Weird Macarons in Brittany

I happened to be in the little Breton town of Quiberon last week.  The town itself is a pleasant enough resort perched at the extreme end of a peninsula that juts into the Atlantic.  The local specialities are caramels, crisp cookies made with butter and sea salt (think shortbread) and, most especiall, sardines.  Several sardine factories offer their wares in stylish shops (yes even canned sardines have style in France).  Above and beyond the cookie boutiques there are more pastry shops per acre than I've ever seen.  And of rather high quality I might add.  What caught my eye, though, was a  patisserie that had decided to take the local fishy specialties in a totally different direction, mainly using sardines, mackerel, tuna and the like as fillings for macarons.

Weird?  Yes.  Good?  I'm a little ambivalent there, though I should add that I only tried the sardine one which tasted, well, like a paste of sardines inside of a macaron.  Very sweet and savory all at once.  It would probably be intriguing in the right context.  I'm not sure walking down the street was exactly it.  Yves & Diane Deniard, 22 rue de Port Maria, Quiberon, France, +33 (0)2 97 50 19 87.

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.

Punch

Finally, as some approximation of winter settles in here in New York, I am reminded of visiting Vienna in its pre-Christmas cheer a couple of years back.  I was doing research for Sweet Invention, traipsing from pastry shop to pastry shop.  (Yeah, I know, it's a tough job.)  And I kept running across groups of people standing around, their cheeks rosy and their fists filled with steaming mugs.  Needless to say, I had to investigate, and discovered one of Vienna's winter wonders:  punch (pronounced "poonch").  No this isn't the cold, spiked Kool-Aid you find at office parties but more like a rich, mulled wine.  There are dozens of variations: some spiked with brandy, others with schnapps (aka eau-de-vie).  They're delightfully warming and, given their alcohol content, they are highly conducive to holiday cheer.  There was a punch craze all over Europe about two hundred years ago but whereas the taste for it faded in places like France and even England (its birthplace, thus the name), here the tradition held on.

Here's a recipe I put together by combining a few online sources.  Great after a skating party, a day on the slopes or the most dangerous sport of the season, competitive holiday shopping.

Punch

makes about six, 6-ounce servings


1/2 cup brandy
1/2 cup golden rum
2/3 cup raw sugar or to taste
3 cloves
1 small cinnamon stick
2 pods cardamom
2-inch piece of vanilla pod, split lengthwise
4 slices orange (preferably organic)
4 slices of lemon (preferably organic)

1 bottle red wine (Beaujolais works well or if you want to be more authentic use something like Blaufrankisch)

Combine brandy and rum with sugar, spices, orange  and lemon slices in a small pan.  Heat to about 150°F.  (Do not allow to boil!) Remove from heat, cover and let stand for several hours.  Combine wine and brandy mixture and heat until very hot but not boiling.

Happy Holidays!

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.

Pastry Jeremiad

Like just about everything that happens in New York, the opening of Dominque Ansel’s new pastry shop in Soho was accompanied by a great deal of hype.  And truth be told, I was excited too, because ever since François Payard closed his patisserie on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the city hasn’t had a decent French pastry shop.  Ansel has good pedigree. Most recently he was the pastry chef at Daniel which has the reputation of serving up some of the best French cuisine in town. So my hopes were high as we weaved and darted through the stream of Soho shoppers on a Sunday afternoon. 

The pastry shop is modest, with a small glass-enclosed kitchen at the back that reveals a couple of banks of convection ovens.  There is a very pleasant back yard where you can take the pastries, something of a rarity in New York.  

We came on a Sunday afternoon so the full assortment wasn’t out, though looking at the board there appear to be no more than about a half-dozen pastries available at any given time.  There is also a selection of Viennoiserie and Ansel has to be lauded for selling that Breton specialty the kouign amman, a disk of butter, pastry and caramel.  Can’t report on that because they were sold out.  I did try a palmier though, which isn’t made so differently.  It was OK, more dense and doughy than buttery and ethereal.  So let us return to the pastry.  Which was fine.  About the level of a provincial French pastry shop without too much ambition or technique.  In other words just about the level of other New York French-style pastry shops. 

Take the “bunny cake” which exhibited about as much finesse as a Crumbs bakery or the gingerbread which looked like something sold at Zaro’s.

My wife had the mini tarte tatin which seemed like the beginning of a good idea.  An individual thick round of apple nestled on a cookie base.  But it’s as if there was no follow through.  Somehow for $5.50 you expect a flight of imagination, or at least a modest leap.  Like Starbucks you’ll find the cups and plates are paper, the forks plastic.

It’s an interesting question, why French-style pastry shops here are so mediocre.  Obviously it has something to do with an undiscerning clientele weaned on Twinkies and Dunkin Hines.  But that can’t be all of it.  After all we have good Italian restaurants which is clear evidence that we can overcome Chef Boyardee.  Real estate may be part of it too as well as the wage structure.  After Payard closed his wonderful pastry shop uptown he opened Francois Payard Bakery, which is all about mass production.  My suspicion is that he just can’t get the workers with the necessary skill level to make genuinely artisanal pastry. 

In France pastry cooks have to go through a multi-year apprenticeship (with little pay).  Why would anyone bother to do it here when you can just open up another cupcake bakery and hire workers with the skill set of twelve year olds.  Another reason why French pastry seems to be holding on in France in ways that it can’t here was pointed out to me by Emmanuel Hamon a talented pastry chef in Brest.  In France people visit their neighborhood pastry shop virtually every day because they buy their bread there as well.  As a result buying pastry isn’t some sort of esoteric, once a month activity it is a quotidian reality.  This, in turn, supports numerous pastry shops which increases competition leading to better quality and variety.  Of course those conditions don’t exist here but still, you'd think a city like New York could support at least one stellar patisserie.

Pumpkin Macarons

Macarons can be made in dozens of flavors but given the season, I thought it would be fun to do a pumpkin version.  I have a bit of a pumpkin obsession, having authored a whole book on the subject:  The Great Little Pumpkin Cookbook.  Macarons do require a certain degree of precision but they are not as hard to make as some people would have you believe.



You will need some almond flour.  If you can’t buy it, you can make your own, just make sure the almonds are really dry.  Separate the eggs at least 1 hour before using or preferably the day before.  And if you want to ensure all the macarons are the same size draw circles of the desired size on the back of the parchment.  And do use a scale, it makes a huge difference here.  And, oh yeah, don’t make them on a rainy day!  (The pictures below were taken on a rainy day which is why the macarons didn't rise as evenly as they would otherwise.)

The recipe makes about 2 dozen 1 ½-inch macarons

215 g (7 ½ ounces) confectioners’ sugar

140 g (5 ounces) almond flour or sliced almonds

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

100 g (3 ½ ounces) egg whites (about 3 large) at room temperature

pinch salt

25 g (2 tablespoons) castor or superfine granulated sugar

orange food coloring preferably paste or gel

Pumpkin buttercream (see following recipe)

1. Line two 18- by 13-inch cookie sheets with parchment paper adhering them to the sheets with a little butter.

2.  If sliced, grind the almonds very fine in a food processor with about half the confectioners’ sugar, scraping regularly.  Add the remaining confectioner’s sugar and cinnamon and process until very fine.  Pass through a medium-coarse sieve and regrind the remaining almond bits if necessary.  If using almond flour, sift together with the confectioners’ sugar.

3.  Beat the whites and salt with an electric mixer until soft peaks form.  Add the granulated sugar and beat until stiff and shiny.  Add enough coloring for an attractive orange color and beat until homogenous. Using a rubber spatula fold in the almond mixture in two additions until just homogenous.  The mixture will deflate.

4. Fit a piping bag with a 3/8-inch (1 cm) round tip. Pipe the batter onto the baking sheets in circles about 1 inch in diameter.

Let the macarons dry about 20 minutes (a little longer is OK if you need to cook them in two batches) so a little skin forms on the outside. 

5. Preheat oven to 425°F.

6. Set the macarons in the center of the oven and immediately lower the temperature to 350°F.  Prop the door slightly ajar with a wooden spoon or something similar.  For small macarons, bake about 8-10 minutes, larger ones will take about 12-15.  They are done when shiny and hard on the outside.  When you pry one apart it should be a little moist in the middle.  Set on a cooling rack and cool briefly.  Remove from the macarons from parchment while still warm. Cool on cooling racks.

7.  Sandwich the macarons with 1-2 teaspoons of buttercream.  Set in an air-tight container and refrigerate overnight.

PUMPKIN BUTTERCREAM

makes about 2 cups (enough for about 4 dozen macarons)

2 large egg whites

2/3 cup raw sugar

pinch salt

6 ½ ounces (13 tablespoons) unsalted butter, slightly cooler than room temperature, cut into 1-inch pieces

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

½ cup canned pumpkin puree (at room temperature)

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg

large pinch ground cloves

orange food coloring, preferably paste or gel.

1.  Beat the egg whites in a stand mixer until they form soft peaks.

2.  Meanwhile combine the sugar and about 3 tablespoons water in a small saucepan over moderately high heat.  Bring to a boil and cook to the soft ball stage (235-240°F) on a candy thermometer.

3.  Gradually pour the syrup into the egg whites with the mixer on low speed.

Scrape down the sides and beat on high speed until the meringue is at room temperature.

Gradually add the butter and salt, scraping down the sides of the bowl regularly.  Beat until completely smooth and fluffy.

Gradually beat in the remaining ingredients adding enough orange food coloring to give the buttercream an attractive pumpkin color.  If the buttercream seems to be separating beat on high until it comes back together.

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.

Gelato on a Stick

As a rule, I’m usually not fond of downmarket desserts go upmarket. You know, the fancy restaurant smores, the French pastry chefs making ring dings but while I have some principles they tend to get weak-kneed when it comes to gelato. Which brings me a little hole-in the wall in Greenwich Village called Popbar. The conceit here is that the place makes it’s own popsicles/ice cream bars which you get to dip in one of several chocolate coatings, sort of good humor on an expense account. The gimmick wouldn’t be much more that cute if it weren’t for the quality of popsicles which are either made with gelato or sorbetto (sorbet). On a cool September day, the ones made with fruit sorbet didn’t seem quite as inviting as the gelati, so we went for the chocolate, gianduia and pistachio gelato. All were yummy: the chocolate was terrific, the pistachio only a trace less so. Only the gianduia seemed a little wan. The friendly lady behind the counter dipped them in melted chocolate and rolled them in nuts. Worth a detour if you’re shopping at nearby Murray’s Cheese Shop or the other worthy stores of Bleecker Street nearby.

The Infantilization of American Taste

Increasingly, Americans are eating like children. The most recent bit of evidence comes from an article in The New York Times about milkshakes served at fancy New York bars (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/08/dining/08shake.html?scp=1&sq=milk%20shakes&st=cse).

Americans have a fondness for drinks containing ice cream that goes back to the nineteenth century when soda counters were a respectable alternative to bars and taverns. In that abolitionist era, milk and milk products were the antithesis of the devil’s brew, associated with mother’s milk and purity, though not necessarily with childhood. The first ice cream-laced beverages were often carbonated “ice cream sodas” or “malts” made with malted milk and ice cream. (Malted milk is dry milk powder mixed with malted barley.) Shakes as we know them didn’t come along until the invention of the blender in the 1920s, which happily coincided with the beginnings of American road culture. Soon enough these calorie bombs became a favorite treat at roadside ice cream stands like Dairy Queen. Today’s “large,” (almost a liter) Dairy Queen chocolate shake is over 1100 calories. While ice cream sodas tend to have a Frank Capra small town association milk shakes evoke images of roller-skate outfitted waitresses in California drive-ins à la American Graffiti. They elicit early adolescence rather than childhood, an age of furtive kisses rather than teen pregnancy.

And after that excessively wordy digression, let us turn to The New York Times’ article which reports on the reinvention of the milkshake as a cocktail. In Brooklyn, now New York’s coolest borough, a reimagined bowling alley serves bourbon-spiked milkshakes. The rest of the menu, according the owners was designed with “childhood memories of birthday parties” in mind—but with booze. The trend has jumped the East River into creaky Manhattan where milkshakes have been spotted at the ultra-trendy Momofuku. In one recipe, the pastry chef Christina Tosi takes cereal milk (that is milk left over from eating dry cereal) and spikes it with Kahlua and vodka. There’s ice cream in there too. In Los Angeles where cool is always much cooler, chef Maria Swan, serves milk shakes based on such combinations as añejo tequila with dulce de leche (a sort of caramel), and Cherry Heering with lavender vanilla ice cream. She readily admits her inspiration is Bob’s Big Boy. While in and of itself, the trend is little more than a clever conceit, when you begin to see it as part of a wider phenomenon it heralds a significant shift in culinary culture. Some years ago, American restaurants and bars came to be afflicted by a plague of cocktails. It started with frozen margaritas but them moved to increasingly more complex mixtures. The result is invariably sweet. Moreover the drinks often share the palette of Crayola crayons. Foods associated with childhood, especially mac and cheese, now have restaurants dedicated to them. A place down the street from me offers a version with “Brie, Figs, Roasted Shiitake Mushrooms and Fresh Rosemary” along with more conventional offering. “Sliders,” small hamburger-type sandwiches are now filled with sophisticated fillings like duck confit and braised venison. Childhood desserts like cupcakes have turned into a global phenomenon. This is reflected elsewhere too.

Fancy restaurants offer deconstructed s’mores, the campfire dessert made with packaged graham crackers melted Hershey’s chocolate and marshmallows. Of course in the white-tablecloth version, the biscuits are home-made, the chocolate is French and the marshmallows are made with Tahitian vanilla. But the result is a little like the ten year-old smearing her face with her mother’s lipstick. Or perhaps the forty-five year old buying a toy car for fifty thousand dollars? Is this kid food masquerading as grown up food, or adult food pretending it’s child’s play?

Recently, social scientists have postulated that we should add another stage to the development of the human animal. In much the way that adolescence was invented in the 19th century, they propose a period of life called young adulthood that spans the period between the teenage years and “real” adulthood, which now seems to arrive at thirty. If this is indeed true then these childhood foods offer a sort of the booster seat to the grown-ups table. Or do they? Do the thirty-year olds then advance to a more adult phase of taste. Or do they simply continue eating more highly sweetened foods you can pick up with your hands for breakfast, lunch and dinner?

American brides now often turn to cupcakes instead of wedding cakes to celebrate their nuptials. It’s an interesting shift in symbolism. Whereas the white wedding cake so clearly stood for virginity devoured, the cupcakes seem to indicate that a wedding is just another childhood birthday party. I’m all in favor of parties but does the food have to cater to the tastes of a six-year old?

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.