Paris Patisserie

Oriol Balaguer

The Poilâne Bakery in Paris | euromaxx

Part Two of the History of Baking

More for you Foodies to get your teeth into.

Part two - The History of Baking

The distinction between sweet and savory is quite recent, dating from the 19^{th century. The medieval baker pastrycook employed a very different range of flavors for cakes and pastries. Pies and pasties ( known around the Mediterranean region as pastilles, from the Roman word paste meaning pastry) have been around since before medieval times and are some of the oldest delicacies of European cuisine, dating back at least to ancient Greece and also some of the most exquisite, combining meat, wheat and the flavors of honey, nuts and flowers.}
The pasties described by La Varene (a master pastry chef from the 17th century) are made with meats like hare and goose seasoned with a sweet spice which consisted of two parts ginger, one part ground peppercorns, grated nutmeg, crushed cinnamon and cloves. The fever for spices in Europe originated with the Knights Templar who brought them back from the Crusades. They also brought back the beignet, or doughnut. In Syria, during one of the last Crusade battles, St Louis was given doughnuts flavored with cinnamon. Spices weren’t needed to preserve food, salt did the trick and though they added flavour, their real function was social prestige. (The original foodies!) A taste for spices was part of the new manners by which the metropolitan elite distanced itself from the peasantry.

Something for Foodies to sink their teeth into.

A little history lesson for those of you with flour in your veins.

 The French word Patisserie comes form Pistores, the Roman name for bakers. The Romans didn’t distinguish between bakers of bread and bakers of cakes. But cakes require special techniques. To this day they denote a special, often ceremonial occasion. In the middle ages, that meant they were linked to religion. For many centuries, only nuns and monks had the time and expertise to produce cakes and biscuits. The madelines of which Proust was so fond were probably first made by monks. With the development of towns, some bakers started to specialise in cakes. By the end of the middle ages these bakers had formed into guilds, and in 1410 they successfully petitioned to deny bread bakers the right to bake cakes.
A description of the wares of late-medieval patisserie comes from the "Patissier Francois", one of the world’s rarest cook books, published in Amsterdam in 1665 by Louis and Daniel Elsevier. The two brothers had already published a successful book about gardening, the "Jardinière Francois", and surmised that a manual of French cake making would be profitable too. The author was a certain Francois Pierre, known as la Varaine, master chef to the Marquis du Exelles. The "Patissier Franscois" became rare because it was a manual handled by generations of sticky fingered apprentices. The crinkled yellow pages of surviving copies are covered in brown smudges, butter and traces of milk dried into opaque circles like the age rings of a tree. La Varaine denotes several chapters to cooking ham en croute and when they were in season stag, wild boar and deer. Rivalry between bakers and pastry cooks sometimes became a triangular conflict with butchers, who objected to pastry cooks selling ham encased or rolled in pastry saying it infringed on their trade because the ham had already been cooked. To this day in France a pate en croute can only be bought from a chartcutierer (butcher) or traiteur (a take away shop which sells savories).
Part two next.

Cheers,

The Bruce & Magster