Some day I may bore you with stories about all my favorite famous named pastries, but here are six of the more interesting ones.
1. In France, many pastries are named after people. However, the Napoleon or (called mille feuilles in France or ) may come from napolitain, the French adjective for the Italian city of Naples.
A Frenchmille-feuille consists of three layers of puff pastry and two layers of crème pâtissière. The top is glazed with icing, in alternating white (icing) and brown (chocolate) strips, and then combed. In France a Napoléon is specific type of mille-feuille filled with almond flavoured paste.
In Italy, the pastry is called mille foglie which mean "a thousand leaves" and is believed to have originated in Naples.
There are almost as many claims to origin as there are countries. The Danes believe a Danish royal pastry chef invented the dessert in the 1800s for a state visit between the Emperor Napoleon and the King of Denmark, in Copenhagen. In Sweden and Finland, the Napoleonbakelse (Napoleon pastry) is a mille-feuille filled with whipped cream, custard, and jam. And that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to claims.
2. The Savarin is named after Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826), a 16th century gastronome. Similar to the Baba au Rhum -- a ring shaped yeast cake, flavored with fruit and soaked in rum syrup-- without fruit, and soaked in kirsch syrup.
As an aside, the baba is believed to be a version of a kugelhopf, which was invented in Lemberg in the 1600s. The baba was brought to Paris, France by King Stanislas Leszczynska, the deposed king of Poland and the father-in-law of King Louis XV (1710–1774) of France when he was exiled to Lorraine. According to legend, he found the customary kouglhopf too dry for his liking and dipped the bread in rum. He was so delighted that he named the cake after one of the heroes of his favorite book, Ali Baba from A Thousand and One Nights. Later, his chef refined the sweet bread by using brioche dough and adding raisins to the recipe. The dish was then simply called “baba.
3. The Madeline is a small shell shaped sponge cake flavored with nuts or citrus. Madeleines are associated with the French town of Commercy, whose bakers were said to have once, long ago, paid a "very large sum" for the recipe and sold the little cakes packed in oval boxes as a specialty in the area. Commercy once had a convent dedicated to St. Mary Magdelen. According to the legend, the nuns, at a time when the convents and monasteries of France were abolished during the French Revolution, sold their recipe to the bakers. Madelines were made famous in the 20th century by Marcel Proust in his book, À la recherche du temps perdu, Volume 1, Swann's Way...
She sent for one of those squat plump little cakes called "petites madeleines," which look as though they had been molded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell … I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure invaded my senses...
And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray … when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane …. and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and garden alike, from my cup of tea.
4. The Croissant, often associated with France, originated in Austria. Remember the Ottoman Empire? Well, the bakers of Vienna are credited with defending the city AND inventing the croissant during the seige of 1683.
The story goes... after several months of trying to starve the city into submission, the Ottoman Turks attempted to tunnel underneath the walls of the city. Fortunately for Vienna, some bakers hard at work in the middle of the night heard the sounds of the Turks digging and alerted the city's defenders. This advance warning gave the defenders enough time to do something about the tunnel before it was completed. Soon, King John III of Poland arrived at the head of an army that defeated the Turks and forced them to retreat.
To celebrate, bakers in Vienna made a pastry in the shape of the crescents they had seen on the battle flags of the enemy, calling it a kippfel (the german word for crescent). Many years later, Marie Antoinette, a 15 year old Austrian Princess, married King Louis XVI of France. To honor their new queen, the bakers in Paris made kippfels (in French, croissants).
5. Closer to home, the first reference to the Hummingbird Cake (with bananas, pineapple, pecans and cinnamon) is credited to Southern Living Magazine in 1978.
The name comes, perhaps, from the fact that hummingbirds are drawn to sweet sources -- the cake is definitely sweet. Like many named pastries however, there is more than one theory about the origin of the name.
- The cake is so good you "hum" with delight.
- People hover around it like hummingbirds hover around nectar.
- The cake is sweet enough to attract hummingbirds.
- The national bird of Jamaica is the hummingbird, and the cake's main ingredients (bananas and pineapple) are tropical.
Whatever the theory, the recipe's first appearance was in an article titled "Making the Most of Bananas." The recipe is, today, the most requested recipe in Southern Living Magazine History. It is traditionally covered in cream cheese icing and pecans.
6. The Lane Cake is a white sponge cake made with egg whites and consists of four layers that are filled with a mixture of the egg yolks, butter, sugar, raisins, and whiskey. The cake is frosted with a boiled, fluffy white confection of water, sugar, and whipped egg whites.
Emma Rylander Lane (from Clayton, Alabama) first printed the recipe in a self-published cookbook (Some Good Things to Eat) in 1898.
According to chef and culinary scholar Neil Ravenna, Lane first brought her cake recipe to public attention at a county fair in Columbus, Georgia, when she entered her cake in a baking competition there and took first prize. She originally named the cake the Prize cake, but an acquaintance convinced her to lend her own name to the dessert.
If you like this kind of stuff, go back and read some of my past posts with references to named pastries...
- The Linzertorte
- Flan
- Peach Melba
- Pain au Chocolat
- Bundt Cake
- Rumpledoodles
- Divinity
- Creme Brulee
- King Cakes
- The Buche de Noel
- Fruitcake
- Bon Bons
- Apple Tarts
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