A wildly popular dessert pastry, little known outside France, is a legend that revolves around a bishop, the French Revolution and lots of fresh cream.
The ancient Christians of Europe had patron saints for everything and everyone, from thieves to computer scientists. There is Rene Goupil for anaesthesiologists, St Martha for dieticians and St Lidwina for ice skaters, I kid you not. The 16th century Bishop of Amiens, St Honore, is the patron saint of bakers and pastry chefs, having performed many miracles with bread. The St Honore Cake is one of the culinary marvels of the Gallic palate and its making is as complicated as a catechism.
Its construction is elaborate and masterly. The gateau has a circular puff pastry base filled with creme chiboust. The base's outer ring is decorated with a piping of pate a choux - profiteroles that are pastry balls filled with whipped cream, custard, pastry cream or ice cream; these are dipped in carmelised sugar and attached along the side of the circle. The cake is then finished with whipped cream using a special St Honore piping tip. St Honore is credited with inventing choux in 1847 - a delicate puff pastry made with butter, water-melon flour and eggs, made at the Chiboust bakery on the Paris street that bears his name, Rue Saint-Honore, a stretch once lined with patisseries and bakeries. Larousse Gastronomique, an authoritative encyclopaedia of French cuisine, claims that the real inventor of the St Honore Cake was the pastry chef Chiboust who worked on Rue Saint-Honore in 1846. The cream in the gateau, a blend of traditional pastry cream and Italian meringue, gets its name from him.
St Honore was born Honotatus in an aristocratic family near Amiens.
Understanding the history of a country is best done from the driving seat of a motor car. St Honore's bishopric Amiens, called the 'Venice of the North', is a 160-odd km upcountry drive from Paris for about two hours. It is a magical medieval city with floating gardens and a network of canals along which you can float on a barge or eat a cake at a canal side cafe on a cobblestone street.
The Amiens cathedral boasts the tallest nave in all of France and is a repository of Gothic and renaissance art. The tiny commune of Port-le-Grand, where St Honore was born, is about five lm away - the tree-lined River Austreberthe runs through it serenely. St Honore is depicted in church iconography holding a baker's peel or loaves of bread. Some stepping stones of history are epicurean legends. Baking historian Steven Laurence Kaplan attributes the Bishop's fame to St Honore chapel, once the headquarters of the Guild of Parisian bakers. The French Revolution put an end to all guilds and the saint lapsed into obscurity but not without a final miracle - the lasting popularity of his little cake.
No other nation has transformed gastronomy into a complicated fine art like the French with charming legends, exotic pronunciation, complicated wine drinking rituals and menu construction. Demystifying a popular dessert is the best way to make one. Even if it is a mystical creation like gateau St Honore.
Courtesy. Ravi Shankar.
Tailpiece.
Got up at 6, opened up the house - as the maid was coming in, earlier than usual at a quarter-to-7, though finally she fetched up an hour and a half later - because of the downpour. The chores and was ready by 10.
Lekha and I'd gone to town by about a half past 12 to buy the 'onakkodi' for the maid and returned an hour later.
My niece, Ammu left Bangalore for Doha, from where she boards the second flight to Boston, arriving there by midafternoon, tomorrow. She's pursuing a two-year MBA in entrepreneurship at the Babson College, Massachusetts.
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