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