paste necessary to make it but there is one source that is pretty explicit, mainly Nāṣir-i Khusraw, a Persian visitor to Fatimid Egypt. "The last day of Ramadan 440 (1049),” he writes, “they said that fifty thousands maunds [about 150,000 pounds] of sugar were appropriated for this day for the sultan's feast.  For decoration on the banquet table I saw a confection like an orange tree, every branch and leaf of which had been executed in sugar, and thousand of images and statuettes in sugar..." Now let’s say his numbers were a little off, even so there must have still been many, many sugar sculptures.  I asked Ellen Kenney, a professor of Islamic art at Cairo’s American University whether this seemed plausible and she wasn’t fazed. She writes, “Nāṣir-i Khusraw is a reliable narrator… and statuary in the medieval Islamic context is not unheard of by any means. Especially in palaces, figural sculpture is known from descriptions and archaeological contexts, fashioned from more durable materials than sugar. For example, the Fatimid palace in Cairo reportedly contained sculptures of gold (I think portraits of the royal family) and I believe examples of figural statues in stucco were excavated at a Ghaznavid palace in modern Afghanistan.”  She points to an (admittedly Persian) sculpture in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum.  The Met website offers a brief outline of the Fatimid art (including figurative sculpture) that confirms Professor Kenney’s point.

Not that any of this proves a direct connection between renaissance Italian sugar sculpture (or spongade as it was known in Venice) and the medieval Arab variety but it does seem implausible that the Italians, who depended on the Arab world for all their early sugar imports, wouldn’t have picked up the idea of making sculpture out of the sweet stuff along the way.  The additive typically added to the sugar to make it hold together was tragacanth gum and guess where that comes from?  Yup, the Middle East.

Again, there is no way to make a connection but one of the best known reports of sugar sculpture in the Ottoman Empire comes from the seventeenth- century Turkish travel writer Evliyâ Çelebi who describes a sweet makers’ parade that concluded with the sugar artists of Galata, who sold fruit preserves and candied fruit that, which, for the procession, they mounted and carried on cypresses and fruit trees made entirely of sugar.  I had assumed that these confectioners were of Western European origin since the Galata neighborhood tended to be populated by Venetians and other Italians.  But who is to say that the tradition hadn’t been kept up in the Middle East?  Nāṣir-i Khusraw’description of a sugar tree is awfully suggestive of an Egyptian connection.  I haven’t come across any mentions of sugar trees in the Italian context.  It is, of course perfectly possible that the tradition developed in one place (Egypt?) was refined in another (Venice?) and adapted in yet a third (Istanbul?).  Suffice it to say that this sort of inquiry tends to bring up more questions than it answers.

In Praise of Sugar

Health obsessions come and go.  You will recall the successive demonization of fat, cholesterol, trans-fats and the great anti-carb crusade.  The last of these caused perfectly rational people to convince themselves that a diet of bacon cheeseburgers was perfectly OK as long as you abjured the bun.  I suspect 2011 will be recalled as the year when demon sugar caught the fancy of the nutritional exorcists.  And don’t think this is an isolated American phenomenon, I just read a long article about how sugar is leading us to damnation in the Czech Republic’s foremost financial paper, Hospodarske Noviny (here’s the link if you happen to read Czech).  Nonetheless, the American health-advice industry still leads the world: just read Gary Taubes “Is Sugar Toxic?” New York Times article from last April.  That piece was largely devoted to examining claims made by Robert Lustig, a specialist on pediatric hormone disorders and childhood obesity at UCSF.  Lustig makes no bones about it:  sugar is poison and it is evil.  By the end of the article Taubes appears largely convinced.  “Sugar scares me too,” he writes and worries about giving it to his sons. 

Lustig’s argument is not that too much sugar is bad but rather that any amount of refined sugar is bad.  It’s like saying that because rhubarb contains oxalic acid (which can cause health problems) strawberry rhubarb pies should be banned.  Americans have a tendency, though, to label food “good” or “bad.”  If you eat the good stuff you will be svelte and fabulous and never die and if you eat the bad you will go straight to hell wearing XXXL sweats from Walmart.  Subtlety does not make careers or sell newspapers. 

That said, Americans undoubtedly do eat too much sugar and other sweeteners, probably about twice as much as is healthful according to a FDA study quoted by Taubes.  But what exactly does that mean?  We’re eating some 90 pounds per year.  Which works out to about a half a cup a day or 24 sugar packets.  A quarter cup would be probably be fine though, according to the FDA study, and just in case you’re wondering, that’s the equivalent of 8 Toll House cookies, 4 glazed donuts or about 3 slices of pumpkin pie.  The problem, of course, isn’t that people are eating too much dessert but rather drinking too much soda.  But telling people to eat a sensible quantity of sugar rather than abstaining altogether just isn’t the American way.  It’s like the advice American teenagers are given about sex: just say no.  It’s no wonder our teenage pregnancy rate is one the highest in the developed world and our obesity rate is just as bad.

So why can’t we just be sensible about all of this?  I think it has a lot to do with the fundamentally puritan nature of our culture.  At the root of this is the idea that pleasure is sinful.  Abstaining from pleasure (especially such sensual pleasures as sex and food) will ensure you a place in heaven while self-indulgence will send you straight to hell.  Sometimes the vocabulary makes this self-evident.  Sugar is “demonized.”  It is “evil.”  Sometimes it’s more subtle than that.  There is a widely held belief that it is up to you to determine how long you live.  The more discipline you have, the better you are able to control your natural urges, the closer you can get to life everlasting.  The good (those who haven’t succumbed to their instincts) get to play golf in the Elysian fields well into their nineties, while the bad (who lived on Coke and KFC) are punished with an early, painful end.  This is the secular answer to heaven and hell but there is the same moralizing quality. When citing various studies on the effects of diet, journalists often write that eating or not eating ingredient X lowered the study participants’ death rate.  Of course what they mean is the death rate from a particular disease but that’s not the way it reads.  To the best of my knowledge, our death rate remains 100% no matter what we do or eat.

We are hard-wired to like sugar much as we are designed to enjoy sex.  Pleasure has an evolutionary basis.  In nature, foods that are sweet are invariably not poisonous whereas bitterness signals danger.  In many cultures children’s first taste of real food is something sweet and kids naturally gravitate to sweet foods.  Does that mean that they should be indulged with a diet of Cocoa Pebbles and soda?  Of course not, but neither should they be told that those things are “bad.”  They need to learn that pleasure has its time and place; otherwise they will only associate it with being drunk in the back seat of a borrowed car—and regret it the next day.  There is a twisted logic at work here:  if pleasure is sinful you can only get pleasure from sinful activities and thus the greater the transgression the greater the pleasure.  You will notice that the term “sinfully rich” does not occur in Catholic Europe, but to us “sinful” is just a synonym for “pleasurable.”

Sugar has long been a natural target for those who wish to save our souls.  Well before the current sugar-bashing fad, sugar was associated with the miseries of the slave trade and, while it is undoubtedly true that European sugar consumption habits in the 17th and 18th centuries were the primary cause of the transatlantic slave trade and its associated horrors, it does not follow that sucrose is somehow malevolent.  Was the sugar produced by peasant farmers in India during this time more virtuous?  Or the beet sugar produced after 1800 morally superior?  Certainly 19th century abolitionists thought so (there was a movement to boycott slave-grown sugar in the early 1800s).  Some made this explicit, describing consuming slave-grown sugar as partaking “of other men’s sins” and the need to refrain from the pleasures of the tea table to safeguard their own virtue. (See Lectures on Slavery, 160).

More recently  (in the 1970s) sugar was linked with hyperactivity in children though the consensus among researchers is that no such link exists.

Undoubtedly the current sugar witch hunt will come and go leaving people ever more conflicted and confused about what is on their plate and ever guiltier about each and every pleasure.  But in the meantime I have every intention of enjoying my next donut or that slice of tarte au citron and feeling virtuous pleasure with every bite.

The Origin of the Bûche de Noël

I was recently contacted by a journalist from Saveur about the origins of bûche de Noël, the “traditional” French Christmas dessert.  (For the article and a recipe, see Gabriella Gershenson, “A Slice of Christmas,” Saveur, December 2011) Today, you’ll see the cake in every single French pastry shop around the holiday, made in the shape of a yule log.  It is generally made in the form of a sponge roll cake frosted and filled with buttercream.  The idea derives from a folk celebration of Christmas where a log, large enough to burn for 3 days, is ceremoniously placed on the fire.  The Brits have a similar tradition.  (For the log, not the cake.)

But what of the cake?  The earliest recipe of the cake shows up in Pierre Lacam’s 1898 Le memorial historique et géographique de la pâtisserie.  The earliest mention however is a couple of years earlier in Alfred Suzanne’s 1894 La cuisine anglaise et la pâtisserie where he notes in passing that it is (was?) the specialty of a certain Ozanne, presumably his friend Achille Ozanne (1846-1898).  Of course we have no idea of what this looked like.  An article in the French newspaper Figaro adds an interesting tidbit (see Pierre Leonforte, “La bûche de Noël : une histoire en dents de scie,” Figaro, 17 December 2000):  according to Stéphane Bonnat, of chocolatier Félix Bonnat her great grandfather’s recipe collection from 1884 contains a recipe for a roll cake make with chocolate ganache.  Admittedly she makes no claim to this being the first bûche de Noël.

It makes sense that the cake, like so many other Christmas traditions (think Santa, decorated Christmas trees, Christmas cards, etc) dates to the Victorian era, to a time of genteel, bourgeois domesticity.  In France, in particular, a certain romantic image of peasant traditions had become part of the story the French told themselves about themselves and while the average Parisian bourgeois could hardly be expected to hoist logs into their 4th floor apartment, they could at least show solidarity for their country cousins by picking up a more manageable bûche at the local pâtisserie.  That the result was a little kitsch fit the middle class sensibility too.

If I had to guess, I would date the cake to the 1880s though it seems not to have taken off until the following decade.  For an early recipe that begins to resemble today’s version see Joseph Fabre’s 1905 Dictionnaire universel de cuisine pratique (This is the second edition of the book—the first was in 1894—but I haven’t been able to locate that particular edition), or look for Gershenson’s article.

Ladurée Comes to New York

Despite my considerable curiosity, I held off some months before visiting Ladurée's new outpost on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Quite frankly, I didn't want to deal with the lines of macaronophiles eager to plop down $2.70 for each little cookie.  And then there was that little snooty voice inside of me that kept saying, well it couldn't be as good as Paris. 

To give a little background here, in Paris, Ladurée is the high temple of the macaron.  Perhaps Pierre Herme's macarons are better and more inventive, but it is Ladurée that put these almond meringue cookies filled with buttercream on the map.  They claim that the idea of creating the little sandwich cookies came from Pierre Desfontaines, a distant cousin of the Parisian shop’s first owner, some 60 years ago.  While the claim is difficult to corroborate I'll take their word for it until something better comes along.  Not that the idea of macarons is in any way new–in France it dates back to at least 1643.  Even the idea of filling them was around in the 1800s, though the filling was jam in those days.

But today Ladurée is the last word on macarons and they've turned the little cookie into a world-spanning empire with outposts all over Europe, the Middle East and Japan. It's a little surprising that it took them this long to get to America.  Needless to say, Ladurée is far from a small artisanal operation, it's more on the order Tiffany's or Louis Vuitton, though admittedly the French confectioner's luxuries are a lot more affordable.  But can they keep up the quality while manufacturing macarons by the ton?  Surprisingly, the answer seems to be yes, at least if the cookies at the Madison Avenue branch are any indication.  A friend and I split four of them and here's my brief review (the texture on the cookies themselves was perfect, crisp yet barely resisting to the tongue):
Coconut:  these were perfect, a delicate distillation of coconuttiness
Lemon:  great flavor though I was a little surprised that the lemon buttercream was a little broken, this happens to me all the time, but I expect better than that from the Parisian masters

Raspberry: brilliantly intense flavor though I'm not convinced that leaving in the raspberry seeds does anything to the flavor
Violet-cassis:  this was perhaps the one dud, any violet flavor was swamped with the cassis and, while the texture of the cookie itself was exemplary, the filling seemed, well, gummy


That said, they are likely the best macarons in New York.  Though if you have the option, get on that plane to Paris.

Nun's Breasts

Well I just couldn't resist sharing a brief article that appeared in Centro, a local paper in the southern Italian town of Pescara, brought to my attention by Luca Colferai (a Venetian and the primum movens of Il Ridotto). To see the photo gallery associated with the article see this link. The following is a rough and ready translation of the abridged version that comes with the photo gallery, the full article is here:

photo: Federico Deidda

Nuns' Tits, Abruzzo's wicked dessert celebrates 125 years.

A simple but delicious dessert made with just a few quality ingredients: sugar, flour and eggs to make the sponge cake; fresh milk, eggs, lemon zest and flour for the pastry cream. These were created in Naples between 1884 and 1886 by a native of Abruzzo who had come to Naples to learn the secrets of pastry. As for the rest, such as the quantities of the ingredients, this remains a secret passed down from generation to generation, unknown outside pastry shops. The origin of the name of what is now the sweet symbol of the town of Guardiagrele [a town in Abruzzo] is also a mystery. The first theory is that the original term was "tre monti" [three mountains], which referred to the mountains of the Maiella [now a national park], but was then transformed into nuns' tits by the popular imagination. The second hypothesis originates in the common belief among the laity that nuns, to make their feminine shape less evident, placed a lump of clothes (the third breast) between their breasts. The third theory has it that nuns of the Order of Saint Clare simply invented this sort of sponge cake and thus the association with the sisters. The colloquial name was simply a malicious play on the dessert's shape. Article: Rossano Orlando.


If you're interested in a recipe you could give this one a shot.

A Little Cookie Detective Work

Among the many desserts that I never covered fully in Sweet Invention because I just ran out of time and space was the humble drop cookie, perhaps one of the defining recipes of the home-baked American repertoire. What I mean is all those doughs make with sugar and butter that spread in homey, irregular rounds: chocolate chip, oatmeal, peanut butter and their kind.

The word cookie is undeniably Dutch in origin (from koekje=small cake) and began to be used English-language American cookbooks by at least the 1850s. Still, what it seemed to mean at this point was a small cake, a kind of muffin, rather than what we would think of as a cookie. In those days drop cookies were mostly called drop cakes. These little cakes came here from England. The eighteenth century cookbook author Hannah Glasse has a recipe (she calls them drop-biscuits). These, however, resemble lady fingers in texture rather than what we would think of as a cookie. Closer to the idea of a cookie is something called a “rout cake.” Mary Eaton, a British cookbook writer gives a recipe in The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary (1822):

ROUT CAKES. 

To make rout drop-cakes, mix two pounds of flour with one pound of butter, one pound of sugar, and one pound of currants, cleaned and dried. Moisten it into a stiff paste with two eggs, a large spoonful of orange-flower water, as much rose water, sweet wine, and brandy. Drop the paste on a tin plate floured, and a short time will bake them.

(For an explanation of the name, see http://www.lynsted.com/html/georgian_-_rout_cakes.html.) Most drop cakes are what would consider a “cake”. And the same is true of early drop cookie recipes. The first real drop cookie recipe that I’ve been able identify (though the rout cakes do seem to be a distant ancestor) is something called “Boston Cookies” which begin to show up in the 1880s. These are essentially the earlier rout cakes but with less liquid and flour but more sugar. The Household: A Cyclopedia for Modern Homes (1881) gives the following recipe.

BOSTON COOKIES.
One cup butter, one and one-half sugar, two and one-half flour, one and one-half raisins chopped fine, one-half teaspoonful soda dissolved in a little warm water, three eggs, a pinch of salt and nutmeg and other flavoring to the taste. Mix well, roll thin, or better still, drop into the pans with a spoon and sprinkle granulated sugar over each.

When you look at the original Toll House cookie recipe, the proportions of butter, sugar and flour are identical (Nestlé later altered the proportions slightly.) This then may the direct ancestor of the drop cookie. Now to figure out whether it really did originate in Boston!

Bashing Wedding Cakes

So I was in a taxi cab with an NPR reporter (busy shilling Sweet Invention, my new book on the history of dessert) when he told me a story that I find just fascinating. He was originally against the idea of having a wedding cake at his nuptials but he eventually relented, but in a rather singular way. He and his bride to be decided to replace the usual multistory extravaganza with a wedding-cake-shaped piñata and fill it with small bottles of booze and Twinkies. To top it all off, the couple placed sugar day of the dead skulls on top. I have to say that I was equal parts fascinated and horrified.

Having spent the last couple of years delving into the symbolic baggage of desserts (chocolate money, Barbie cakes, bone-shaped cookies, and so on) I couldn’t but stop and rejoice at all the symbolism inherent in bashing apart a symbol of wedding bliss filled with toy-sized bottles of booze and sweet relics of childhood.

Let me very briefly note the symbolism of the more ordinary wedding cake (or bride’s cake as it was sometimes known in the 1800s). In those days there was a kind of parallel between the virginal bride and the white-frosted cake, sometimes made explicit by the orange blossoms placed on both the bride and cake. The fashion for these white cakes originates with multi-story confection created by (mostly likely) Alfonse Gouffé for the wedding of the future King Edward VII and Princess Alexandra of Denmark. The idea caught on and white wedding cakes (they used to be pink or even red) became de rigueur.

One anthropologist has noted that the act of the newlywed husband and wife plunging a knife into the cake represents the consummation of the marriage. If that is the case what does the smashing of the piñata represent?

The next step is, of course, to share the cake among the guests. They are, in effect, the witnesses of the marriage act. The cake, quite literally embodies this. You can draw a parallel to the sharing of the host in a Catholic mass. So what does it mean to consume a plastic-wrapped, industrially-produced mélange of chemicals? Moreover one that is associated with childhood? Are we bearing witness to the creation of a new consumer unit with child-like impulses born out smashing apart a traditional symbol of marriage. Then there are the toy-sized bottles of booze. In the nineteenth century, candy manufacturers used to make sweets in the shape of gin bottles, guns and cigars so that kids could play at being adults. Like so many of candy-like cocktails popular today, the little bottles seem to point to the fact the line between child and adult is little more than a blur. But what should we make of the sugar skulls? An ironic reminder that all, including symbols and marriage, are as dust to dust? Or just more spooky candy, no more threatening than Jack-o-lanterns on Halloween. Well I guess kids will be kids…till death do us part.

Cupcakes and Macarons

I was recently in Paris, in part to interview the master pastry chef Pierre Hermé. In case you haven’t leafed through a Paris Match in the last dozen years, Pierre Hermé is one of those French culinary hypercelebrities, appearing regularly on television programs to deconstruct the state of French cuisine today. All the same, his celebrity is of an older more glamorous variety. He has not yet degraded himself by appearing on

Iron Chef. He is a recipient of the Légion d’Honneur, his nation’s highest honor. He brought a new spirit of inventiveness to French patisserie and as a consequence the French press has branded him with the rather dreadful moniker of the “Picasso of pastry.”

Macarons at Ladurée in Paris

I mention all this simply to contrast his fame with his personality which is entirely generous and free of any pretension. Hermé has the easy grace of the truly successful. We met in his miniscule office above his boutique in the ever fashionable Faubourg St.-Germain. The boutique is tiny and resembles an ultra-trendy jeweler more than a pastry shop. Each sweet sparkles under the carefully arranged spot lights. You can only fit in about a half-dozen customers at a time so naturally the line snakes out the door and down the block. (Hermé is a master of PR.) Upstairs, our conversation inevitably led to the macaron for this is the maestro’s claim to fame. Displaying no false modesty, Hermé admits to having started the macaron fad that swept pastry shops across the world in the last decade.

For those who haven’t visited a pastry shop in the last five years I should explain that the macaron is a confection of sugar, egg whites and almonds and goes back to at least the seventeenth century. I had always assumed that it was one of those Italian imports that arrived with Marie de’ Medicis or one of her crowd, but I have begun to have my doubts. I just can’t find any use of the term in Italian that doesn’t refer to pasta (or an idiot). (How “maccheron,” meaning pasta in both its meanings would become almond cookies is baffling to me—nevertheless the Académie française dictionary insists this the French word’s origin.) But whatever its origin it became a classic of the French pastry repertoire. There were lots of variations, including macarons stuffed with jam but it wasn’t until the 1940s (?) that someone had the bright idea of sandwiching two of these delicate cookies together with buttercream. And it wasn’t until the late 1990s that they became a multinational phenomenon and for this we have to thank M. Hermé. Bored of plain old chocolate and vanilla he started infusing his macarons with flavors of roses, green tea, licorice but also with such things as wild rose, fig and foie gras (that’s one in one macaron, mind you). Next thing you know, pastry shops in Los Angeles, New York, Brussels and Vienna had leapt onto the idea. Today you can walk into Picard, the French frozen food chain and pick up a selection of macarons with flavors like basil-lime, white peach-rose, and yuzu praline!

So why the obsession? I have a couple of notions about that. At their best the macarons are genuinely delicious. The intensity and clarity of the flavor translates into pure, uncomplicated pleasure. They are also small so that they are a practically guilt-free dessert, so important in this day and age when we give up pleasure so that we may prolong our joyless lives as long as possible. The flavors are often exotic but safe. They’re difficult to make so that we can exercise our connoisseurship by finding the very best producer—yet they’re informal. You eat them with your hand. It’s all so very 2010 (or perhaps 2005).

Cupcakes at Gerstner in Vienna

Now even as macarons have swept the French-style pastry shops in the United States there has been a local fad that is oddly analogous, mainly for cupcakes in an equally wide panoply of flavors (bacon, “chai-latte,” tiramisu, peanut butter...). For years it was a staple at children’s birthday parties, and like the macaron of old, in no more than two or three flavors. However unlike the macaron you need virtual no culinary acumen to make a cupcake. Most people make it from a cake mix. And like macarons, cupcakes have gone global.

The two desserts aren’t strictly analogous but I do think they give you insight into the state of European and American culture today. Increasingly, the old bourgeois structure is breaking up in on the old continent to be replaced by something at the same time more cosmopolitan yet attached to some hypothetical Europeaness. Luckily so far it has only been nationalism lite (if you set aside the Balkan conflagration). It would be interesting to analyze the exotic flavors of the macaron and where they come from. I bet it isn’t Africa or the Muslim world. In France the flavors often come from herbs or those extra-safe foreigners, the Japanese. Yet even while the macaron may be informal it is still a very adult-sort of treat. There is still a line drawn between childhood and adulthood by most Europeans.

But in the United States a youth culture has been dominant ever since the baby boomers hijacked the nation. In America, the ideal age is about 16. Old enough to drive and screw but as yet with many of the tastes of childhood. When not at work, the average American man dresses in sneakers, jeans, tee shirt and a baseball cap, the uniform of a twelve-year old. To an enormous extent these tastes apply to food as well. Sweet is the favorite flavor in America, whether in pasta sauce, bread, ketchup, breakfast cereal or 90% of all beverages. American’s love eating food by hand. Think of sandwiches, hot dogs, hamburgers, burritos and, naturally, cupcakes. The cake you don’t need to eat with a fork with a gooey uncomplicated appeal to childhood, much like the rest of American mass culture. It is the perfect dessert.

Yet as different as the two cultures are we all know how they are gradually turning into one. Walk through a typical European airport and it’s hard to tell anyone apart by dress alone any more. The fashion-makers across the world are using the same media to set their trends in motion. The most recent trend out of France seems to involve marshmallows (guimauves) a treat that seems almost as binational and infantile as Jerry Lewis.

Carnival Donuts in Innsbruck and Venice

A few weeks back I happened to be in Innsbruck just as the Carnival celebrations were coming to a close. The holiday is decidedly more low key here than in Rio or New Orleans and has none of the pomp of Venice. In the Tyrol, which claims Innsbruck as its capital, fat Tuesday, or Fasching, is celebrated with a parade of the good burgers hidden behind grotesque masks straight from a Hansel and Gretel nightmare. Kids opt for princesses or Power Rangers, or whatever Disney dishes out that year.

Faschingskrapfen at Café Diglas in Vienna

But mostly, the imminent arrival of Lent is marked by an Alpine-sized avalanche of Krapfen. Krapfen filled with jam and cream. Chocolate Krapfen and vanilla Krapfen but also the eggy, boozy Eierlikor Krapfen filled with an egg-based liqueur. Of course Venetians would hardly be surprised that Carnival should be a time to gorge on fried dough balls, the city has its fair share of pre-Lenten fritters and for much the same reason as Catholic Austria. Doughnuts are an indulgence that used to depend on animal fat: clarified butter if you were really hoity toity but lard for most of the rest of us. Great cauldrons of simmering lard, something that would be strictly forbidden for the next forty days and forty nights. Thus the donut orgy before the fast.

Of course donuts are hardly limited to the catholic world or even Europe as any fan of Homer Simpson is well aware. They are certainly as old as the ancient Greeks and any civilization that has figured out how to fry food has its version. In India there is the dayglow tangle of dough called jalebi, Arabs have Luqmat al qadi, a ping-pong- size fritter that translates as “judge’s morsel,” Spanish speakers have churros, the Dutch have olie bollen which, according to some historians later turned into American donuts. And, of course we mustn’t forget zeppole served on St. Joseph’s Day, right in the middle of Lent, proving once again that Martin Luther was right about the Italians.

Roughly speaking there are historically two ways of making fritters. In the case of churros and at least a some of the fritters that go by the name bignè in Italy (from the French beignet). The dough is made by mixing flour into hot water. You often find egg in there too. There’s recipe for this sort of thing in the ancient Roman cookbook of Apicius. Scappi, the renaissance maestro, calls a much enriched version of the same thing frittelle alla Veneziana (sic). The other kind of fritters, the ones that are called fritelle alla veneziana today are essentially made with a bread dough, leavened with yeast. And this is the category to which the much-beloved Krapfen belongs.

The origin of a fritter called Krapfen probably goes back to the middle ages in Central Europe. A recipe from 1531 has you mix in honey and wine as well as the usual eggs, flour and yeast. These early recipes seem to have been unfilled. Instead there is some evidence that they were dipped in honey or possibly some sort of fruit butter (apples and plums were traditionally boiled down in Central Europe without the addition of expensive sugar). In this they may have resembled honey-dipped Levantive fritters or, for that matter, the fritelle di Chanukà of Venice’s ghetto.

Filled Krapfen seem to have come along only when they moved to the big city. In Vienna these filled donuts came to be called Faschingskrapfen, because of their association with Carnival (Fasching) though Krapfen were by no means limited to the holiday. The Florentine Gazetta Universale reported that in Vienna April 7 1790, Leopold II distributed 300 pounds of prosciutto, 3000 pounds of roast veal, 3000 bread rolls 2000 Krapfen after annual ceremony when vows allegiance were exchanged between him and the representatives of his domains. Rather skimpy if you ask me but the Hapsburgs were known to be skinflints. And Krapfen weren’t cheap. They ran one to two Kreutzers unfilled and double that with a filling. That would have cost an ordinary workman one or two hours of wages. The really fancy ones were even more. You could tell good quality Krapfen by the tell-tale ring around the edge. It told you the doughnut was light enough not to sink in the cooking fat. She as pretty as a Krapfen was high compliment. And when a gentleman was to intimate with a lady that they would share a Krapfen you knew that a proposal had better be in the works.

Krapfen at Pasticceria Tonolo

Yet just when the Krapfen craze reached Venice isn’t recorded. Or at least I haven’t been able to track it down. Presumably it came with the Austrian occupation after 1797 though I am skeptical that the locals would have leapt on the invaders’ fritter all that quickly. But sooner or later the German donut’s very obvious appeal overcame any nationalist reservations and the locals adopted it as their own. I am tempted to ascribe Florence’s bomboloni to the Austrians as well but here too I have no proof other than the very obvious similarity of the recipe.

Who could argue with the appeal a sweet snack endorsed by both Homer Simpson and John F. Kennedy. Well, OK, in both cases we’re dealing with fiction. A cartoon character in one case and an urban legend that when Kennedy stood in front of the Brandenburg gate and declared himself a “Berliner,” he made a grammatical faux pas and inadvertently declared himself a jelly donut. Well it turns out his grammar was actually just fine. A pity, it would have been a much more universal statement of the unity of humankind, if you ask me.

Monastic Sweets in Barcelona

Spain isn’t the first place you think of when you contemplate dessert. Just why is a little unclear, the next-door Portuguese are dessert obsessed. Lisbon has more pastry shops than Paris, with a much smaller population. So why are the Spanish so lukewarm about dessert? Perhaps there isn’t really a place in it in the Spanish meal system. The Spanish eat a small breakfast but given the late meal times there is the national institution of snacking—tapas. You eat tapas at eleven to get you to lunch at 2 or 3 and you eat tapas in the early evening so you’re not starving by the time the 10 PM supper hour arrives. It’s hard to fit in a leisurely coffee and dessert somewhere in there. Perhaps equally important, the savory snacks end up doing the jobs of sweet snacks in places like Vienna and Brussels. Instead of a doughnut and coffee there is a slice of tortilla española and a glass of cava. Portugal, on the other hand, has much more of a coffee culture (the Portuguese seem to have as many words for coffee as the Inuit do for snow) so that a late morning snack will most likely be some sort of pastry washed down a sweet slug of caffeine. This is all theory mind you generated by a visit to Barcelona.
Barcelona is one of my favorite towns. It has the perfect location, right between the beach and mountains. It has wacky architecture. It has great food. Not only are there the ubiquitous tapas but the Spanish explosion of innovation is mostly centered here. The Boqueria is the world’s finest and largest covered market. But dessert? The pastry shops tend to be few and far between and vaguely French. The ice cream is expensive and either a pale imitation of Häagen Dazs or gelato. Still, there is at least one sweet spot worth seeking out. Located deep in the Barrio Gotíc, Caelum (c/De la Palla 8, tel. 933026993) specializes in serving and selling Spanish monastery sweets. You can taste them upstairs but it’s more fun to go to the downstairs cellar that once served as a Jewish baths. It’s all gloomy and candlelit in the best possible way. There are cakes of various kinds which seem just a little too homemade (and the ubiquitous brownies) but there is also a wide selection of packaged monastery sweets you can taste. Many seem to be based on some sort of almond paste which is fine by me. The lunitas, for example are a kind of half-moon of very thin pastry enclosing a moist marzipan-like filling. The pastel de piñon is much like an Italian pinoli cookie but somehow denser, chewier and more intense. Pestiños (also called borrachuelos on the package, presumably because they’re made with wine—borracho means drunk in Spanish), on the other hand resemble tiny doughnuts little bigger than a wedding band. There’s also something distinctly medieval about them, tasting, as they do, of honey and olive oil. The fourth monastery sweet I tasted was something called a polvoron, a kind of cookie that is the shape of a very large sugar cube. As you bite into it, it shatters into a powder (thus the name which comes from polvo—powder), it's barely sweet with perhaps just a hint of cinnamon. This is one of those cookies, like biscotti, that cries out for some hot chocolate, or perhaps a sweet monastic liqueur?

Chicken Pudding

Every culture has its own taboos and rules about what is edible and inedible. There are also rules about what may or may not be combined: “thou shall not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk” in the Jewish tradition, Italians have a taboo about combining cheese and fish and most Europeans (with the huge exception of Spaniards) do not mix fish and meat. The great majority of the citizens of the EU also can’t abide meat that is sweet more than savory. The idea of dessert based on meat is fundamentally repugnant. Of course this was not always the case. In the UK mincemeat has traditionally been made with meat—though nowadays the only animal product it contains tends to be suet. Medieval Europe used to be obsessed with blancmange, a pudding typically made with chicken, almonds and sugar. Today, if you want to taste anything vaguely similar you’ll need to travel to Turkey.

In Istanbul, I had arranged to meet Mary Isin in front of Haci Bakir, the city’s most famous confectioner. Mary has written a book on Turkish sweets and like every good Brit (she has lived in Turkey for ages but still…) she adores a good custard. Haci Bekir is renowned for it’s Turkish delight but there’s nowhere to sit down, and no custard, so Mary dragged me across the street to Hafiz Mustafa Şekerlemeleri (Hamidiye Caddesi 84-86), a café that dates back to the 19th century. After a brief conversation with the owner her face lit up with a triumphant smile and she dragged me upstairs to the pastry maker’s café, a low-raftered affair—so low that the beams are covered with foam to prevent the customers from inevitable concussions. What she had been after arrived in a few moments. Tavuk Göğsü is about the closest thing to medieval blancmange. It is a milk-based pudding, thickened with rice starch and chicken. Yes chicken and plenty of sugar. As you bite into it, it has a texture that is oddly both chewy and smooth with little shreds of chicken breast in it. When the pudding is made, the bottom is caramelized to give it that contrasting bitter dimension. It’s very good, really. And if you don’t like it there’s always baklava on the menu.

All in the Name of Science

So I thought I would test out the hypothesis whether you could make a Sacher Torte in 1832, or at least whether the chocolate was up to snuff. The first trick, of course was to get chocolate that would have been made the same way it was back then. Mexican chocolate is, sort of, though the brands typically available have cinnamon and sometimes almonds added to them. Luckily Taza Chocolate in Somerville, MA is making a stone-ground chocolate that is made, as best as I can figure out, much the way Baker’s and other companies would have made their chocolate a couple of hundred years ago.

I spoke briefly to one of the Taza owners, Alex Whitmore, and he explained how the chocolate is ground, mixed with sugar and then passed through granite rollers to smooth out the texture. No conching. And that’s critical because it is the invention of conching that created the really smooth texture we’re all used to now. Alex describes conching as a little like a long (mechanical) process of kneading the chocolate base which, rather than making the particles of cocoa smaller, smoothes their edges. It also mellows the flavor—you apparently loose the sour edge that chocolate naturally has. I have to say that I find the sour, almost spoilt milk flavor, of Taza off-putting. But then I grew up on Lindt and its likes. Americans who grew up on Hershey’s—which most European chocolatiers criticize for exactly this sour milk flavor profile—would probably like it. It is gritty though.

At any rate, if there is a chocolate that resembles the chocolate circa 1830, this is probably it. And how did it work on the Sacher torte, or more specifically the glaze? I can report that it did just fine. It melted a little more unevenly than normal but otherwise it behaved perfectly adequately. The resulting glaze was shiny and smooth, just as it should be. (I did overcook the glaze a little—I find it hard to get right when I’m making just a little glaze—but it still worked.)

The recipe I used was loosely adapted from Rick Rodger’s Kafeehaus, probably the best Viennese dessert book in English. His history is shaky but the recipes work. I wanted to make a 7-inch cake so I beat 6 tablespoons butter until smooth, beat in 2 3/4 ounces of bittersweet chocolate and 4 room yolks. Then I beat 4 whites until semi-stiff, beat in 7 tablespoons sugar until meringuish. This I folded into the yolk mixture, then folded in a half cup flour. That was baked in a (buttered and floured) 7-inch springform for about 45 minutes at 350°F. This was chilled to room temperature and flipped up-side down. Then there was the apricot glaze made by boiling down apricot preserves until thick and syrupy (make sure you buy preserves made with sugar not corn syrup!) then strained and brushed all over the cake. Finally I took a 3-ounce bar of Taza 60% Stone Ground Chocolate, combined it with 3/4 cup sugar and about a third cup water. This was simmered until glaze consistency. Rick says to cook it to 234°F which is all very well, but try getting an accurate measurement from a half-cup of glaze! I usually test it by dropping a few drops on a frozen ceramic plate. You want the consistency of fudge, more or less. Finally, I spooned the glaze over the cooled apricot glaze. Incidentally, the cake shouldn’t be refrigerated. It will keep fine, covered, for a couple of weeks. In a sense that’s the whole point of it. And yeah, you have to serve it with Schlag—whipped cream. Did the 15-year-old Sacher really invent this on the spot? My guess is that it took some years to get it right. But there is no reason to think that he couldn’t have due to the ingredients on hand at the time.

The Sacher Story

I returned recently from a quick weekend trip to Vienna—a few too many tortes for two days—not that I’m complaining. But between bites I had a conversation with Ingrid Haslinger which got me thinking about stories and history, or at least about the kind of tales that are told about food.

Dr. Haslinger is a food historian and probably the most knowledgeable person in Austria (or elsewhere for that matter) on the culinary habits of the Hapsburg court. She’s written books about it and if you visit the jaw-dropping collection of Imperial Silver (the so called Silberkammer) in the old imperial palace (the Hofburg) she’s the one who wrote the labels that explaining what’s what.

At any rate we got to talking about the story of the Sacher Torte. The legend—as it is told in repeated retellings —is that the young Franz Sacher was once in the employ of Prince Metternich. (This was the string-pulling, reactionary chief minister of Austria in the early 1800s, the guy who is generally credited with setting up the post-Napoleonic European order. ) One day, the prince had a few of his chums over for dinner for which the fifteen-year old Sacher whipped up the first Sacher Torte. The noble-blooded diners applauded and the world’s most famous cake was born.

You have to admire the narrative: the adolescent wunderkind struck with the spark of genius, recognized immediately by the savvy old diplomat and his cronies. It’s a great story. The only trouble is, it’s probably not true. At least that’s Dr. Haslinger’s very credible hypothesis. Other than the rather incredible age of the young Sacher there is the date when this was all supposed to happen: 1832. The Sacher is a chocolate cake which is coated with apricot preserves and then a fudgy chocolate glaze. The problem is that chocolate smooth enough to form the glaze hadn’t been invented yet—that would come in 1879 when Lindt developed a way of making chocolate super smooth by processing it with a conching machine. But the other bit of damning evidence comes from an interview with the old Sacher himself that appeared in 1906 where he says he came up with the cake in 1840s. So what about the Metternich story? It may well originate with his son Eduard who recounted it in a issue of the Wiener Zeitung in 1888 (or supposedly did according to Franz Maier-Bruck's Das grosse Sacher-Kochbuch—I haven't been able to find the article in the actual newspaper). Did Eduard misunderstand something his father might have told him or did he simply put two and two together and get five? Hard to say. He had run a hotel since 1876 and a little publicity probably couldn’t hurt. It's interesting to note that the first recipe for it appears two years later though!

Let’s say for the sake of argument that the Metternich story is inaccurate. Isn’t it still of enormous interest, especially to a food historian? Certainly that it was widely circulated gave the cake inestimably more cachet than the more probable story that Sacher invented something like this cake (even if the glaze was later refined) in the 1840s to use in his catering business for ships on the Danube. If it was indeed first promulgated in the 1870s, the Mettenich origin myth tells something about the era of increasing industrialization and the PR potential of a good story in an era of increasing mass media. Dr. Haslinger tells me that we Americans are too prone to overemphasize the role of public relations in the history of food. Perhaps. But I would make the argument that the fable has had a greater influence popularizing the torte than any real history. Stories matter.

Sluka

Sluka, another of Vienna’s famed Zuckerbäckers is holding up less well under the Christmas onslaught. Admittedly, its location next to the Rathaus puts it just a few steps away from the ginormous Christmas market that takes over the square in front of City Hall. The market is great fun in a hokey, carnival kind of way. Seemingly, there are miles of stands selling kitsch and wurst. And Sluka does not bear the overflow with grace. The service is more brusque than efficient, the harried waitress demanding payment even as she drops my order on the table. Looking over the shop-worn desserts I had selected the strudel, thinking it a safe bet. Not so, it turned out to be soggy, mushy and overly sweet. No need to go to Vienna for this!

Demel

Two weeks before Christmas, Demel is a madhouse. At five in the afternoon, the waitresses cut through the swaying shoals of tourists like sharks on a mission. The customers barely take heed though, transfixed as they are by so much towering confectionery. Demel’s is easily the city’s most picturesque Café-Konditerei with fittings that date back to the late 1800s. Admittedly, the design is just about as chaotic as the crowd with a confusion of styles that comes with a century of decorative accretions. The latest change came in 2002 when DO & CO the catering corporation that bought the storied confectioner added an open kitchen to the mix. Here, the curious can ogle the Sacher-Tortes being iced and chocolates receiving their final flourishes. I am of two minds about this. I love seeing the meticulous workers carrying out their métier, but it does turn the café into an even more Disneyesque production that it already is.

All the same, the cakes look damn good—not merely the tortes but also the strudels, tarts, and other more homey confections. I stick to the cakes though, ordering a slice of Maroni-Torte, a four layer affair of chocolate and chestnut cream robed in an infinitesimally thin coating of marzipan and an overcoat of chocolate glaze. Textbook perfect and the little “kiss” of chocolate dipped chestnut cream on top just adds to the delight. Demel’s at least seems to be surviving the corporate takeover rather well.

Gerstner

Though Gerstner dates back to 1843, the Café-Konditerei on Kärtner Strasse, one of Central Vienna’s main shopping drags, is of much more recent vintage. No Gemütlichkeit here, rather a contemporary urban vibe keeps the room humming with conversation, the steam-engine hiss of the large, utilitarian espresso machine and the constant timpani clink of china on marble counters. The cakes are picture perfect though my Dobostorte —admittedly a dense confection of chocolate buttercream and some eight layers of vanilla cake—is perhaps a little denser than need be. And the coffee is thin.

And I’m a little put-off by the display of French-style macarons in the window. It makes me wonder if the management’s heart is really in the right place. I’m probably being unfair though, who am I to deny the Viennese these delightful Parisian treats.