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.